Since september I work with Arnd to implement new main features on digiKam for KDE3.

Coming up with 0.9.3 beta3 release, new advanced tools on album view status bar have been added to filter album contents. New filters are listed below:
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The digiKam releases 0.9.3-beta3 and its English documentation. The tarballs can preferably be downloaded from SourceForge.New Features

1. The main window has yet another live filter: The new string search filters the current view (album/collection, date, tags, search) on substrings within file name, caption, and tags. This feature is really convenient and completes the file type filter and rating filter introduced in previous 0.9.3-betas.
2. Several usability improvements in the Light Table
3. A green tint has been added to the b&w conversion plugin

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Once upon a time was a Krita hacker trying to draw a futuristic car, but who not only end up with a car looking like a prototype of the early 60s of the previous century, but with really flat colors.

Swarming noise

Guided by the Force, the Krita hacker, weaving as only weapon, his keyboard, against the hordes of evil Bugs, started his quest by writing the skeleton of his filter, and to ensure a swift victory, he decided to test that the basic of his filter was working using the most simple noise generator, the Holy function "rand()".

I noted that thanks to clee I have been added to planet.kde.org now as well. This requires just another "Hello to the planet" message to introduce me briefly.I am one of the developers of Digikam for about two years now (it's really so long already? Can't believe. Time is running.). Main fields of my work have been e.g. multithreaded image loading and recently the database upgrade we are currently busy with for our KDE4 version.
Yes, not much is more sweet than a mutex and a cond var.In daily life I am a medical student at the university of Essen, Germany, in the 4th year now, learning for exams and working on my MD thesis in physiological chemistry. No, no computer science, physics or mathematics background here ;-)

I noted that thanks to clee I have been added to planet.kde.org now as well. This requires just another "Hello to the planet" message to introduce me briefly.I am one of the developers of Digikam for about two years now (it's really so long already? Can't believe. Time is running.). Main fields of my work have been e.g. multithreaded image loading and recently the database upgrade we are currently busy with for our KDE4 version.
Yes, not much is more sweet than a mutex and a cond var.In daily life I am a medical student at the university of Essen, Germany, in the 4th year now, learning for exams and working on my MD thesis in physiological chemistry. No, no computer science, physics or mathematics background here ;-)

The digiKam team is proud to release 0.9.3-beta2. The tarball can also be downloaded from SourceForge.This is not only a bug fix but, due to the development in the KDE4 branch, a few nice new features have been backported to this KDE3 release.New FeaturesTwo quick filters have been added to the status bar of the main window:

• A mime-type selector to filter for one of JPEG, PNG, TIFF, RAW, movies or audio files
• A rating filter to select rated images

A new navigation feature: whenever a thumbnail is selected in the main window you can immediately jump (Go To) to any other of the views where this image is a member of.

The digiKam team is proud to release 0.9.3-beta2. The tarball can also be downloaded from SourceForge.This is not only a bug fix but, due to the development in the KDE4 branch, a few nice new features have been backported to this KDE3 release.New FeaturesTwo quick filters have been added to the status bar of the main window:

• A mime-type selector to filter for one of JPEG, PNG, TIFF, RAW, movies or audio files
• A rating filter to select rated images

A new navigation feature: whenever a thumbnail is selected in the main window you can immediately jump (Go To) to any other of the views where this image is a member of.

I finally decided myself to release the second release of Krita-Plugins for the 1.6 serie.

It has been a long time since previous release,but somehow I did persuade myself that I made a release in July including the most important new filters. So when I prepared the source tarball for this release, two monthes ago, I told my self that I could take the time to make packages for it. And not only, I realized today that not only I didn't make a release in July, but that I was only able to create two packages. Anyway I guess it's a good start.

So this new release brings the Binarize, Dodge / Burn, Expand, Fast Blur, Grayscalizer and Pyramidal Sharpening filters to Krita.

I promised to blog a bit more about some more technical aspects of current digikam development. Today: Our database backend.With version 0.7 a few years ago, digikam decided that it was time to use a real database. This meant SQLite2 at the time. For 0.8 and 0.9 we have been using SQLite3 which is a very good choice for local use, (complete unicode support, no configuration for users, in-process, fast) but has its weaknesses for those users who want to access a database from different computers (does not work over NFS).All the time we were strongly bound to SQLite by using the native C/C++ API directly. Coming from that situation (and not abstracting different DBs already like Amarok) it was a clear and easy choice with minimal work to base the database backend on Qt SQL.

I promised to blog a bit more about some more technical aspects of current digikam development. Today: Our database backend.With version 0.7 a few years ago, digikam decided that it was time to use a real database. This meant SQLite2 at the time. For 0.8 and 0.9 we have been using SQLite3 which is a very good choice for local use, (complete unicode support, no configuration for users, in-process, fast) but has its weaknesses for those users who want to access a database from different computers (does not work over NFS).All the time we were strongly bound to SQLite by using the native C/C++ API directly. Coming from that situation (and not abstracting different DBs already like Amarok) it was a clear and easy choice with minimal work to base the database backend on Qt SQL.