Whither Krita?

[Boudewijn Rempt]

On Monday 14 September 2009, LukasT.dev at gmail.com wrote:
> 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 some very interesting things about mypaints brush engine. One of 
them is that MyPaint used to be really stroke based, i.e., it would store 
strokes, and strokes were intended to be editable at a later stage. It's still 
possible to change the brush parameters and see the last stroke change 
accordingly. I have got a version of the mypaint brush engine integrated in a 
krita paintop, but never got it finished enough to allow painting. The other 
thing about mypaints brush engine is that it works in 15 bit pre-multiplied 
rgb.

> > 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...

Yeah, that's one of those things that broke during our integration with 
KOffice. It worked quite well in 1.6, but is broken right now. And 
investigating the fix takes so much time.

> 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?

Well, only 4 and 5 can give us real use cases. But we've tried to write down 
usecases for Krita before. That didn't help a lot -- but then, I was sick at 
the time and not involved, which didn't help either. But right now, I am most 
interested in finding out what we need and what we have in common.

> > 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, 

That's because there isn't one, really.

> 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.

We're integrating her stuff in Krita now. It needs a lot of work, really, 
since it's very much a learning process for Vera, but the ui ideas she brings 
are very sound.

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

For that, it would be good to be more independent. But then, we need someone 
to manage all that. Attempts at getting krita.org started up have faltered 
because, for instance, all that web content management stuff is too hard for 
me. Heck, I cannot really do stuff with the krita pages at koffice.org 
anymore! Maybe we should look at how mypaint does this.

> So far Krita is development platform for me as I can test many algorithms
>  in it.

That is something you and Cyrille have in common at least :-)

>  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.


-- 
Boudewijn Rempt | http://www.valdyas.org