Fewer bugs
While I have been away in Fermo (a nice Italian city) last week to attend a summer school for my PhD, I was somehow expecting a flood of bug reports against krita 1.6 Beta1, but I got disappointed, or should I say: I got a pleasant surprise, there was very few bug reports, I can see two possibilities, either no one tested it or there was a very few number of visible bugs. Somehow, I tend to think that it is the second solution, mostly because krita's internal architecture hasn't changed much between 1.5 and 1.6 which means that there was less possibilities to add bugs in core functions. On the other, I tend to think that unfortunately, very few people test beta version, and that a lot of issues will be discovered after the release of 1.6.0.

The first beta of KOffice 1.6 is now released, you are all invited to test it, and to report any problem you might find when using it. You can find more information on the KOffice website.

Today is about three new filters in Krita 1.6 : random pick, random noise and wave. In this image, I wanted to show a problem of reception of the TV image, the image is noisy and wavy. The random pick was used just because it gives a cool touch to the image.

Actually, this image make use of two other features, the adjustement layers, which were allready available in 1.5, but which have made amazing progress toward beeing actually usuable.

It seems that most of my work lately on krita has been put into perspective stuff, remember the perspective grid and the perspective duplicate tool. And today, I have finish fixing the interaction with the perspective tool.

When I first wrote it at the beginning of August, I simply imitated the tool from some other graphical application. But the more I though about it, the more I felt something was wrong with it. And I remembered the main use case of that tool, you have a wall, or a stained glass window, or any other kind of plan, which is distorted, and you want it to appears like a rectangle. That's why, now when you select the tool, it offers you to create a parallelogram that you want to correct to a rectangle, as shown on the video bellow:

One of the new feature of krita in 1.6, is the addition of an option to the duplicate tool to correct the perspective. This is useful, for instance, to hide an obstruction on a wall. Or if you want a perfectly good looking obelisk like in the following video (size: 3.0 MB, length: 1:01):

In the video, the bottom of the obelisk has been damaged, I want to fix that, so first I need to create a perspective grid fitting the plan of the front of the obelisk and I create a selection to avoid duplicating outside of the front of the obelisk.

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 [...]

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).

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:

Well, we said CMake rocks, but after the time we have used it, we have generally come to like it. So far it has provided our escape we wanted, and given us more flexibility and ease of build system modification. A generally good experience all round you could say.Well thats all very nice, technically, but [...]