whither krita -- summary

[Boudewijn Rempt]

Looks like the discussion has run its course, so I want to make a shortish 
summary, juxtaposing the things mentioned. There were a couple of interesting 
things noted! But that doesn't mean we've found our direction.

There are quite a number of contradictions:

flexible, comprehensive app  <---------> polish and usability
platform for experimentation <---------> stable application for users
creating images              <---------> manipulating images
integrated in koffice        <---------> attractive to artists
corel painter                <---------> photoshop
competing with gimp          <---------> competing with mypaint
go all node                  <---------> continue with the current core

Use cases I've seen in the thread:

 * photo manipulation
 * HDR workflow (for film or for pictures?
 * illustrations and comics
 * sketching
 * integration with movie workflow, blender
 * web development (what is that, actually?)

Can all these things work in one application? 

Reasons to work on Krita:

 * can do experimentation
 * want to create an app I can use
 * it's fun to work on 
 * prefer qt, c++ over gtk, c (I find this a bit disappointing, this can 
hardly become a compelling reason for people to use the application)

Work flows

And there are differences in the way we work personally that also influence 
the characteristics of Krita: Cyrille paints using small brushes, I tend to
use big brushes on big, high-res canvas. That means a very different workflow.
I love enkithan's comic book artist use-case, and I think we need more of 
them. (It also makes clear that we need to work on memory consumption and 
performance first thing! 1000 dpi A4...)

Wishes and todo's

We've got a big todo list that once again is reasonably up to date. There are 
many wishlist items in bugzilla -- and I haven't looked at them for over two 
years since there is too much to do already.

So, what's the vision? 

The only way I can resolve the above in a mission statement is something like 
this: "krita is an platform for experimentation for developers and application 
that surprises its users." I'm not sure whether this is going to be a banner 
to conquer the world with! 

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