It has been quiet a while since I have written about a new feature in krita, while in reality a lot of new features have been added and the next version will contain a lot of improvements, but I didn't took the time to speak about it. And now KOffice 1.6, and therefor Krita 1.6, has started their feature freeze period.

And as I have found in the past, that blogging was a very interesting and powerful tool for debugging. How so ? It actually force you to do a lot of test of your feature, to find the best screen shot, the best description on how it works, on how the user might use that feature.

It’s a common misconception that a font is a bunch of characters. That’s not so. Fonts (or, as Adobe likes to call them, font programs) contain glyphs. Glyphs are the shapes which are painted to screen or on paper. Characters are more abstract and convey some meaning, eg. the latin character ‘A’ or the diigit [...]

Hello, our new engine, ccHost, now accepts SVG files thanks to the great work by Roan! Everyone should +10 thank him! Please see the great functioning test site: http://www.openclipart.org/cchost So, please help us best by uploading test SVG files to this installation. We hope to move to it very shortly (hopefully within the week). There are still [...]

As posted on Open-Collab.org and elsewhere...
The Amarok Live team is searching willing artists for the artwork of version 1.4 of their famous Amarok Live CD. Amarok Live is a live cd system based upon PCLinuxOS, shipping latest major version of Amarok bundled with free music and optimized for ultimate rediscovering of music. It is meant for everyone who's not able to install a system which is supported by Amarok and therefore this live cd is a essential medium for convincing people to use Amarok and one of the supported operating systems, such as Linux. Latest version 1.4 is still missing artwork though, which is the only reason for release delay. So if you want to support the Amarok Live team and speed up release of Amarok Live 1.4, have a look at the Amarok Wiki. There you can find a list of images missing and what to take care of when doing artwork for Amarok Live. Submissions are allowed until September 1st. If you have skills in raster or vector drawing, read further information in the Amarok Wiki 

While most of our developers are focusing on the upcoming 2.0 version of KOffice, working hard to resolve all the issues that currently prevent the wide spread use of their KOffice applications. Some of us believed that their was still a lot of things that could be done with the 1.x series and KDE3. That why we decided to have development happening in two branches. And today, two months before its final release, the KOffice team is happy to release a technical preview of KOffice 1.6.

So this release includes mostly new features in kexi, krita, kformula, kchart and kspread. KFormula, thanks to google summer of code, get supports of OpenDocument and MathML, and KSpread thanks to Isaac Clerencia include supports for kross (our scripting framework).

Just after having released the first digiKam version 0.8.0 during august 2005, I have started to work on 0.9.0 features. The main goal of this release has been to support 16 bits color depth images including RAW pictures.At this date, Renchi Raju (the digiKam project former) has left the team and is going to work with PalmOs in California... But before leaving the digiKam project, he has provided a great first implementation of a new internal digiKam API named DImg to support 16 bits color depth images...Until now, I have worked hard to improve this API and I've been assisted by Marcel. We have created a very well documented API similar to QImage, but on top of it with an implementation for loading and saving files featuring
a progress bar and full control over the loading process (loading thread).

Today, I finished a new feature for krita, a perspective grid. If you wonder what it is, you can either skip the text and look at the screenshot, or read it: it's a grid for which all "parallel" lines intersect on a vanishing point. It's a very important feature when you are drawing buildings, because if you want to have a realistic picture, you have to be able to correctly draw parallel lines.

First, you need to use a special tool, to create your grid:

This is my fourth flash screen movie to promote again the future digiKam 0.9.0 with the new black and white converter.- See the digiKam search tool in action. Now digiKam indexes the metadata from RAW, JPEG, PNG, and TIFF files (where 0.8.x indexed only JPEG files). This information will be used to perform items searching on albums collection.- See how a RAW color picture is imported into the editor in 16 bits color depth.- See how the black & white converter is used to change color tonality and to apply black & white effects. Each set of filters and tonality is independent and shows a thumbnail preview on the right sidebar. Finally, a curve can be edited to set the exposure.

This is my third flash screen movie to promote again the future digiKam 0.9.0 about the new image editor tool supporting 16 bits color depth.- Shows how digiKam includes a new fast mode to show pictures preview without loading the whole image.- See as you can import a Canon RAW file in 16 bits color depth using a color profile from BibblePro .- Show how all the image editor plugins support 16 bits color depth. The new Noise Reduction tool will be used to reduce CCD noise due to long exposures.- See how all image editor plugins use sidebar (again), and provide new tools to change the zoom factor and preview rendering mode.

This is my second flash screen movie to promote again the future digiKam 0.9.0 about the camera interface improvements.- The sidebar is used everywhere now. This provides a homogeneous interface and optimized space.- You see new options to set IPTC tags during download, especially about photographer information and internal date.- The camera interface is a non-modal dialog. You can minimize it during a long download.- See how in the main interface JPEG files can be tagged using IPTC metadata to store Comments, Date, Ratings and Tags at the same time as digiKam database. In the future, PNG and TIFF will can be tagged like this as well.