[dot] First Krita Preview Release

[Dot Stories]

URL: http://dot.kde.org/1096230607/

From: Boudewijn Rempt <boud at rempt.xs4all.nl>
Dept: it's-not-perfect-but-it's-what-you-get
Date: Sunday 26/Sep/2004, @22:30

First Krita Preview Release
===========================

   Krita [http://www.koffice.org/krita/], formerly known as Krayon,
formerly known as KImageshop, never known as nor intended to be the
Kimp, is available for your testing pleasure.

     For the first time since development started in 1999, Krita is
complete enough to be packaged as the first preview release. Building on
the great foundation laid by the original team, the enthusiastic work by
John Califf and the thorough architecture designed by Patrick Julien,
the Krita developers have been working real hard during the last year to
bring you a firework of interesting features.
 Those include (but are of course not limited to):
    * painting with Gimp brushes or image filters
    * gradients & patterns
    * excellent tablet support
    * world-class image scaling
 Note: This is not even an alpha release. Stuff is broken, not
implemented at all or even not even intended to be implemented. We've
really been making really great progress, but there's plenty left to do
-- a challenge to someone wanting to get their hands dirty with a paint
app that's still small enough to understand.

     Installing Krita might interfere with your existing KOffice
installation, as it depends on KOffice CVS. But if you're curious or
anxious to know how far we've come in the past year (or five), download
the packages [http://ktown.kde.org/~danimo/krita/preview1/] Daniel
Molkentin has prepared and made available. Because Krita is very
actively developed, with several CVS commits per day, we also provide
Krita nightly snapshots. SUSE packages will be available soon.

     If you don't feel up to compiling, but still want to gaze at the
look & feel (described by as "very clean, very easy to find your way
around" by an expert Photoshop user) you can go to the screenshots
[http://ktown.kde.org/~danimo/krita/nightly/] and sate your curiosity.

     For now, all I want to do is to thank all the people who have
worked on Krita: Michael Koch, Matthias Elter, Andrew Richards, Carsten
Pfeiffer and Toshitaka Fujioka for starting this amazing project, John
Califf for impelling the project, Patrik Julien for designing Krita's
current architecture and finally the current crew:

    * Boudewijn Rempt (maintainer, stuff that doesn't work)
    * Sven Langkamp (GUI, especially the dockers & the color wheel)
    * Cyrille Berger (Filters, tools, core stuff)
    * Adrian Page (Painting, tablet support, gradients, core stuff,
      fixes all over the place)
    * Clarence Dang (zoom, shape tools)
    * Dirk Schoenberger (code cleanups, tool shortcuts)
    * Bart Coppens (Fills, previews, text tool)
    * Michael Thaler (Scaling, rotating)
    * Casper Boemann (core stuff)
    * Daniel Molkentin (Packaging this release)

     We really hope to keep up the pace, and make Krita part of KOffice
[http://www.koffice.org/] 1.4, to be released near the end of the first
quarter of 2005.