Fading Memories

KDE’s kio slaves are incredibly useful, I couldn’t live without fish, audiocd or camera, but today I discovered another one, while doing research on Django: kio-sword.

I’m already a pretty heavy user of BibleTime, but kio-sword is even handier for finding the text of a particular verse really quick. And there’s even a Kubuntu package.

Leads to:

I bet old Basil the Great would have loved this.

Krita is quite extensible. You can add new filters, of course, and chunks of user interface like scaling dialogs, and new tools — like weird and wonderful selection tools or a path tool like the one that is right now being worked on for Google’s Summer Of Code. But also new ways for existing tools to paint. I’m working on a Chinese brush simulation based on Clara Chan’s interpretation of Strassman’s Hairy Brushes for Krita 1.6. And finally, you can add complete new colorspaces. We’ve already got various rgb, cmyk and grayscale colorspaces, and also xyz, lab, yuv and lms — but there is no end to the possibilities.

However, the best API is useless without a good tutorial, and I’ve just completed the first draft of Developing Krita Plugins. Apart from extending Krita with C++ plugins (and, if you manage to get automake and gcj to play ball, java), you can use Krita’s document scripting interface to create scripts in python and ruby. And there’s dcop, too, of course, but that’s not as well documented.

So, if you’ve always thought Krita was nothing more than a glorified icon editor, you can now change that. Go ye therefore, and code all kinds of plugins, extending Krita in weird and wonderful ways, in C++ and Java and Python and Ruby.

ps. What I also wanted to say… Krita’s got a pretty good manual, too, in case you just wanted to use this icon editor.

I’ve been quietly working on a discussion draft for an OpenRaster file format specification. The goal is to create an file format that fits right in with OpenDocument for layered raster images with extras (think adjustment layers). Dave Neary discussed this issue yesterday, which was just the kick in the pants I needed to continue work.

(I’ve been slacking a bit lately. Of course, I needed to work on the last few papers for the theology course I’m nearly done with, and after the 1.5 release Real Life wanted its Boudewijn back for various things, and I got a bit fed up with the kind of reactions that prevail on free software-centered websites lately. But that’s for another rant.) But it’s nice to read that Krita is good, too.

In any case, with the valuable input from Øyvind KolÃ¥s (alias Pippin), whose esteemed presence graces the koffice irc channel, I’ve prepared a discussion piece that after review by Cyrille Berger will be posted forthwith to the Create project (where we’ve agreed to do the initial discussions) and also be presented to people higher up in the OpenDocument community. The basic idea is to just follow OpenDocument and have a zip archive with XML and binary parts in it.

And then, after lots of discussion of details and lots of coding, we may finally be able to move images from Krita to the Gimp and vice versa without losing too much.