Whither Krita?

[LukasT.dev@gmail.com]

On Monday 14 September 2009 19:33:07 Boudewijn Rempt wrote:
Let's share my ideas.

> MyPaint is fast, uses 16 bits/channel, supports ora, has a nice brush
> engine (although it's not too hard to make a paintop for krita that uses
> MyPaint's brush lib, it's definitely going to be _slow_). 
Let me know about any brush engine you like from MyPaint and I will try to 
make it native for Krita so it will be fast enough.

> There are a
> couple of issues with its user interface, especially for tablet users since
> it relies on keyboard shortcuts a lot, but nothing really problematical. I
> actually use MyPaint myself more often than Krita nowadays!
Keyboard shortcuts is something I miss in Krita a lot. I consider it a big bug 
when I can't configure shortcuts for Tool Docker. I investigated the issue a 
little, but not much...

> Gimp now has layer groups, is integrating gegl, going to get a
> single-window interface in the next release and with all the work being
> done by Peter Sikking, the user interface is getting really polished. There
> are even people working much better brush dynamics for Gimp.
Good for Gimp :) 

> So -- what is the story about Krita? What can make Krita compelling to the
> artist? I think it makes sense to individually identify why we are
> personally working on Krita and what we want to get out of it in the first
> place, and to use that to develop a vision for Krita that we can work
> towards.

I see some groups of users who would like to use Krita:
1.) GIMP has ugly interface for them -- they don't like it and they like Krita 
2.) KDE users who wants to replace GIMP(or GNOME based app) with KIMP, 
ehm...Krita (mainly to have clean KDE desktop solutions) 
3.) People who think we have very nice tablet support, even better then other 
open-source apps
4.) Artists (who does not care about what libs or language is Krita written in 
:) , digital painters, matte painters, concept art painters
5.) People hungry for various colorspaces

Every group has different use cases. Maybe would be cool to write down these 
use-cases?

> It also makes sense to identify the really big problems in Krita, both in
> relation to that vision (so that will have to wait) and problems we know
> about right now, like:
As I don't know about the vision, I will share ideas later in discussion.

Anyway so far we are trying to be [Gimp+MyPaint] and I think it is good way 
but we need more developers :( I like the way to be [Gimp+MyPaint] for KDE.
Developers will not come in the first hardest part of the development when 
things crashes etc..

We need users so that we can motivate the developers to come. If you notice  
last year just two developers came in -- me and dimitry and we were motivated 
by GSoC. Also Vera seems to be promising these days.

This imply that we need better support for community. E.g. Krita forum would 
help a lot I think.

For now I'm interested in paintops as I do thesis about this topic but I would 
like to use Krita for web-development and photo editing in future also. And I 
like to paint with paintops and I would like to see same pixel art related 
tools in Krita so that icon painters could benefit maybe...I see also big 
advantage the connection between Krita and Karbon. Yes, I want all the ponies 
:) 

So far Krita is development platform for me as I can test many algorithms in 
it. C++ and Qt are my favourite as I learnt them through the time I contribute 
to Krita. And Krita allows me to use them as wide as I want. 

Lukas