IRC meeting

[Sven Langkamp]

On Sun, Sep 26, 2010 at 10:33 PM, Silvio Grosso <grossosilvio at yahoo.it>wrote:

>
> Hi everyone,
>
> > maybe more people  are interested in sponsoring the
> development of Krita.
>
> I hope they are :-)
>
> In my opinion, there are three things that might possibly attract potential
> supporters.
>
> 1. working on a Windows ".exe" self-installer.
> The best would be to have it "portable", that is, not requiring any
> privilege, as administrator, to install it on Windows.
> Probably, the best would be having only Windows 7 as target for it. This in
> order to reduce the bugs reports :-)
> As of today, there are far too many Windows systems to support.
> On top of that, Windows 7 is probably the best system ever released by
> Microsoft :-)
> All Linux open-source software for "drawing" have a Windows version:
> MyPaint, Gimp, Inkscape, Alchemy, (Blender), Pencil, OpenOffice draw.
> Most importantly, as everyone knows, most users work on Windows ;-)
>

For a good windows port we would need a windows team. Currently no Krita
developer works on windows. So with the current way we would just put a
Linux developer on Windows for three months and at the end he would probably
switch back to Linux.

The KDE Windows teams is working on some stand-alone installer. There is
still the problem of the KDE dependency which means that, unless you do a
Qt-only version, you still have the 500MB extra stuff that needs to be
installed. KDE will be cutting stuff to be more suited for mobile in the
future, so there is a bit hope that the size will still reduce a bit.


> 2. working on a manual.
> Needless to say, it is useless to have a super-powerful software if your
> "average" user doesn't know how to use it.
> For instance, Krita has the text tool which is a bit difficult to find out
> because the other similar softwares have it on a different position :-)
> As everyone knows, Gimp and Inkscape, for instance, have both a magnificent
> documentation.
> This being said, generally, the documentation is not vastly produced by the
> developers themselves :-)
> This would be a waste of time and resources :-)
>

I think a project that would focus completely on the manual wouldn't get
that much support, I think. When the project gets more popular, more people
will be writing documentation and tutorials. At some point maybe even books.

By the way for 2.4 Adam has a new text tool in his todo list.


> 3. trying to have a software which works well on pictures.
> This is by far the MOST controversial suggestion:-)
> Maybe I am totally wrong by proposing it :-)
> To make it short, in my opinion, most users work on images instead of
> making
> drawing.
> As a consequence, having a software which can allow them to modify a bit
> their pictures would be a plus.
> Gimp 2.8 won't allow to work on images with 16 bit color. Martin Nordholts
> has explained that it will require 2-3 years before Gegl is fully
> integrated
> on Gimp.
> By modifying I *only* mean applying some very simple corrections on it
> (crop, curves tool, using levels for colour correction, and so on).
> This, together, with the 16 bit color feature, might be enough.
>
> I am confident Krita must be totally focused in being a drawing software.
> Otherwise, Krita might become "bloated", with far too many bugs to fix :-(
> Nevertheless, Krita in the past had already most of these options and,
> maybe, it would be not difficult to improve them a bit.
> In the end, it is what every commercial software tries to do :-)
> I have even read that Microsoft PowerPoint (version 2010) allows now its
> users to modify a video :-) :-)
>

If you say that you would like to do a app that competes with Photoshop you
certainly would get support, but that isn't what we are doing. We should
work on that application that we want to create and not create something to
get popular on all costs or just get more money from it. If you believe in
what you are doing and are excited other people will be too. As you brought
up Microsoft, I think that is one company that fails at exactly this point.
On the other hand Apple would be an example of a company that keeps a very
strong focus (Note that I'm not suggesting to become like Apple ;-)).

Beside that Krita actually has these simple corrections. We have a crop
tool, a transform tool and filters. I think when Krita community grows there
will be more people interested in photo features and they might start to
develop a photo-oriented application based on Krita.


Ok, so here is my take further fundraising:

I think we should postpone that till next year after the next Krita meeting
and maybe even after 2.4. There are several reasons for this. First is that
the last fundraiser isn't that long ago and we first need to show our user
how that turned out. So we need to deliver a rocking 2.3/2.4 so that we can
point to the release and reviews and say "See what your support has
achieved". Second reason to postpone the fundraising is that we currently
don't have free developers to work fulltime on Krita. As only students can
work work three months full time on Krita, the preferred period is likely
during the summer when there are no courses. Finally I expect the community
to grow after 2.3 and 2.4, so it might be more effective to do it then.

For the work that should be funded I think we should investigate what our
users want. If you look at past reviews the result was mostly that Krita had
pretty good features, but lacked stability and performance. I think this is
one the reasons why the first fundraiser was so successful as it
concentrated on that. So I think on the next one I think a good part should
go into bug fixing and performance.
So we need to have a look what is still missing for the Krita vision like
the infinite canvas for sketching.

Personally I would love to see Krita being used for the blender open movie
(Mango). We missed Durian as Krita wasn't ready, but we have a chance to
make into the next one.
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