Krita presentation

[Michael Thaler]

Hi,

> - Pleaese introduce yourself: (what is your name, where are you from and
> what is your profession)

My name is Michael Thaler from Germany and I am currently doing my Ph. D. in 
theoretical physics at the Technical University of Munich.

> - When did you first hear of Krita, why did you get involved with Krita and
> what are your contributions?

I first heard of Krita when I tried to improve kpaint (I only added some minor 
things like a Karbon like toolbox and a star tool to kpaint. Then I heard 
about Kolourpaint and stopped working on it). I wrote the scaling and 
rotating code and ported some filters from digikam to Krita.

> - Is Krita the first free software project you are working on or did you
> work on other projects?

Bascially yes, except the little work I've done on kpaint. But that was never 
released (but I think I still have the code around somewhere:-))

> - How much time do you usually spend working on Krita?

I did not have time to work on Krita lately because I had a lot of things to 
do for university and I also have to administrate the computers at our 
institute. When I worked on the scaling and rotating code and the filters, I 
probably spent about 10-15 hours a week.

> - What motivates/keeps you motivated to work on Krita?

I really like painting and drawing and I would like to see a good drawing app 
for KDE. Gimp is nice, but it is not a drawing/painting app and it lacks 
really interesting things like natural media painting.

I also want to improve my coding skills. Krita is a very good way to do so 
because of the heavy use of patterns.

> - Where does Krita has its strengths? What do you think is still missing
> badly in Krita?

I think one of the strengths is definitely the cleanly designed code. I also 
really like the idea that Krita supports different color models and I really 
look forward to see natural media painting:-)

Krita is of course lacking many things: lots and lots of filters, 
optimizations, a really good UI and so on. But I am really impressed how much 
Krita progressed.

> -What are your future plans for Krita?

I would really like to work on things like a wet paint algorithm, but 
I guess I will not have much time until I finished my thesis. So I hope I can 
do at least some small things like reworking the scaling algorthm or adding 
some filters or tools like a polygon tool or the star tool from kpaint-NG :-)

Thank you very much for answering these questions. I look forward to my 
presentation. I think it is really interesting to look behind the scenes of 
an open source project and to learn a little bit about the people involved.

Greetings,
Michael