Fwd: Re: Need user feedback - PPC issues

[John Califf]

Bart Szyszka wrote:
> 
> > Currently Krayon is being developed by one person, myself, with no
> > sponsorship.
> > The immediate goal is to provide an easy-to-use painting app for
> > Koffice, not to recreate Photoshop or Gimp.
> How do you define a "painting app", though? Are interested in
> recreating Windows paint so people can doodle sketches or are
> you interested in creating a program one can use to create Web
> and Print graphics (which one would use Photoshop/Gimp for)?
> The former is useless and the latter is essential. I see nothing wrong
> with tryng to create a Photoshop/Gimp competitor for the KDE
> environment.
> 

I guess this is what happens when people actually use an app.  Now I can
understand how the kmail team felt about my critique.  

Krayon is nothing like Windows Paint.  Krayon has a nice implementation
of layers and channels and much more.  The comment doesn't really
deserve an answer, except that people who have not seen or used Krayon
might believe it, and I don't want that misreprentation to stand
unchallenged. 

There are many things about Gimp that I don't want to duplicate and some
that I do want to parallel in functionality.  It goes much deeper.
Krayon has a very different approach from Gimp or Photoshop to some
basic actions, but some other things are taken after Gimp. I look at the
Gimp code now and then to get ideas, so far haven't copied any of it. 
Using some of the Gimp plugins, etc., is planned.

The emphasis in Krayon will always be on painting, not on image
processing.  There's a lot more to painting than you imply, and keeping
the most frequently used functions accessible and/or visible comes first
for most users, whether they are doing web graphics for a home page or
professional rendering.


> > Undo-redo is not a high priority for the initial release of Krayon, so
> > long as it's open-ended enought to allow undo-redo for most actions to
> > be hooked into the various tools, etc.
> Maybe the second release? It would be extremely hard to get work done
> in Krayon without at least a single-step undo/redo.
> 

Well, I already indicated that I was making provisions for undo/redo,
didn't I. No need to restate the obvious.  You try the patience of a
saint.

> > Importing photoshop docs is not something I've even considered and will
> > be in the distant future, if at all.  I've never used photoshop.  A higher
> > priority is importing gimp .xcf files, and if it can be done through
> > Gimp I'll probably choose that route.
> Gimp can import PSDs. Can't you borrow the code?
> 

Yes.  It's all GPL.

> > You must be, but not in that sense.  I haven't added the text tool yet -
> > it will be similar to the other drawing tools - using Qt to mask the
> > shape and then applying the color or gradient, etc., automatically, to
> > the layer.
> Antialiased text?
> 
> > Check the toolbar for options. All the drawing and painting tools now
> > have options dialogs - the wrench button brings up options for current
> > tool, or use the menu bar, "options" or "settings".  I'm also
> > considering accessing the options for each tool with a right click on
> > the tool button in the toolbar itself.
> Speaking of the dialogs, Killustrator's and Krayon's UI are severely
> different. Where in Krayon everything is docked on the right-edge of
> the screen, Killustrator has all the palettes (what they're called in
> Photoshop)/dialogs seperated and you can dock/undock them plus
> they autohide. I'm not sure which one I'd actually prefer (well
> Photoshop's tabs would be great... you can group and ungroup
> them through drag and drop), but I'd be insane if they had two
> completely different UI's for the same types of functions.
> 

A very superficial critique. You can switch krayon's dock to either
side, or completely undock it and turn it into a dialog, or hide it, all
with a single click.  I find Killustrator's slideout docks to be
extremely irritating and confusing, and they get in the way of work.  In
the context of doing real work, the sidebar is better.  I know it goes
against current buzzwords, but put yourself in the place of a user.
Actually the slideouts came from Kivio.  They do look nice, but are
harder to use especially with more than one slidout in action. 

Ultimately all Koffice apps will probably use toolbars insead of
sidebars or docks or slideouts. It only takes a few days to change to a
toolbar implementation, inserting the same widgets as custom toolbar
widgets.  The Qt/Kde toolbars aren't quite ready for that, though, and
when the docking/undocking code is done allowing you to drag a toolbar
out of the frame and turn it into a window, and better arrangements are
made for alignment of odd-sized widgets, I'll probably go to toolbars
exclusively.  Now that I think about it I'll check Qt2.24 to see how
toolbars have evolved, if any.

> - Bart
>