release announcement draft

[Boudewijn Rempt]

Here's my first draft: anything I've forgotten or should highlight more (apart from the places where I still need to fill in dates etc.)?

Third Beta Released!

<p>Today the Krita team together with the <a href="http://www.calligra-suite.org">Calligra</a> team have released the third and hopefully final beta of Krita 2.4! This beta incorporates the strokes framework developed by Dmitry Kazakov during his Google Summer of Code project as well as the first results of Siddharth Sharma's photoshop import filter. We really need a good hammering of this beta to make sure we're in excellent shape for the final release!

<p>The Krita team is organizing a bug day where the team will be on irc from early in the morning until late at night across a selection of time zones to help everyone get the latest version of Krita up and running. Help us by finding new bugs and confirming existing bugs!

<p>Join us all on #krita on irc.freenode.net on XXX!</p>

<h3>New Features in this beta</h3>

<p>This beta's splash screen is by Alvaro Dopazo and should inspire everyone to start slashing the remaining one hundred or so bugs!

<p>The strokes framework is a new design for handling your painting. All painting is done in the background, so Krita is always ready for your next action. This means that even if you're giving Krita and your computer a hard time, for instance by painting with enormous brushes on a ginormous canvas, Krita won't drop any subtleties in your stroke. To test this all you need to do is paint, paint, paint and paint some more. And then of course show of the result in our gallery forum!

<p>Krita now also has preliminary support for 8 and 16 bits RGB Photoshop files. Support for other colorspaces is being worked on. We have a fairly limited selection of test files, so we would love it if people started testing this feature and if they have a file that fails, sending it to <a href="mailto:boud at kde.org">us</a> so we can improve the psd support!

<p>Geoffry Song has implemented a new kind of autobrush mask, "gaussian", which has much smoother results that the other options ("Default" and "Soft brush"). However, it is also a bit slower, and best suited for smaller brush sizes, compared to the other two options.

<p>The default order of tools in the toolbox has changed. Now we first have the generic vector shape manipulation tool and the text tool, then the krita specific tools and finally the other vector tools.

<p>Srikanth Tiyyagura has made it possible to share ICC profiles using Get Hot New Stuff. However, dynamically loading a new profile is still broken and can lead to crashes.

<p>Ramon Miranda's Gimp Paint Studio set of resources has been integrated: the brush tips, patterns, palettes and gradients from Gimp Paint Studio now form the default resources set. We are still working on brush presets.

<p>There's a new cursor type: a tiny circle, designed by David Revoy, for precise work.</p>

<p>Bug fixes: loading and saving of clone layers if there are layers with the same name in the stack, the color preview is now grayscale if the image is grayscale, the pixellize filter is fixed. The fill and select-by-color tools should be quite a bit faster now, as is the default canvas. The location of the swapfile is now configurable with the "swaplocation" key in Krita's configuration file. And many more!

<h3>Known issues in this beta</h3>

<p>We still have more than one hundred open bugs, so there's plenty to do before we're ready for a Release Candidate. These are the most important caveats

<ul>
<li>Some operations crash the OpenGL canvas</li>
<li>Exchanging brush presets using GHNS is broken</li>
<li>The mask painting system still only uses opacity, instead of the gray value</li>
<li>The canvas still is centered wrongly after operations like zoom, crop or resize</li>
<li>We are still working on a new set of default brush presets, so currently no good set of presets is preinstalled</li>
</ul>
-- 
Boudewijn Rempt
http://www.valdyas.org, http://www.krita.org, http://www.boudewijnrempt.nl