Thoughts on Krita website presentation

[Torsten Rahn]

On Tuesday 11 September 2007 15:38:48 Cyrille Berger wrote:
> This is because OOo have a short term vision, and they are obsessed by
> making sure that Writer beats Word, which means the other components
> receive less love. While I do believe that a good image processing
> application which works nicely and integrates with a good word processing
> is a benefit for both applications.

No, it has _nothing_ to do with OpenOffice. 
It has got to do with two things:

1.) Definition of an Office Suite
2.) Perceived self-image of graphics designers

Ad 1.: Target users of office suites are all kinds of "average" people who 
either only create contents for occasional usage or just create the raw 
contents that will later on be post-processed by professionals:

To focus on professional type setting you'd use a _real_ DTP solution (like 
scribus).
To focus on professional image work you'd use a _real_ graphics suite instead 
(like the ones Adobe and Corel sell).

The thing that will continue to irritate people is that Krita has abilities 
that make it a perfect fit for people who would never ever search in an 
office suite for a professional image processing application.

Of course you can try to "teach" people about it (a hopeless act like certain 
astronomers try to "teach" people that astrology has no scientific value) but 
this will be a windmill fight because you are trying to redefine established 
standards (which is pretty hard) while also trying to promote your product.

So trying to redefine an established standard to make your product more 
visible to the right target group is a strange and ineffective idea with only 
little merit. 

Ad 2: Graphics designers usually don't really see themselves as part of the 
boring "office crew" (I'm pretty sure that a lot of them would even perceive 
that assumption as an insult, no matter what you might think about it).  They 
see themselves being much more creative having their heads up in the clouds. 

Torsten

> > I must agree...    I've never used any other aspect of Koffice, and
> > probably won't --- I have MS Office on my machine via cross-over.   I
> > admit that I initially thought a little less of Krita since it was 'the
> > drawing package of Koffice'...     I'd never attempt to use the drawing
> > package of openoffice to do anything real, and so I wasn't tempted to
> > use Krita...
>
> > I'm discovering now that it rivals and exceeds the
> > Gimp in many aspects.
>
> Good :)
>
> > I'm curious --- how many of the Koffice components does Krita depend on?
>
> Quiet a lot in 1.6 and it's increasing in 2.0. For 1.6 it's mostly
> architecture (file import/export system, UI, documents...). But for 2.0,
> it's increasing, the color management library is shared, rich text editing
> and vector layers will be provided by other KOffice components, etc...
>
> But even in 2.0, Krita will be able to be installable as stand alone.
>
> > but even if we don't remove the dependancies --- I think having more of
> > an 'independent' mind-set for Krita might gain more attention.
>
> As a marketing point of view, I think we should more make the emphasie for
> KOffice on the two sets of application, Productivity and Creativity. While
> Krita is currently the flagship of KOffice Creativity, and Karbon doesn't
> have enought developers to rival with the bigger player, I do think that
> having both application able to use the feature of the other one is a
> strong added value for the user.
>
> And the single reason why Krita will be able to use the vector graphics
> capabilities of Karbon, is because they both use a library which is part of
> kolib.
>
> So if your distribution is forcing you to install all of KOffice just for
> Krita, you might want to report it as a bug to them.



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 Torsten Rahn

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