People are almost already gone, or are about to leave (myself I am leaving the office in an hour or so). The office is getting empty, the discussion are fading away. But today, started by a presentation from Jos of strigi fame on a metadata project for KWord and KOffice, and a proof of concept implementations of ODF 1.2 metadata, and how to use nepomuk. This trigger a discussion between him and Pierre on a design that could work for change tracking and metadata in the KOffice text library.
The last main topic was about making KOffice ready for end-users. And we decided to define a few use cases with an associated users for each application. And then list the features they need, and what kind of issues they face. While Krita is getting focused on being useful for the artist behind Blender movies. Of course, the biggest challenge is now to find developers resources to implement all this ideas and fixes.
This was the last topic on the general session. Afterward hacking started again, as well as specific discussion between a small group of developers. For instance, the Krita team (or what was left of it after the departure of Dmitry) started a discussion on redesigning our painting operation settings, which are currently a bit messy between GUI elements, and settings used for painting.
And now people are either gone, compiling KOffice on windows or almost asleep.
Would love to hear more about the “discussion on redesigning our painting operation settings”. It does seem to me though that half of Krita’s power is hidden away in the painttop configuration box / dockers when users look for tools in the toolbox. Being different is fine, as long as it’s made clear to users from the start how the different things work.
Actually, Krita is not different: Krita works a lot like Corel Painter in this regard, which also has a combobox of brush types and subtypes to choose from. We’re not where we want to arrive at yet, but we certainly don’t want to add a possibly infinite number of freehand tools to the toolbox.
To be honest, the redesigning was more about the technical internals, than user visible UI. As for the configuration box / dockers, I have kind of an experimental project that would allow to “undock” the configuration dialog of paintop to have it behaves a like a real docker (ala photoshop), but it is very buggy and a bit hackish, so not sure when it will be used. We will hopefully have UI discussions in February, in a special Krita meeting.