Tonight is the night
in the KOffice 1.4 release schedules that is marked red. The coding work needs to be done; the translators have another week to clean up the mess the coders inevitably left in their wake.
In the past few weeks an incredible amount of work has been done by the Krita developers. I've been on holiday for two weeks -- I did plan this holiday around the KOffice release schedule, but I thought KOffice would be done by the end of March at its latest -- so I didn't do as much damage as I'd have done otherwise.
Especially Casper, Adrian, Bart and Sven have really cleaned up the TODO list. Of course, a number of planned or tentatively implemented features have been scrapped, but even so, this version of Krita is more powerful and stable than the one in the last beta. Code that was commented out because incomplete has been uncommented and completed, lots of crashes fixed -- I'm really quite happy with the version of Krita that's going to go out into the big, bad world.
(Let me share one tip already with you: if you find that Krita's palette windows take too much space (for instance because you've got a small monitor), then make add the following line to the [GENERAL] your .kritarc file:
dockerStyle=0
This will give you sliding docker windows like in Kivio automatically.)
For the future, we want to finally add 16-bit channels, painterly features like the Wet & Sticky model I've been porting and I've also toyed with the idea of asking the OpenUsability people for a review of Krita's UI -- the problem here is that we have some very clear ideas on what we want to change almost immediately after the release and that may impact the usefulness of a review.
The Krita hackathon will be in a month or two, and I'm still working on an abstract for the User conference part of Akademy -- but I'm also still not sure that I'll be able to go. I hadn't realized that I simply must be back on Thursday, because that's my twin's birthday.
Update: I completely missed David Faure's mail about us coders having another week to fix bugs, too -- not just the translators. I promise I'll be extra careful with strings!