Preview release

[Michael Thaler]

> Welcom to the Krita Technology Preview Release. Krita is a KOffice
> application for working with raster image data. This preview release
> is meant to sate your curiosity about the current state of Krita
> without forcing you to compile most of KOffice from CVS. However,
> Krita is far from ready, even though it can already be used to make
> screenshots of itself and scale them for use in the Krita website
> (http://koffice.kde.org/krita), so please read the:

I think this sounds too negative. Krita already offers most basic painting 
tools and they work quite well. Loading and saving of images work and Krita 
can work with layers. I think you should mention this in the beginning of the 
document so that people become interested in trying out Krita.

> Despite having been in development since 1996, this is the first public
> release of Krita.  It is a preview release: this means that it isn't even
> alpha quality. Some things work, other things are horribly broken, other
> things again are not implemented at all, and, finally, some things may
> crash your X Window session, you computer, your house or your marriage.

Im my opinion this also sounds too negative. I think it is better to write 
something like:

This is the first preview release of Krita. Even though Krita is still under 
heavy development and many parts of Krita will not work as expected or even 
crash Krita, Krita already offers powerful painting tools, the possibility to 
work with various layers, the possibility to load and save images and various 
image editing functions. This release is intended to give you an overview of 
the basic image editing functions Krita currently supports. 

> Also, you will find many menu options or tools don't do anything, or
> present an anemic little dialog that has no obvious functionality.
> This we know, too. It's a consequence of my lack of focus... I work
> on too many things at the same time.

I think you are the driving force behind Krita and you are for sure not the 
reason that some things are not finished. Just mention that many things are 
not finished because there are not enough developers or developers don't have 
enough time and that this is a good oppurtunity for new developers to get 
involved.

> Patches that fix bugs or that implement items from the TODO list, or
> plugins and filters that enhance Krita's functionality _are_ welcome,
> if they conform to the HACKING guidelines.  If you've always wanted

I would leave out the last part of the sentence. I think we should tell people 
that everyone is welcome to work on Krita, even if he is a newbie and that 
all patches are very welcome. If they are not good, you don't have to apply 
them.

> to work on a big paint app, but were intimidated by the Gimp's half a
> million lines of code, this is the time to join. Krita is a tenth of
> the Gimp's code, so it could fit into anyone's head.

And much of the basic functionallity is still missing, so you don't have to be 
a computer graphics expert to write some code for Krita.

> We don't have any user documentation, but it is likely that any user
> documentation will become obsolete before the projected release with
> KOffice 1.4, anyway.

Hmm, I don't think that writing this is a good idea. This really discourages 
people to write documentation for Krita. If someone wants to write 
documentation for Krita, he will get to know Krita well and it will be easy 
for him to update the documentation if Krita changes. I think the more people 
we get involved in the project, the better.

I think it is a great idea to make a preview release. Many people are not even 
aware of the existence of Krita and Krita is really already quite impressive. 
I showed Krita to some people and they were really impressed.

Michael