In our general discussions, we talked about the release schedules, this include starting releasing monthly snapshots, until the first beta in September, for a stable release that would occure by the end of the year. Then we would switch to a four monthes schedule. We also discussed our marketing message, to emphazie more the different user interface (desktop, mobile), the availability of an office engine and lastly we discussed some logo drafts (they look really nice !).

After a short break, we had some discussions on whether we should be more Qt-only, or if the KDE libs dependency is not an issue, but while a year ago, the Qt-only road was very tempting, a lot of work has happen on KDE libs’s mobile profile that is making the dependency less a problem. Then we talked about some issues surrounding calligra extensions, especially the problem of selecting the default for plugins and to load plugins only on demand. And finally we had some discussions on the scripting APIs.

For lunch, we first started by walking a kilometer (or two) and get loss somewhere in Berlin, before going back close to the office, and have a lunch in a nice Croatian restaurant. And we had discussions around the future of Krita.

After the lunch, we held discussions around the User Interface. First, Anna presented the results of usuability testing of Calligra Words, focused on the startup dialog and the docker interractions. There is some work to do, and we will get some gigabytes of results. Then we had a long discussions on what belongs to the tool options, or to some general dockers, or if we could have options on the canvas… Then Jaroslaw presented an alternative for the startup dialog.

For the break, we had the first projection of the first movie made using Krita:

Then we had long discussions on how to embedd documents, from KParts to creating a custom canvas. And how to create a seperation between the engine and the UI, for each applications.

People kept arriving after us, and are still arriving. And right now, it is the usual friday night, computers on the table, people talking about difference between Russian and Slovak, other being more serious and fixing bugs, unit tests, discussing patches, refactoring… Or simply talking about the meaning of life.

Soon we are going to head out and eat food.

I think the major topic will be our user interfaces and how to make them fit all together. Read more at the calligra website.

But this release also brings new features, such as a slide sorter view, or support for viewing annimations in KPresenter (as shown in the video below), a new color selector or canvas rotation in Krita. More detailed information available in the KOffice 2.3.0 changelog.

Also I am making the last stand alone release of Braindump 0.10.0, since the next releases will be done as part of the Calligra Familly.

When drawing in real life, like on paper, it is very common to rotate the paper to be able to positionnate your hand to optimize the control on a curve. Unfortunately, rotating the tablet does not work, the brain seems unable to map the hand gesture with the screen content. The only solution is to rotate the content, in older release, you would have had to use the transform tool, but then it introduce quality loss for each rotation, and now, there is a feature that rotate the canvas without affecting the quality. The pan tool allows to select the rotation, by shift-clicking.

Rotation of the canvas in krita

In combination with the infinite canvas and the possibility to mirror the canvas, Krita makes sure artists get the best drawing experience.

A reset

The triggering reason of the new name is indeed the consequence long time disputes in the community. We tried hard to solve them. But it was two visions of how the project should be conducted, and of its aims, that could not be conciliated, so at the end we concluded that it would be best to part and follow different paths. Unlike what I have seen on identi.ca, it is not exactly true that we hide that in last night announcement. It might have been the trigger but it is not the driving reason. I think that when the discussions around the split started, the majority was in favor of keeping the KOffice name, but slowly, the idea of changing took over in our mind.

First of all, the KOffice name itself has a lower value that it might seems, it is often associated to the office suite that has potential but does not deliver, it is hardly known outside the KDE world, it is not such a good name, and above all, KOffice includes applications that are not traditionally associated with office applications. Also a new name is a good opportunity to get a new start, and from what I have seen, it has boost energy inside the project, and it is fueling the enthusiasm of many people, and I am confident that it has helped us to leave the past behind, and focusing on making the future of Calligra. And I am thankful to Jos Poortvliet for advising us for a new name.

After long discussions, we have settled for a new name, Calligra, based on the word Calligraphy. It might not be my favorite of our choices, but I think it is a good name, it refers to “Writing” and “Beauty”, which are two main aspects of our suite of applications, meaning that it makes all our applications feel at home.

Present

Actually our present is to work on the release of the version 2.3 of KOffice. In my view, the renaming was poorly timed, since it happens slightly before a new release, and quiet far away from our first release. But we did not have full control of the agenda either, especially since last week-end the project moved to git, and it is simply more convenient to point people to a repository that will stay for a long time than to ask everybody to switch in six months. And also the split precipitated the events.

The future

There is a lot of speculation about the future, between Mobile and Desktop. Several person have presented Calligra as being mobile oriented. Lets be clear, it is not true. Calligra is focused on developing technologies related to office and creativity applications, on top of those technologies, the Calligra project is delivering a set of desktop applications and mobile applications (and maybe tablet, in the future). All of it is build over the KDE technologies, using the Qt toolkit, which makes it potentially available to an incredible range of devices and operating system: Linux, Windows (desktop and mobile), Mac OSX, Symbian, Meego, Haiku (and maybe Android, iPhone, WebOS…), using a desktop computer, a laptop, a mobile phone, a tablet, your TV… And all with an user interface that is most suitable for your form factor.

Well of course, Qt and KDE being available on a platform is not sufficient to make Calligra available, it needs more work. The majority of the volunteers are working on linux and targeting the desktop, Nokia is supporting the mobile phone and Meego efforts. And anyone is welcome to come and give us a hand with their favorite platform and form factor.

Personally, I find those goals very exciting. Since it pretty much in line with my vision of where computing should be in 10 years, I do not believe in web applications, or thin clients, I believe in web servers as a storage space, while the intelligence remains on the actual device, and collaborations goes through peer-to-peer solutions, using open standards such as ODF.

On the organization level, we want to build a community where every contribution is regarded equally, where people’s work is properly acknowledge, where discussions remains friendly. Where maintainers are facilitators.

I hope this answer a few question, we are also preparing a FAQ, so if you have more questions, you can ask them on this blog, on our irc channel (#calligra on freenode), on the calligra-devel mailing list or in the calligra forum.

Personally I was very happy with a combination of the small color selector and the digital mixers. But many artists wanted something different, so we had a Google Summer of Code project last year by Adam Celarek to work on a new color selector, to rule them all. It took inspiration from other projects, especially mypaint.

The result of this project is a new docker, that looks like this by default:

It shows a rather classical color selector area, three shades selectors and a list of colors coming from the image. The docker was designed to make the best use of the available screen space, as well as being able to take as little space as possible:

The drawback of having a small color selector is that it might become tricky to select the color, this is solve by implementing a zoom feature, triggered by a middle click on the selector:

Different artists have different preferences on the shape of the color selector, between the triangle, the box, the whatever. So the docker is offering the choice:

The last two features of the docker is to provide two automatic palettes, the first one contains the history of the last color that the user selected, displayed in the column on the right:

The other one generates a list of colors from the current image, and display them at the bottom of the docker:

In the end, it gives a very flexible and power full color selector that will hopefully give satisfaction to many users. The drawback is that the number of options is a bit overwhelming, but this will probably evolve with user feedback.

• A build dashboard.
• A user visible website with information on the extensions.
• Make it easy to install extensions.

As Krita does not guarantee API compatibility between major releases, the first priority has been to setup the build status page, so that we ensure that extensions keep building. It does not look good with only one extension that compile, for the simple reason that it is the only one that has been ported to Krita 2 (actually, it was developed for Krita 2), while the other ones were never ported from Krita 1.6.

But the user visible part was missing, so yesterday, as I did not feel like doing C++ work, and wanted to do something distracting, I worked on the ruby script that generates the website, and made a CSS for the website. The website source code is available on gitorious, in case you need to setup a similar website for your project.

So now, all that is left is to add more content, if you are interested in extending Krita, you can contact us on the mailing list or on freenode’s irc in #krita.

The topic that kept us busy the most was success and failure, after a while we concluded that no one want to speak of failure, so we concentrated on what we consider is going to be our main criteria of success, the top mains one are lot of users and lot of developers. Our first step to get a lot of users will be to make it possible for a lot of users to use it (surprised ?), the good thing is that is indeed something that is progressing release after release. Then we will need a lot of advertisement and documentation. When it comes to developers, we concluded that the main problem is not to attract new ones, but to retain the one we have, and one of the key challenge is going to make sure we keep a good ratio of paid developers / hobbyist developers. A key feature of KOffice is going to be interoperability, and ODF is the way to go. Some ODF features are border lines and are not considered to be essential, but if someone is willing to write an implementation, it might be accepted by KOffice if it is good enough (code quality, maintainability and UI). Also an other way to achieve interoperability is with the implementation of import filters. Then the question of whether KOffice is a desktop application or also for use on mobile devices was raised, but this is a subject that require research on how to make the actual implementation. Suresh mentioned that Nokia would need a roadmap to help with their planning, which also require a vision, but writing a vision require an usability expert and the roadmap would have taken us an other day.

Then we continued with listing the missing features in KOffice, Suresh presented us their current work on mobile use of KOffice. And we finished by a discussion about our website, sadly Alexandra who did a wonderful job on planning our current website is now too busy to work on it, so for now I am going to take care of technical aspect, while Boudewijn writes content (expect a last week in koffice !).

The full minutes are fully available on koffice’s wiki.

For the dinner we went to the slowest restaurant, half an hour for the first drink and to order, an hour to get the food…

And now we enjoy the fresh evening, while blogging, sipping wine, hacking and discussing.

This raise the question of how productive we will be, as you can see below Boudewijn and Thorsten are already at work reviewing a patch on loading and saving text on shape, and we started informal discussions:

Now almost everybody has arrived, and is enjoying the wifi, in the garden. With more discussion, blogging, bug hunting, and listening to the history of castle told by Boudewijn.