Fading Memories

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!

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!

I'm keeping my promise to write a weekly update on what has happened in Krita. There's usually a lot to write about, and I'm trying to add some generally interesting things, some personal, some artistic, so it's not just a commit digest, but a little bit more.

But I'm wondering how to syndicate it -- Planet KDE is meant for personal blogs, and this isn't personal. I'm not sure about the other planets my blog is syndicated. And I've had complaints that having a pointer to the new issue on my blog is a bit spammy, and I think I agree with that. So I'm intentionally not linking to Krita.org this time :-) (But it's a good read!)

Does anybody have any bright ideas?

Update: I just learned that if I can teach krita.org to put the Last Week in Krita articles in an rss feed that's unique for what I post, i.e, personal, but from krita.org, I'm fine. I bet our webmaster can figure out how to do that, right Kubuntiac :-)

I've just published the next installment of Last Week in Krita. Lots of cool and fun stuff has happened! We are slowly getting the 2.2 feature plan implemented.

An application isn't complete without good documentation. Those fine folks at Linux Format docked a lot of points from Gimp when they reviewed their new release because the manual wasn't updated yet... Krita 1.6 had a pretty fine manual for a free software application, but given that Krita 2.2 is going to be so much better than 1.6, the manual should be ace, too. And almost nothing from the 1.6 manual is still usable, there have been so many changes.

We have to rewrite, and make it even better this time. There is no way I can do this on my and code, it's got to be a collaborative effort. And there should be video tutorials, as well, as part of the manual. So... Enter userbase.kde.org. It's the perfect central place for efforts of this kind. I've started an outline for a new Krita manual, a manual with more than just a description of every menu option and dialog, but one that focusses on concepts, getting things done.

Also: the first Last Week in krita of 2010 is out!

So today I booked two bed&breakfasts to handle the overflow of Krita hackers for the coming Krita sprint last weekend of February. We'll be seven, maybe eight developers and Peter Sikking. A weekend like this is usually more discussion, getting together and building a shared vision than hacking, but Cyrille, Sven and Lukas will stay on following the actual sprint for a whole week of what I suspect will be very intensive hacking.

Of course, an occasion like this should be marked by having its own t-shirt. The last dedicated Krita sprint was in 2005, and back then we had t-shirts designed by Nuno:

I gave the last surviving shirt to Cyrille during the Oslo KOffice sprint.

So... Is there anyone who wants to set the vestimentary tone for the 2010 sprint?

I missed the last two edition of Last Week in Krita, but my 2009 retrospective is up on krita.org. Summary: it's been a great year, and 2010 promises to be even better! But better read the whole thing...

Thanks to our latest donor, Silvio Grosso, we're at four thousand euros now on Pledgie: Help raise Krita to the next level -- which together with the donations people have made into my bank account directly, means that, even after Paypal has taken its cut, Lukas will be able to work on Krita for another month in the summer!

Here's a screenshot of Krita showing off a feature Silvio asked for that we never really highlighted before: using flake shapes, it's easy to add vector arrows to screenshots, to point out important items. In this case, the default color setting for a new image, which is what I'm working on currently:

Deep-felt thanks go to the more than 160 people who cared enough about Krita that they made this donation drive such an unbelievable success! It is a big vote of confidence and I am determined that we'll prove ourselves worth of it.

The Krita fund raising campaign went live on Monday. Tuesday night, Jos Poortvliet published his interview with me and Lukáš. Today it's Thursday night, and not only have we very nearly reached the campaign goals, we're now at €2,343.00, but I've also bursted out of my Paypal account! So from now on, new donations will go to Cyrille Berger's paypal account, until I've unblocked mine. Our ace webmaster, Kubuntiac has been telling me he warned me this had happened to others, but I simply hadn't expected so many people -- 89 already -- to care enough about Krita that they wanted to help us!

A great, big thank you! to you all!

I can only say that I'm totally floored and apart from the paypal issue, and, deo volente, it's now certain that Lukáš will be able to start doing what you all have decided is so very much worth doing: Make Krita fast!

As I promised, we're having weekly updates on what has happened in Krita on Krita.org, and last week's update has just been published: Week 48: Relative Quiet.

But don't let the title scare you from clicking on the link! It was still a way cool week for us! Quiet for Krita still means lots of development.