Fading Memories

About two years ago, Adrian Page added OpenGL support to Krita. The idea was that soon we would be able to use GLSL shader programs to modify the display of, for instance HDR images. Dynamically setting the exposure. Or for painterly images, bumpmap the canvas to provide the illusion of lighting and depth. Well... This week he did it: on both NVidia and ATI cards, Krita can execute GLSL shaders in the display stack. If you have a supported card and move the exposure slider, the exposure changes while sliding:

At the same time, Casper Boemann has completed two items from our 2.0 todo list, namely printing using the image resolution and redesigning the scale image dialog to take resolution into account:

As for me... I've been working really hard on stuff that I cannot ksnapshot yet. I've added effect masks to krita: layer masks associated with filters or another operation, like transforms. These masks can be stacked, so you can non-destructively blur, sharpen, rotate, and hide pixels in your layer. I've added a new layer type, too, the Clone Layer that clones another layer. Either the original pixels or the pixels as effected by the original layer's effect masks. You can move the clone layer, apply other effect masks and every time you change the original layer's pixels, the clone layer will follow. But all I've done is just in the krita core; I need to add the user interface to be able to show off.

Oh, by the way, Marijn Kruisselbrink is using Qt 4.2's addApplicationFont method to load the musical notation font for his music notation google summer of code shape plugin. He's also working on improving the engraving. There are two tools now to edit the music: one for editing the parts, and one for editing the notes. What's really needed at the moment is line ends and frame continuations, but no doubt that'll be implemented. I mean... The Summer of Code hasn't started yet, officially, has it? Plenty of time to do implement this little thing.

Last weekend we implemented the basic infrastructure for loading ODF into KOffice 2.0. And this week, Jan Hambrecht (who now has a blog that's in clee's queue for adding to the planet) has been working steadily on making shapes load from ODF. I mean, like:

SVN commit 665978 by jaham: loading of ellipse shape
SVN commit 665983 by jaham: loading of the circle radius attribute
SVN commit 666027 by jaham: implemented loading of line, polyline and polygon from odf
SVN commit 666042 by jaham: move svgpathparser into flake so i can use it there to load pathes from odf
SVN commit 666096 by jaham: implemneted loading path data using the KoSvgPathParser
SVN commit 666382 by jaham: loading of enhanced path shapes from odf

And so on, and so on. Very soon my unittests will actually not fail anymore!

So here I am... For the first time of my life in Berlin. First impressions are good! I arrived last night for the KOffice OpenDocument Hack Weekend. A little early, but that way my train fare was cut in half. I was collected at the railway station by dipesh (Sebastian Sauer) who is much younger than I had imagined. We went to the Motel One and had dinner afterwards in a small restaurant near the hotel.

Really nice place, Good food, nice people and incredibly cheap -- twenty euros for dinner for two, including drinks. On the other hand, smoking in restaurants still abounds. I was so happy in Canada where smoking in restaurants is already banned. Imagine... For the first time in a decade I could go out to a bar, enjoy the life music, the beer and the company and not come home spitting my lungs out coughing.

Since Motel One is a bit of weird place and very, very busy, I chose to forego breakfast at the hotel and wandered into the same street, the Oranienstrasse, as yesterday night's restaurant to find a bäckerei. Lucky me... A lovely croissant, good coffee and a huge glass of fresh orange juice for about two euro's. I bet the hotel couldn't have competed.

This morning I'm going to meet dipesh again and see a bit of Berlin. Then, in the afternoon, we'll meet up with the rest of the KOffice crew, register once again at the Motel One, have dinner and start hacking. I hear that David Faure's OpenDocument introductory presentation is already two dozen slides...

Well, yesterday we wrapped up the 2007 Libre Graphics Meeting. As you've no doubt gathered, it's been a blast. I really feel I've got inspiration and energy for another year of hacking from this meeting. The organizations has been excellent, the venue outstanding, the participation great (250 attendants!) -- thanks Louis!

For Krita, this will mean renewed energy, increased development, better awareness of the requirements of users, and more confidence in ourselves. For the free graphics world as a whole it's been, I think, the same. After Louis' final speech people kept saying how great it was. There will definitely be another LGM!

Where? We don't know yet. Amsterdam has been requested (but I am not organizing it! I want to get Krita 2.0 out before LGM 2008.), as has Poland. Somewhere in Europe seems likely. There has been a great attendance from the Americas, but I think Europeans were still in a majority. Besides, it's Europe's turn again.

Last night we would have gone out with ace panorama photographer Yuval Levy and Pablo D'Angelo, but I was too tired to get the thing decently fixed. And when I woke up (I fell asleep on my hotel bed almost as soon as I'd got there after the closing ceremony) -- and on waking up I just went with the flow. I was even too tired to realize that I had a) a telephone on my room and b) Yuval's business card with his telephone number. I need to get used to this business card thing!

Instead we sort of joined Keith Packard (Intel jumped into the breach when sponsorship failed and sponsored the LGM, making it possible), Liam Quin and a crowd of other LGM attendees. We went to "Le Taj" (if I remember correctly -- I was really tired), a high quality Indian restaurant. Those chickpeas -- to die for! Intel paid the tab -- thanks! -- and we had a great and instructive evening. It may seem silly, fifteen geeks at a table, but it was, I feel, really useful. Lots of knowledge gets spread, lots of insight is gained by lesser geeks like me.

On Sunday, Pablo D'Angelo, lead developer and maintainer of Hugin presented his application to the LGM crowd. Cool stuff in itself, but the really cool thing was this:

Pablo proposes to develop a database that would contain characteristics for lenses like distortion and vignetting. Every lens is subject to those problems, and they are specific for specific types of lens. There's even a commercial company that sells a database with this information for lots of money, and there used to be a free database, too, but that was taken proprietary.

Together with that database would come a small library that applications like Digikam, Gimp or Krita could use to fix distortion, vignetting and chromatic aberration -- based on the lens used for the input image. Applications could do that at the import stage, or, in the case of Krita, as an adjustment layer or effect mask.

Hugin, because it uses large numbers of shots and analyzes them, can provide the necessary information. There would then be a web app for photographers to upload the data, which could get checked and coordinated by volunteers.

Pablo is going to get this jumpstarted real soon now by getting the CREATE community involved. And as soon as we've got a prototype, Krita will add support. This is exciting stuff!

On Friday night there was a Grand Gala Dinner for all attendants. I got introduced to someone who was really, really complimentary about Krita, telling us that he thought our colour handling was much, much more logical and useful than even Photoshop's color handling. Like, wow! Lots more compliments ensued :-)

On Saturday, Cyrille and I gave our Krita talk (download the slides in ODF format). Right afterwards Cyrille presented his talk on OpenRaster.

The Krita talk went really, really well. I was almost mobbed by people wanting to talk to me after the presentation and all through the afternoon people came up to me to tell me they really liked our style of presentation, that they thought it was one of the best presentations they'd been at. And, did I have a business card for them? I should have asked the KDE promo team for a set -- and I'll be sure to do that when I get home.

During the talk someone asked me whether I intended to make Krita compete with Corel Painter. Dramatic silence... Then I said "Yes!" To which he said "Good!". It turns out his wife illustrates children's books with Corel Painter. She uses an older version -- 5.5, if I remember correctly, because newer versions are too slow for here 600dpi drawings. Seems like we've got a new hard requirement for Krita! And then someone else jogged my sleeve and told me he'd been a Corel Painter developer a few years ago -- and if I had any questions, I should be sure mail him about it.

The OpenRaster talk was great. It provided the catalyst for a great round-table discussion with all the experts present. From people who could provide input on the xml style we use to people who are really hot on color and color requirements. There are a couple of people I really. I feel outnumbered a bit compared to the large Scribus, Inkscape and Gimp teams, so Bart, Casper, Sven, Adrian, Emanuele and Jan really should have come! And then Clarence Dang for Kolourpaint, Gilles Caullier for Digikam (so he could have fight^Wdiscussion with Hubert Figueire on the best way to (ab)use dcraw) and especially Zack Rusin for general graphic goodness! I really suspect that this conference will rival and outclass siggraph in a few years, the level of energy, commitment and just plain expert knowledge is really great.

One thing I especiallylike about the atmosphere of this conference is the open-mindedness of the people around, users and developers. I'm loving meeting the Gimp people, the inkscape people, the scribus people. I've had a great talk with Peter Sikking, the Gimp usability guru. I've been going out for dinner & a beer with a group of panorama enthusiasts -- one of them took not only a panorama shoot of the restaurant table, but also of the beer glasses in the bar! (Yummy beer and interesting beer, and live music.)

Of course, there are also moments that tie in tightly with Aaron's blog. Jakub Steiner gave a presentation about photo management and editing with F-Spot and GIMP. Quite interesting to see him work with those applications, but his explanation at the end that free software was simply not ready for a 16-bit workflow so we had to make do with the 8-bit limitations of Gimp, Ufraw and F-Spot was a bit, well, parochial-minded. After all, with Digikam and Krita, you can go 16 bit from your original RAW image to the finished artwork without any trouble. Pity, but we'll overcome that.

A couple of years ago, someone, I think it was Alan Horkan, pointed me at the Inkscape project as an example of a project that just functioned very well. I subscribed to their mailing lists and started watching them to see what made their project tick.

Today Bryce Harrington gave a talk on Inkscape the App and Inkscape the Project. The app is way cool, of course, although I'm rooting for Jan Hambrechts and Karbon. The parts of Bryce's talk on project organization really resonated with me. The things I came up with myself that I consider important for Krita and the things I picked up from watching their project were made explicit:

• Freedom to develop whatever
• Liberal feature inclusion process
• Low barrier of entry for newbies
• Lots of developers involved
• High bus count

Krita must be fun to work on: that's really important. Users don't count as much as contributors. As soon as a user contributes -- by creating patches, documents, suggestions, testing betas -- they become contributors.

To seduce people to become contributors there must be a place for them to scratch their itch. That's why Krita, despite its core goal of becoming an application for creating original art, will always have a lot of extra features -- things that were fun to create and useful to our users.

Right, now Peter Linnell starting to talk about Scribus.

At the LGM, we've just had Peter Sikking and Kamila Giedrojć talk about Gimp usability -- really energizing and interesting. Because, yes while, there is overlap between Gimp and Krita, it's also clear that both projects have quite different core goals. To see those core goals stated clearly is very helpful. And although there is a clear difference, some of the problems facing the Gimp are very familiar in Krita. We had a good laugh yesterday comparing the user demands for mdi/sdi/apple-like interfaces for Krita and Gimp: but there are others, like organizing the user interface for use of dynamic effects or presenting often-used colors for a particular document to the user. I want to hack now!

We've also -- briefly -- met Louis Suarez-Potts. In some respects, Louis, who represents both OpenDocument and OpenOffice, is thinking along the same lines as I do: extending OpenDocument beyond pure, plain and traditional office documents into the creative realm. Music, raster images and video are interesting areas. Of course, innovation and cast-in-stone standards are hard to combine. But flexible standards that urge developers to use those standards as a basis to create innovations on top off are quite possible.

He invited me to an OpenDocument do in September. Not sure whether I'll be able to go, but we'll see... It should be interesting.

Our lunch was nice -- although I fear that the idea that you need spiced corn-syrup for grilling meat is not really an original part of Vietnamese cuisine -- but tonights dinner is better. And a lot simpler. I need to work on our presentation tonight so I tried to find a supermarket to buy some food I could take to my room.

The first supermarket I found was the Couche-Tard. The only thing they sell that I don't consider actively evil is bottled water... But a bit further on was the Marche du Village where they have real food. Bread, sausage, cheese and beer. And the beer is unbelievably good: La Barberie Rousse Bitter. Even from a plastic cup, as good or better than the St. Peters beer I can no longer get in the Netherlands. And not too strong, so i can still work on the Krita LGM 2007 presentation.

Cyrille and me arrived at the LGM yesterday. We met Nicholas Spalinger on the shuttle bus to the student residences and teamed up to find dinner. Montreal does give a the kind of culture shock I recognize from Jennifer Meyer's blog, only the other way around. Simply crossing the streets when there are traffic lights for cars but not pedestrians is already quite complicated. Today in the Vietnamese restaurant the waitress was nice enough to allow me the use of her calculator to find out how much we needed to add to the bill for service. And I'm in terminal linguistic confusion, in the francophone part of Canada. Plus, I couldn't figure out how to operate the water tap in the student hotel.

But that's all very well and educating. The real deal is meeting all those people from graphics projects who are, in some cases, just irc nicks for me. Cyrille and I lunched with Dave Crossland and Nicholas and had an animated discussion about free fonts and the toolset needed for that. I have always loved fonts -- even created a few, about a decade ago, with Corel Draw. And a good long talk with Michael Schumacher from the Gimp project at breakfast -- nice to compare notes on user requests for interface changes :-).

I've just met up with Cyrille Berger at Schiphol Airport. We're going to Montreal for the Libre Graphics Meeting 2007, the successor to Gimpcon.

Over the past few months I've grown really impressed with the way Louis Dujardin and his team have organized the meeting. A beautifully printed insert for an art magazine in Montreal has been produced, among other things.

I'm really looking forward to this meeting. We're going to talk serious OpenRaster with Pippin and other people, showcase Krita 1.x and Krita trunk -- which is progressing very nice nicely thanks to Adrian Page and Emanuele Tamponi and the rest of the team. There will be something to showcase!