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.

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.

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.