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Krita participated through KDE with the 2006 Summer of Code by Google. I think the result turned out to be quite impressive and usable. Basically, there were 2 big objectives: create a Bézier tool, and create an 'intelligent scissors' tool, through a common, to-be-created framework. The student that did the programming for this, was Emanuele Tamponi. He completed the project nicely on time, so that the new features can be admired in the upcoming 1.6 release of Krita. First, there was the Bézier tool. This now (finally) allows us to draw an arbitrary and potentially nicely flowing (or is it derivable?) curves on the screen, edit them, and then decide to stroke (draw them with the current brush and color), or convert it to a selection. The basic interface looks like this. Which gives you the ability to move points, control points, add points, etc. In my opinion it's very usable and gives a pretty result (but then, I'm not an artist). There's quite a chance that this tool will get superseded in Krita 2 with the flake bézier tool, which is quite a shame. The far future might look bleak, but at least now we have a working implementation, that will probably get used for the year(s?) to come, until KDE4 and Krita 2 actually get to the users. The other big thing that got done, is the scissors tool. Or, MOS, as we call it now (stands for Magnetic Outline Selection). The tool does a pretty neat thing: you move your mouse around an object (preferably one with well-defined contours), and the tool will try to follow the outline, drawing a curve around it. When you're finished, you can go and modify it a bit, or just convert the outline to a selection. It's a bit like the regular selection tool, but with the very cool effect that you can shake your hands with the mouse, and the tool will actually try to follow the mind, not the hand ;-) In the picture, I moved my mouse around the rose, and the tool automatically added intermediate points. Those points are everything it needs; the lines in between are automatically calculated from the image itself. Pretty cool and useful, I'd say. If you'd like to have a look at the features, you can either wait for the 1.6 version of Krita and KOffice (scheduled for October 10th), the first beta (September 8th), or just check out the svn version from the 1.6 branch (but as with all code, no guarantees it will work).

I created KDE4.x/ application directories in ftp://upload.kde.org's incoming/ directory. The first application it was used for was okular, an universal document viewer for KDE 4 based on KPDF, with a snapshot preview requiring the recent Krash release. Read More

Long time since last blog post.. But i've been quite busy with KMobileTools 0.5 beta1 release. Pre-release time was a hell.. i had to rewrite the whole theme for the homepage (looks really good now, anyway :P ) and some new reference pages, since a lot changed since 0.4. But post-release was busy too: trying to get the best visibility as possible, writing here and there, but above all answering to all the emails, bug reports, and feedbacks. Well.. sometimes it's annoying, and it takes a lot of time, but hey.. we love our users :P Even if tired, i'm very satisfied by users interest, and so i was a bit more motivated than before on bugfixing. Now it's still a bit early for beta2, but seing a lot of code fixed, i feel it's not even too far... So just a polite reminder: beta1 has still old and annoying bugs, try current svn instead. I was also working with Marcin Przylucki for the Season of KDE project regarding mobile filesystems. We started with obex:/ protocol, rewriting it in place of kdebluetooth (outdated) one. It started working good, and it has also write support, now. Also, i implemented a more complex url syntax: obex://transport@device:port/ where transport can be Read More

So, after a long period of nagging by Cyrille and others, I finally got myself a blog. The idea is that I'll occasionally post something about a new Cool Krita Feature, or other stuff I might want to talk about. I think one of the first things I'll write about, once this gets syndicated on Planet KDE, will be the result of our SoC (ooh, suspense!).

The Formula One is more exciting than any since Hill retired. But to top this, RTL decided to field test new commercials during the "break" 10 gaps to go. In case you missed it, you should look at this - especially if you're male :) Read More

Wanna chat directly with other cmake users ? Ask questions ? Exchange your experiences ? Share your cmake scripts with others ? Let the world know how much you like cmake ? How it made you understand your buildsystem again ? How it brought the fun back to hacking ? And how it finally brought world peace ? ;-) Read More

There is an article over at linux.com which predicts that the Portland initiative will fail to reach its goal of "unifying the Linux desktop". Unfortunately the author somehow missed that "unifying the Linux desktop" is not the goal of Portland. Read More

The splash screen contest started yesterday just got more exciting. You now have the chance of winning $100. see contest info

I wanted to write down my experience with how good KDevelop 3 is for KDE4 development since a long time, but never had the time for it. I used it since I started to work on KDE4 porting, and I can say that it is usable with some shortcoming and rough edges. First of all you have to use the upcoming KDevelop 3.4, not the latest stable release. This is an improved version of KDevelop 3.3.x, with big changes in debugging - it is supposed to work better with Qt4, but there are some issues left - and autocompletion. It also has better cmake support, which is important for KDE 4 development. The KDevelop 3.4 can be found at /home/kde/branches/kdevelop/3.4 in the KDE subversion repository. Once you have it you have to generate a KDE 4 project file for it. I use as an example an existing project, namely Quanta which is in kdewebdev module. So check out kdewebdev from trunk and run cmake in the source directory by specifying the -G KDevelop3 option, which will generate a KDevelop3 project file. I use the following cmake command: cmake -DCMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX=path_to_kde4_install_dir -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=debugfull path_to_source_dir -G KDevelop3 Read More

Today Christoph Moseler managed to push me over the edge. Several times people have complained that the KPhotoAlbum splash screen was a combination of ugly, ugly and non relating to KPhotoAlbum. So far I've managed to tell people to go and take a hike, but today I gave up :-) Read More