Check out my sculpture website: www.boudewijnrempt.nl.
2011-11-25
2011-11-19
In the past two years I've travelled a lot, on average about a week a month. I usually take about six books with me if I'm away for a week, but I also started reading books on my laptop, just to have more variety. But my laptop is heavy and not comfortable for reading in a hotel bed. Then I realized that it might be a smart thing to buy a dedicated e-reader. I'm a reader, and I've got about ten thousand books, but I'm not a bibliophile, I don't care about first editions, for instance.
But which one? Kindle was out of the question, since I don't want Amazon to be able to track or even delete my reading habits. I also am quite sure that I will carry around a lot of books, so I wanted to have an SD card slot. And if the device is hackable, that's a plus.
I got the Sony PRS T1 reader on the day it was released:
I've got it for a month now, there are about 500 books on the device, I've spend quite a few hours with it and I've learned what this kind of device is good for, and what it isn't suitable for. In short, it's great if you want to read a novel from cover to cover, and it's atrocious if you're actually someone who uses books.
An advantage or disadvantage is that nobody can see what you are reading: no more peeking around you on the plain or train to see what people are reading, no more smiles of understanding between two Terry Pratchett lovers. On the other hand, since nobody sees what you are reading, no longer sharp remarks about being a poser who is just trying to impress if you accidentally happen to be reading Donne. Or sad looks about your lack of taste if you happen to be reading 1634 by Eric Flint.
Technically, my Sony PRS T1 is pretty ok. There are some bugs, especially in the touch screen which is prone to getting confused and will then turn dozens of pages in a quick succession, but nothing too serious.
The screen is good, though a the white is bit too gray, and it's too small. They tell you that your e-reader will have the same size as a paperback, but that's only true if you count the bezel and buttons. There's much less text on the screen than there's on a page of a real book.
I like the fact that this device has real buttons to go to the next and previous page -- I find that easier ot use than the screen gestures. The touch screen keyboard is pretty good, very usable.
The back is rubberized for good grip, and I wish the front was as well, but it's shiny plastic. Not so good. The whole device feels a bit cheap, which is actually a good thing, because it means I don't feel forced to be too careful with it, even though it cost 150 euros. I pop it in my coat pocket or backpack, carry it everywhere.
Battery life is wonderful, and for reading long stretched of text it's great that I can change the fontsize. When I read in bed without my glasses, I can make it small, when I'm using my glasses it needs to be bigger. But the choice of fonts is pretty limited.
It's pretty easy to add new books from Linux, I don't even use Calibre for that, I just copy them to the right location on the device. And project gutenberg is stuffed with the kind of thing I like to read.
The thing is, this e-reader is nearly good enough. It's tantalizing. Already ten years ago I was dreaming of a device close to this one. But an e-reader made for serious users of books.
It should have a bigger screen, at least A5, but color isn't necessary.
it should come out of the box reasonably well-formatted copies of all the classics, from the Odyssee to the Hypnerotomachia Poliphili, from Jane Austen to Kalidasa, from Mengzi to Layla and Majnun, both in the original language and in an English translation, and a way to show both in parallel.
The text should be searchable, but there should also be some serious smartnesss in that search facility: I want to be able to select a passage and nearly immediately get a list of places from which that passage can be a quote and where that passage is quoted. Wikipedia integration is great, but selecting a name should give me a list of all works where that name occurs. A chapter quote should link to that book, as well as books about those books.
There should be a serendipity feature, where browsing through the list of available books is replaced by "give me something that suits my mood" or "give me fiction about Tipu Sultan".
More and better fonts. I want to have Bodoni for my French books, Bembo for my books in Italian and Caslon for my books in English. I got a copy of Mengzi on my Sony, but there's no Chinese font!
It should be much easier to have a set of books open at the same time -- instead of having just one open and the reset remember their current page. Opening a new book doesn't mean closing the other one!
Text to speech -- especially in the dictionary, especially important for English, which does pose some challenges for a foreign reader.
/books | permanent link |
2011-11-14
Of course, I'd also wanted to blog on the second day of the Calligra sprint, but we were way too busy... In the morning we had the usual plenary meeting. Among other topics, we discussed an extension to the 2.4 release schedule. In view of the current state of the Quality Dashboard, we decided to have at least one more beta release, which probably will move the release into 2012. At the same time, our release manager Cyrille Berger, who couldn't join us, had come to the same conclusion.
Then SKF gave a remote presentation to everyone present on how they use Calligra Words in their application. They are developing a modelling and calculation application and using Calligra Words as the report writing component. The main application creates tables, images and plots which inserted in a document in the embedded Words component. The engineer then addes the explaining text. Those generated items are tagged using RDF, which means that if the input data changes, it become trivial to update just those items while the text the user has created remains intact. We got a remote, life demo of their application, event. It's immensely encouraging for everyone in the community to see Calligra being used in real life!
Then Nokia presented every attendee who didn't have a Harmattan device yet with one; an N9 or N950! This once again showed everyone how far along we have come, since it contains the Documents application with is built on the Calligra core office engine.
Despite giving many people new toys to play with, the commits never stopped coming in, and also from a coding perspective, the weekend was very succesful.
An extremely nice dinner in , which the seven Indians acknowledged present acknowledged tasted very authentic rounded off the day, or would have, had we not congregated in the lobby of the Radisson Seaside hotel for some more hacking. And playing with the new devices.
On Sunday, I spent most of my time in a separate room with Pierre, Pierre, Boemann, Thorsten and Leinir, taking a step back to look at the purpose and problems of a text editing component with a goal of identifying where there are conceptual problems in the current design in Calligra's text component. And then there was a group photo (by Dmitry).
Lunch (the lunches provided by Nokia were awesome!) We also got a presentation by Nokia's Abishek on Sunday showing us how well Calligra does as the core engine for Harmattan Office -- and what could be improved still. It's amazing that in some areas, like showing embedded charts in spreadsheets, we're better than Micrsoft's mobile office on Windows Phone.
Many thanks to Nokia for hosting the sprint in their office building, providing us with lunch and dinner, and to Nokia and KO for sponsoring travel and accomodation!
/kde | permanent link |
2011-11-11
Pierre Stirnweiss, Dimitrios Tanis and I arrived together this afternoon in the Nokia office in Helsinki. By coincidence, we're actually using the same room that we occupied when we first discussed putting Calligra (back then, still KOffice) inside Nokia phones! Kind of historic ground!
The usual suspects are here, but also many new faces, like Smit Patel and Brijesh Patel, who hack on Words and Dimitrios Tanis who is doing documentation and is now turning into a Kexi hacker!
We've come a long way since then... We have created at least three different applications based on the Calligra engine. It started with FreOffice, a QWidget-based office application for the FreMantle release of Maemo. The code for this application lives right inside the Calligra source repository. Then came Harmattan Office, which will also be released under GPL. Harmattan Office uses QGraphicsView and MeegoTouch. Having Harmattan Office installed by default on the N9 means that Calligra suddenly has hundreds of thousands of users, since the N9 turns out to be an extremely popular device. And then Nokia sponsored Shantanu to create Calligra Active, a Qt Quick-based document viewer based on Calligra that's part of Plasma Active.
But now it's time to go full-tilt for the 2.4 release of the Desktop applications! There's plenty of cool stuff going on, from discussions about the difference between pre-, post- and ambilactarianism, to new comboboxes for the style dockers, to attempts to get Thorsten to commit his line endings. (We're in freeze, but those arrows are smooth...) The room is already full, more people have to arrive, it's noisy, everyone is active -- this is going to be a great weekend!
Thanks go to Nokia and KO GmbH for sponsoring travel, accommodation and dinner!
/kde | permanent link |
2011-11-07
This was one busy weekend! We had the Krita bug day, of course. But that wasn't the only thing happening: finally the printed comics were delivered! Consquently, Animtim took the train to Deventer and spent the weekend drawing dedications in the pre-ordered comics.
Meanwhile, Irina was busy preparing the list of addresses and printing the address tickers. Then it was time to start stuffing the jiffy bags:
Sort the jiffy bags
And stack them
With a huge stack as result:
Now all that is needed is to get the stamps and send them off, and everyone who pre-ordered a comic-book + dvd pack will get to see the result
If in the coming week or two you do not receive your order, or your order is not correct, please mail me! It's the first time we've done something like this...
And if you haven't ordered your copy, there are still a few left, so don't hesitate, and go to the Krita website and press the order button!
/kde | permanent link |
2011-10-08
Krita uses OpenGTL, a very, very cool techology. We use it for filters and for colormodel definitions (mainly for floating point colorspaces). OpenGTL uses LLVM internally to compile from its domain specific language to fast native code, on the fly. Ultra-cool stuff, in short.
But recently, I've had two bug reports that worry me a lot, and I do not know how to handle them:
It looks like there's problem having an application that links to llvm running on a system that uses the radeon driver. I'm not sure, llvm being black magic to me... I also don't know who to approach in the gallium/radeon/llvm communities about this issue, and neither are the reporters. But if this is true, Krita has a big problem, and so have other applications that make use of the cool possibilities of llvm.
If you have any suggestions, please mail me directly!
2011-10-06
While we're in the middle of the beta period for Krita 2.4 (which promises to be completely amazing, of course!), I got an email from Julian from Packt Publishing, asking me to fill in a questionnaire for the judges of the 2011 Packt Open Source Awards. Nice, thorough questions.
Krita is a finalist in the multimedia category... It's already great that we got this far: a year ago, Krita never got further than a write-in option whenever there was a vote going on! But we want to win as well!
So please go to packt's website, register and vote!
2011-08-22
No, I didn't queue for the exo-pc. More on exo-pc's and tablets in an earlier post. But I am very glad I came to the desktop summit. Had a great time with lots of people, met many people from the Calligra project, including Summer of Code and Season of KDE students Siddharth, Shreya and Aakriti, and even had some hacking time. We even went to an Indian restaurant with Shreya and Shaantanu.
And I gave two presentations. The first was together with Thorsten Zachmann from Nokia. You can download the slides here.
The Calligra Suite of applications has been going places. First came FreOffice, the open source first mobile office suite, later renamed to Calligra Mobile when it was ported to the WeTab and MeeGo. Calligra Mobile is based on QWidget technology.
Then came Calligra Active, part of the Plasma Active project. The development of Calligra Active was sponsored by Nokia. Calligra Active is written using QML.
And Nokia, together with the Calligra community and KO GmbH, developed the successor of Calligra Mobile: Harmattan Office. At the Desktop Summit, Thorsten Zachmann revealed Harmattan Office for the first time. We would have shown it in a life demo had the beamer been compatible with the video out port on the N950. Harmattan Office not only uses Calligra, but also Poppler and will be made available under a GPL license when it ships.
Calligra really has been going places and one of the topics of my presentation was to show how a company-community collaboration can be a success. All in all, Nokia has been involved in the Calligra development for several years now, spanning two generations of mobile office applications.
They spend time (and money) to integrate in the community. They joined sprints, sponsored sprints. All the development on the calligra engine was done directly upstream, in first the KDE subversion and then afterwards the KDE git repository.
At first, bugs were registered in the maemo bugzilla, but all those bugs were pretty soon moved to the KDE bugzilla, and that's where we work with them.
Nokia hired testers to test Calligra. Not just their own gui frontend, but also the backend. They assembled a huge repository of test documents -- and all those are in the open.
Nokia made a lot of effort to grow the community, for instance by sponsoring more than a dozen students to do an internship inside Nokia working, in public, on new features for FreOffice.
It cost effort and was something everyone had to get used to, but as much as possible, everyone used the same communication channels, notably the public irc channels, except for things more tied up with internal process, like the daily scrum meetings. If I would change one thing, I would propose to also do this in the open irc channel.
Like any community member, Nokia scratched their itch. They mostly needed a viewer application, so they were interested in loading office document files, both OpenDocument and Microsoft Office, as well as PDF. And they were interested in rendering fidelity. That's where they put their effort, and not in the desktop gui which they didn't need.
What Nokia also did was develop their gui on top of the calligra engine in-house, so it would be a surprise when they released their new systems -- and then FreOffice was released under GPLv2+. The community had a choice to accept this code-dump or not, and we accepted it. The same will happen with Harmattan Office.
All in all, I consider that the cooperation between Calligra and Nokia has been an example of doing everything right. And the result is impressive: in many, if not most ways, Harmattan Office is more capable of loading and rendering complex office documents than any other mobile office suite.
Then -- after the break, provided by LibreOffice's Michael Meeks, it was my turn again, this time to talk about Krita!
I perhaps over-prepared my Calligra Everywhere presentation -- and underprepared my Krita presentation. In the background, I had gwenview running with a slideshow of all the great art people have created with Krita, and in the foreground I told my story...
Mostly about where Krita came from -- a Photoshop/GIMP clone -- where it went (everywhere, but without focus -- to where we want to take it now -- a really good digital painting application.
I also touched lightly on why Krita seems to be flourishing right now. I don't claim to have all the answers, but some of the things in the mix are these:
And don't forget -- the pre-order for Animtim's Comics with Krita DVD is still open!
| permanent link |
2011-08-18
Intel was nice enough to hand out exo-pc tablets to people at the Desktop Summit. I didn't queue up for one, since I already got a brace -- and seen as geek toys, they're not even that desirable. The wetab I took to the MeeGo conference was a geek magnet, but those days are over for this hardware.
But remarks I've heard around suggest to me that people are mistaken about the purpose of these machines, and even about the purpose of the tablet UX it's running. Not all tablets actually are created for the same purpose, but from what I've seen, no tablet is actually made to be a productivity tool.
For instance, the iPad is designed to bleed you of dollars or euros, a few a day, maybe ten or twelve euros a week. It's a boring device where the big draw is the app store. Every app is a bit boring by itself, and after playing around a bit, you tend to want something new. Say... Another app, or a bit of media like an eBook or music file. Or a comic. So you go to the app store and spend a little money, not enough money to think about. Less than a beer in a cafe (unless you're in Helsinki)... It's a very good device for that purpose. The way it seduces you is by being very nice to hold and inviting to play with, but boring enough that you need something new for it regularly. And when you've got a few dozen apps, it becomes very unattractive to move to another platform and lose your "investment" -- because they do add up, those nickels and dimes.
The WeTab is sort of the same, but instead of bleeding you, it's intended to bleed advertisers. The huge scrolling pinboard is intended to be sold square by square to content/advertisement providers who can place a little app that can continuously show information you might find useful along with advertisements. You're seduced by the information to take in the ads. The applications on the WeTab are secondary, in my experience.
Intel's tablet UX has, basically, as its purpose to get you to buy a tablet with an Intel CPU. To that purpose, they have created an interface that shows the average user what they probably want to see: a quick look at their music collection, video collection, the noise their social network is making and a bunch of favourite webpages. For that, the concept is perfect, even if reminiscent of the plasma netbook interface with its columns in some ways. The version of their UX on the exo-pc's is pretty old, there are newer images on the MeeGo website. I think that the Intel tablet UX is actually quite good and quite useful for the kind of user it's intended for.
But the exo-pc is a developer device, meant to make it easy for people to test their new multi-touch enabled MeeGo application. And the tablet UX is not meant for developers... People complaining that the terminal doesn't have a virtual keyboard are really missing the point. The terminal is useful if you attach a usb keyboard so you can execute a few commands to install your app. For that, I think it's really good enough. All rise to the challenge of multi-touch apps on Linux!
2011-07-29
And I'm coming to Berlin for the Desktop Summit, with lots of colleagues and friends from KO GmbH and from the Calligra community.
And I have been given the opportunity to give two presentations. On Sunday morning (as usual...).
First, I will speak about Calligra Everywhere. Without wanting to put in spoilers, I can say that there are two parts to this presentation.
The Calligra suite of applications has been expanding in the past year in several direction: there are now more applications than ever part of the project, Calligra applications are available on more platforms, both desktop and mobile than ever, Calligra has joined the Active project, Calligra functionality is used in more applications and finally, some of our applications are being used more and more. So what I want to do in the first place is to review these developments, and make clear why they were possible, both technically and socially.
In the second place, the Calligra community has benefited from a long relationship with Nokia. Together with Nokia's Thorsten Zachmann we will discuss not just what this has resulted in for Calligra and Nokia, but also the lessons we can learn from the collaboration of several commercial partners with the volunteer project that Calligra still emphatically is.
Next it's Michael Meeks's turn, who will speak about LibreOffice. It's a bit like Fosdem all over -- where KO colleague Jos van den Oever first presented WebOdf, then Michael talked about LibreOffice, and I finally gave my presentation on Calligra's technical underpinnings. This time, I won't put quite so much C++ in my slides!
So... When Michael is done, it's my turn again. This time I will talk about Krita -- in the first place not about Krita the application, not a list of features we created since last year's aKademy presentation, but rather about Krita the project.
Krita is now more than ten years old, and it has started coming into its own only this year. What I hope you will be interested is in are answers to the questions "Why did it take so long?", "What went wrong?", "What went right?". I'll use the evolution of the application as a guide to discuss what it takes to create a large application with a diverse team that actually makes artists have fun.
/kde | permanent link |
2011-07-15
Yesterday the page where you can pre-order the Krita DVD + Comic book went life! Animtim is actually nearly done with the content for the DVD, while his brother is working on the soundtrack. And in October, with the first beta's for Krita 2.4 (and hopefully also the first Windows release of Krita), the DVD's will be pressed, the comic printed and sent out.
People who have already donated receive a hefty discount, but even pre-ordering already gets you a discount. Read all about it and enjoyu the trailer on krita.org:
Comics in Krita Training DVD Now Open For Pre-Orders! (Inc. Trailer)
/kde |
permanent link |
2011-05-27
Sculpture post again, since I need to be away from code and hacking for a while. More Krita stuff tomorrow.
Following both the antique tradtion of the spinario (a statue of a boy withdrawing a thorn from the sole of his foot which I saw a copy of in the Irish National Gallery) and female equivalents like Andrassy Kurta Janos' Taking out the thorn, as well as the many sculptures in Khajuraho depicting a woman taking a thorn out of the sole of her foot, I tried something similar.
 |
| From spinaria (only click if not offended by nudity) |
My goals here were in the first place to make something that needs to be turned round and round and round -- wherever you look, the eye is drawn round the statue. Then, it's quite a bit bigger than my usual work (and casting will be correspondingly more expensive, I'm afraid). But it's done now, more or less to my satisfaction, so up comes the next project. It was ambitious, but gratifying, particularly when one of the colleagues at the sculpture classes exclaimed she wanted to look like this thorn lady. Presumably without the thorn in her foot, though.
/art | permanent link |
2011-05-20
While I was forced by circumstances for forego the production of t-shirts for this sprint -- and I feel bad about that! -- the first day of the Third Krita Sprint has been great. Yesterday, our webmaster Bugsbane, a.k.a. Kubuntiac and Krita hacker Dmitry Kazakov arrived in Deventer already, and this morning we took the train to Amsterdam, to the the Blender studios. We're crammed around the same glass table where last year selected Krita hackers saw a sneak preview of the Sintel movie. Feels weird!
Assembled today were artists David Revoy, Animtim, Silvio Heinrich and Kubuntiac, as well as hackers Adam, Dmitry, Sven, Lukas, Matus (tomorrow is his birthday!), Dmitry, Silvio (again, this guy puts in a double appearance). We got a surprise visit from a bunch of Danish game designers here for a game jam at the Binger Filmlab, who, of course, got a full demo.
The selection system in Krita was redesigned, bugs were filed and solved, lunch was consumed on a road-side terrace in the wonderful sunshine, dinner was had at the Blender team's usual Thai restaurant -- and we made plans for tomorrow.
We'll start off around 10 with an artists session: all artists present are going to take about half an hour to work in Krita, a projector connected so we all can follow. We call it the "demo and gripe" sessions. That way the developers can learn about the way different artists really work, and we can spot glitches and issues with usability. We are going to try to record this session, both sound and screencast and make it available afterwards. No promises though, we might run into glitches there!
The afternoon is for the whole team to get a list of highly important issues that hamper artists most so we can set the priorities for the year following this sprint. After that -- it's hacking and discussion time!
2011-05-14
Day four was the last day of the LGM. Sad... But it was filled with action packed talks and some good hacking. Of course, today is already Day 5 so I'm a bit late reporting. It's not because I went to the after-party -- instead I went to the hotel room to hack and write this blog. But instead of blogging, I spent all evening helping people to get Krita up and running on #krita. Though I did have a nice beer with it.
The first talk was by Nicolas Robidoux. He gave us examples of greatly improved ways of scaling and transforming pixels. We really need to get these improvements in Krita as soon as possible, and Nicolas has promised to stay in contact with me. Jon Nordby showed off the history of MyPaint. Even though I'm a Krita developer, I'm also a regular user of MyPaint, and it's great to see its evolution. Many of the other talks were just as cool and though-provovking, but I'm at the airport, and I don't have time to philosophize on the need for open and free hardware to break the stranglehold of appstores. Rejon mentioned in passing that he expected Google to stop using the Linux kernel, and having used an iPad for a day, one thing is clear: this is a super-hostile environment for anyone who wants to have any freedom (except the freedom to be bled dry).
At lunch Animimtim and me gave a Krita demo to the Libre Graphics Magazine editors, eliciting many a wow!
Today we refreshed our mind at the Museum des Beaux Arts. I also saw an amazing bit of sculpture in an art gallery and even dared go in to see it up close. And then finally the LGM wended to its end. Until next year!
2011-05-13
On Thursday, the most memorable event was the hacking night. Jon Nodrby from MyPaint, Pippin from Gegl and me sat together and started improving the state of OpenRaster. Next to us were Joao, the sole Gimp representative here, and Lukas from Krita, who was being sketched by Animitim.
Again, the presentations were of a high quality. One immediately sent me coding: DeviantArt had sent two people and they presented their new web api, making it possible to upload images together with their (.kra for instance) source files to deviant art right from an application. The only thing that's hampering me now is the lack of an OAUTH2 implementation for C++/Qt.
2011-05-12
A day of confusion and chaos -- in parts. Some speakers were apparently a bit confused as to the time, or possibly the timezone. In that, my body whole-heartedly agrees. It's 21:20 here and it tells me I'm pulling an all-nighter. But much good happened as well!
(And not just that I've started a serious attempt at optional colord integration in Krita...)
The talks today were less focussed on application, but instead presented new and refreshing ideas on creating documentation, making fonts available and the ardours of creating a beautiful magazine dedicated to Libre Graphics Software.
Tom Lechner's talks on laidout are always amazing, eye-opening moments of art, and today's was no exception. He showed a t-shirt printed with a panoramic image...
Fun moment of the day was Sébastien Roy demonstrating lighttwist -- a project that uses compiz to combine images from different projectors in one screen. Huge and impressive -- and Sébastien mentioned that they use Krita to prepare the 16 bit/channel PNG images they use for a color LUT. The maths is beyond me, of course, but he asked for a small feature: not to lose the text annotations to the PNG image during the load/save cycle. Lukas could reassure him: that bug has been fixed already! And apparently using the smudge or warp brush on the LUT images produces wonderful psychedelic results in the final image. Maybe they should consider making the LUT programmatically, or even interactively paintable with Krita!
For the rest drinks, dinner -- and fun. Oh, and check out Rougelivre for a snapshot of Lukas and of Animtim, and a great picture of the cartoon Animtim did for his workshop! Also, Nathan Willis has published a very good writeup of the Krita presentations for LWN. I'll blog a link when it gets freely available! (Or get an LWN subscription to read it now!)
2011-05-11
So here I'm sitting at my desk at my "Cosy Studio" in the Therese Casgrain student housing facility/hotel calles Les Studios Hotel in Montreal. Too tired to do anything but nibble cherry tomatoes and drink a beer, after the first day at the Libre Graphics Meeting, 2011 edition.
Perhaps slightly less busy than last year, and I'm missing a lot of familiar faces, but the quality of the talks has been outstanding so far. I'm working on experimentally getting colord up and running on my OpenSUSE laptop so I can check whether I can generate Qt bindings for the dbus interface to experiment with integration in Krita.
If the number of questions people want to ask after a presentation is a measure of success, then Lukas' Krita presentation was a huge success. By that metric, but also by any other metric was a huge success indeed! Lukas showed off all the new stuff we've created since LGM 2010 -- and was followed by Animtim giving a workshop on creating a comic in Krita. The audience was completely silent as he used Krita's mirroring feature, sketch brush, vector layers, hatching brush and color modes to quickly create the first panel for a comic. (But admittedly, I came away with notes on three points where Krita must improve, because Krita made Animtim fumble at times.)
Then we went per school bus to Lovell's printing museum in the heart of old Montreal. This was an amazing visit. There are, apart from Dave Crossland and Nathan Willis, many, many type and press freaks in the libre graphics community. And pro's, too, of course, like the Scribus team! I'm one of the self-confessed type and typography geeks, having made my first font when I was 16, for my first dot-matrix printer. Old printing machines, old type, the cauldron where monotype cast letters and linotype slugs where melted back into ingots.
Even more wonderful, our hosts, John Lovell, his wife, some retired printer employees and a young guy really, really digged what our LGM is about. We were all passionate, and there have been many great conversations this night. Apart from much, much useful and wonderful thing, osne thing I learned here is that sometimes people have difficulty finding the right free software application. John Lovell had never heard of Scribus yet -- but he had been looking for an In-Design-like application. And we all know Scribus is in some important (for a professional) respects even better than In-Design!
And I got a real lead monotype cast "v", in six points!
2011-05-04
It's a never-ending tale of sorrow and tears... The tale of Qt, Wacom and distributions. It happens with distressing regularity that people join us on the #krita irc channel, the krita forums or the krita mailing list. Users, but also developers. Their question? "Krita doesn't seem to support my Wacom tablet, but Gimp and MyPaint work fine!"
This is never actually caused by Krita. Krita uses Qt's wacom support, same as for instance Maya does. The Qt Wacom api is good, the rate of events is good, we are fine with that.
The problem is that sometimes Qt breaks when a new version of the wacom drivers is released. And sometimes distributions package the wrong version of Qt and the wrong version of the Wacom drivers together. We don't have an exact table of what works and what doesn't work. As developers we tend to drift to distributions that are relatively good at supporting Wacom and Qt together... OpenSUSE hasn't failed me for a couple of years now! But just check our help forum.
And then there are situations where Qt is blameless, Wacom is blameless and the distribution is really to blame. For instance, when distributions patch Qt to achieve multitouch with an experimental patch that breaks tablet support.
I'm not sure what to do about this: the bugs get reported to the distributions, and when necessary to Qt, but in the meantime, for many people Krita breaks every time they do an upgrade. And we cannot help them!
2011-03-20
And so forth. There used to be programmeerzomer as well... KDE is in again as a mentor organization, which is utterly great! But it's also a good moment to put some things straight.
Over the past couple of years, I've seen a rising number of misconceptions about these programs. One of the most pernicious is that some people have started to think that Google Summer of Code is the only approved way to start working on a cool project.
This is Not True.
But lots of people seem to think it is. It isn't even true that it's the only way to get mentored when you start working in an open source project. That's a related, but just as common misconception. It depends on the project, perhaps, but at Krita and Calligra we are totally prepared to spend the same amount of time on you when you want to get into hacking on our projects no matter what the reason is. People have learned not just our code, but even C++ in our irc channels and on our mailing lists. Everyone is welcome, the year round. The only thing needed is an itch and passion for the project.
Another misconception is that the Ideas page is the sum of all admissable ideas for Google Summer of Code project proposals. It is nothing of the kind. It's what we came up with that we think would be cool, but if you are passionate and you propose something out of the box, there's a huge chance that we'll think it even cooler, and you will get ranked high!
And note that there are generally speaking between ten and twenty proposals per slot. Even if you engage with us, make sure we know you well -- there's no guarantee of selection. But note that you will still be allowed to work on the project, even if Google doesn't pay you for it! Most project members never see any money for their work.
The final misconception I want to mention is the "it's a summer job" idea. Nope. Not at all. You write the code, your code goes into a release -- and Krita always makes students work with git master, so your code will go into the next release -- and then it's your responsibility to maintain it. And to broaden your engagement with the project beyond the project you coded for. We are looking for people who will stay with the project for many years to come. If you are in it for the three months of paid work, please reconsider.
And now start engaging with us, discuss your cool ideas, start fixing bugs already and make sure we love and trust you before the time arrives for us to rank your project proposals!
/kde | permanent link |
2011-03-19
I've been to India three times now, in the space of about ten months. I've never really had any problems, but this time I came home with a bad bowel infection, and it's still raging... I'm not sure where I went wrong, maybe it's just that this time I was a little less careful. I even forgot to take my medication and the mosquito repellant this time! Anyway, I'm up and about, most of the time, active and working, most of the time, but I might not be around when you need me, and I might postpone writing difficult mail and so on.
But apart from that, this visit to Bangalore was as wonderful, or perhaps even better, than the previous visits. The first part of the week was spent working on the Calligra-based office document viewer application Nokia is developing for Harmattan/MeeGo. It's going to be pretty cool, in many important ways better than the proprietary competition. Calligra Stage (formerly known as KPresenter)'s maintainer Thorsten Zachmann was there too, and we had a good time together with Mani, Vidhya and Sai.
And I managed to see parts of the Cricket World Cup match India vs Netherlands! I still think, though, that the Indian in the breakout room shouldn't have laughed so much at our blunders! We put up a good game for a country with fewer cricket players than the average layout of Bangalore, I think...
Highlight of the trip was, of course, conf.kde.in. I managed to be there on Friday and Saturday. It was very, very well attended, by hundreds of people, mainly students.
 |
| From kde-related pictures |
Lots and lots and lots of delegates waiting for lunch!
The Calligra talks given by Inge, Mani and me were very well received, even if the content was quite technical. On Saturday, Inge, Mani and me helped quite a few people getting started hacking on Calligra and Krita. I even worked together with a five or six year old boy on fixing a bug in Braindump, the latest addition to the Calligra family!
 |
| From kde-related pictures |
Mani giving his talk on embedding Calligra using the KoAbstraction interface created by Jaroslaw Staniek. Note Qt Creator being open -- this talk was technical!
The conference promises to be quite succesful when measured by new contributors arriving on the mailing lists and irc channels, fixing bugs and providing patches.
A truly great conference. Thanks Pradeepto and team for organizing it!
My Sunday was spent with Girish, working on a shared project, but also meeting his wife and nearly one-year old son (who learned to push a chair around the room while I was there). And a nice walk through Ramamurthy Nagar's farmer's market. As organic as organic can be, but it was extremely crowded as well as dark and dusty, so I couldn't take any pictures.
And now it's time to check out the progress Krita has made in my absence...
| permanent link |
2011-03-17
I'm travelling too much... I just returned from India, where I visited conf.kde.in and did some work -- but I haven't had time to blog about the Mobile World Congress, which I visited before going to India! And the First Calligra Sprint in Berlin is already coming up, and I haven't got my train tickets yet... Oh well, first things first. The MWC! (I'm sure to be the last MWC attendant to blog, so there's value in there as well...)
MWC is a huge event, with tens of thousands of visitors in a sprawling setting with eight enormous halls. We went there on behalf of KO, invited by Intel, to show off Calligra running on MeeGo at the Intel App-Up booth.
We had three versions of Calligra to show: the desktop version, the mobile phone version (formerly called FreOffice, now renamed to Calligra Mobile) and an experimental tablet prototype that has support for multi-touch pinching and zooming. We intended to show that the Calligra engine really is kind of the webkit for office document apps -- a story we kept repeating.
But in general, the concept of open source or free software seems to on the retreat, if the MWC is any indication. There were a few free software companies with a booth of their own, but they got hardly any interest. And whenever we gave our spiel about Calligra being a free and open engine for office software, just like webkit, we mostly did't get much response. Similar for MeeGo at the MeeGo pavillion: people were interested in it, interested in the hardware, but the upstream-first, open nature of MeeGo didn't seem to interest anyone much.
It might just be the kind of audience, but I think that Nokia retreating back into the comfort zone of closed source, proprietary development might have something to do with it. Even though Nokia's announcement isn't the end of MeeGo -- Intel is pretty much committed, as they were when they were on their own with Moblin, and Nokia still develops it as a research project, like they did with Maemo, and there are still plenty partners in the consortium, it still is a watershed moment for the open source world. The trend of increasing openness and cooperation is quite clearly reversed.
What people seemed to repeat to us most was something like this: Apple succeeded with completely proprietary systems, Google succeeded with grabbing code and dumping back what they had to. Nokia twice tried to engage with the community to build their product. They failed twice. Proprietary development vs Open Source, score: 2 - 0. It's very hard to discuss this idea, especially since Nokia did not do anything really wrong in their engagement with first KOffice and now Calligra.
About Nokia... The Nokia booths and developer days were very, very weird. Especially because everywhere Nokia was still giving out the pre-Friday message: Qt everywhere, MeeGo cool, Symbian cool... They were even handing out E7 phones. The Qt booth had some pretty impressive demos as well. Down to "Qt Everywhere" posters in the Nokia lounge.
Android is clearly everywhere. And that makes the release of an alpha version of a Qt for Android SDK so incredibly important. With Android and WebOS running Qt apps, the only place where Qt isn't, is Windows Phone 7. (By the way... I made a Windows Phone 7 phone crash by playing with the pre-installed Microsoft Office app on it.)
Whenever I make a trip, I like to have some time exploring the place. I didn't get to see the Sagrada Familia, instead I got lost a bit in the Barri Gotic, saw the remains of the Roman walls and visited a wonderful fresh food market. And one afternoon I took an hour or two off to visit the Catalan Art Museum. Parts of it were closed, like the romance art section, but the parts that were open were fantastic. The gothic art, frescoes and paintings, were different enough from the flemish art that it became interesting and the sculpture collection had some very interesting pieces, even in the mordern section.
All in all, a great experience, very educational and a wonderful city to visit. The City Part Hotel Sant Just we stayed at had such great food that we never really went out for dinner anywhere!
| permanent link |
2011-02-12
I just booked my tickets for the Libre Graphics Meeting 2011 in Montreal. And so did Animtim, who is going to give a workshop drawing comics with Krita. I'm really looking forward to LGM, as usual. It's maybe the most fun and relaxing conference in the year and the talks are always really high quality and often thought-provoking.
(Lukas speaking at LGM 2010, in Brussels)
/kde | permanent link |
2011-02-07
Just back from Fosdem where I gave a presentation with the above title. It was taped, but I don't think it's edited an up yet, but you can get the slides here. I think the talk went reasonably well, but since the organizers had asked for technical content, my content was very technical. Either that, or the timeslot (Sunday 16:00) meant that there were very few people in Jansons and that the people who were there couldn't come up with any questions. I still do think that the subject was pretty important: how to use the Calligra office engine in your own applications, no matter the form factor your app is intended for.
And development in Calligra is so exciting these days, with 2400 commits since we moved to git. It's a pity we're generally speaking too busy to blog or dent. Jan Hambrecht, the Karbon maintainer, has returned and is working on connectors between shapes and clipping. Thorsten Zachmann is properly implementing the long-needed text-on-shape feature. Krita developing is rushing at an enormous pace. Casper Boeman and Sebastian Sauer are rejuvenating the rather unstable, slow and tangled code of the layout engine. Yue Liu is making a go of the development of Flow (formerly known as Kivio). We really should blog more often...
The opening keynote by Eben Moglen was very inspiring, but not everybody could attend since the auditorium was packed while there will still people waiting outside. Eben Moglen called on all of us to make software that promotes freedom on the ground -- referring to the current situation in Egypt as well as to the datamining monopoly the United States has achieved in the past decade. Facebook is not harmless, it's dangerous. Even though they sponsored Fosdem...
It made me think about where Krita fits in there, but the answer is simple: artists who create art to support the struggle for freedom deserve to be able to do that with free tools, tools that cannot be taken away from them. So with my conscience salved, I plunged into the crowded corridors to find the KDE stand where Irina was helping out again this year, despite still being tired from her hospital adventure end of December. Met up with a lot of people, too. I didn't go to many presentations apart from the keynote and the office track, but it looked like most rooms were packed anway.
The Fosdem organizers really took great care of us main track speakers, with a nice hotel for self and spouse (no free internet at the hotel, though!), taxi between hotel and venue, t-shirt, snack-bag and so on. Wonderful work guys and gals!
All in all, a chaotic, rousing, inspiring and tiring experience. It's nearly 11:00 now, and I still need to shower. But at least most of my mail backlog is done!
/kde | permanent link |
2011-01-15
Since yesterday, the river IJssel has flooded its banks. The embankment ("Welle") is now flooded. It's expected that we'll get some more water. There's no danger it'll reach our house, though, since we're living on little mound that's been dry since the first people came here in the neolitic.
| permanent link |
Krita 2.3 is really pretty good -- although following the release we've found a number of rather serious issues, especially when working with images in the 50-100 megapixel range. But on a less important note, there are quite a few features in Krita that never really got any love after they were initially coded.
The pattern creation tool is one of those, and it's getting more important now since it's not possible to use patterns as a color source for freehand painting. The pattern creation popup was coded in 2006 by Bart Coppens (who is also responsible for quite a few other features in Krita but who's too busy with his Phd these days to code for Krita).
As you can see, it's quite simple:
There's a preview, an update button, an use-it-now button and an add-to-predefined patterns button. If you try to make your pattern from a big image (like this 6000x4000 image), you get a warning, and the pattern will be downscaled to fit in 1000x1000. That's because otherwise it's pretty easy to run out of memory! Oh, and since yesterday you can select whether you want to create your pattern from the current layer or from the whole image.
What's missing is using the selection, naming the pattern, exporting the pattern and who knows what else -- I haven't yet checked what other apps provide. Managing existing patterns is pretty primitive as well. And the layout of the popup is a bit of an embarrasment!
But there you have it -- a nice small feature that's suddenly become important. It was fine in 2006, but in 2011, we expect more of it. So... If you suddenly feel inspired to hack on this, join us on #krita on irc.freenode.net and we'll get you started!
2011-01-10
This year I'll give a presentation at Fosdem. I'm not sure which day yet, though.. Updates will follow. The presentation will be very technical: I want to show how easy it is to build a new, custom interface on top of the Calligra Suite core engine -- using QWidgets, QGraphicsView or even Qt Quick, for viewing and editing of documents.
I don't think there's any other office engine/application suite that makes it not just possible, but even relatively easy, to reuse the canvas, the file conversion code and even the tools in applications. Calligra is beginning to become sort of the webkit of the office document world.
There's a lot of interest and a real need for this sort of possibility: I know for a fact that apart from Nokia's FreOffice/Calligra Mobile, there are at least four projects working on a new Calligra user interface, using various technologies, some of them generic, some of them focussed on a particular target group, like medical information systems.
I'm really looking forward to it, but it's going to be a weird kind of weekend for me, though, since Irina will be doing KDE booth duty, like last year, and I don't think we have ever been away from the kids together for more than a day since they were small and still had grandparents who could care for them for a weekend.
