Fading Memories

I've been in Bangalore for a week now, giving an intensive training to ten students from IIIT. Nokia is sponsoring them to do an internship focussed on koffice and fre-office. This is a pretty smart bunch of people, and it's been a pleasure working with them. In fact, every day during the training sessions, they have been able to produce fixes for KOffice already and post patches to the reviewboard.

This is the first Bangalore Bunch (five more students will start working on KOffice/FreOffice related projects later on):

So, let's introduce them:

Standing: Pratik, Kaushal, Sugnan, Pramod, Kaushik, Boudewijn, Ajay, Srihari. Sitting: Gopalkrishnan, Mani Chandrasekar, Rahul.

The invisible guy is Amit -- he took the picture, but he's the sitting guy in the next picture:

The students are really ambitious: let's take a look at their projects.

Ajay Pratab and Pratik Vyas are going to make editing work on the mobile version of KOffice, FreOffice, and then Ajay will continue with collaborative editing, while Pratik is going to add advanced editing features, like ocr from the camera or sms-integration.

Gopalakrishna Bhat, Kaushik Pendurthi and Sugnan Prabnu are going to work with the KPresenter-based module of FreOffice: they will use the accelerometer of the n900 phone to add gesture support to KPresenter (for instance to move between slides), eye-tracking for highlighting parts of a slide, painting on the slide during a slide show and an slide-show companion to manage a slideshow running on a laptop using a phone.

Rahul Das is going to work on new slide transitions for the OpenGL-based slide transition feature for KPresenter that was developed by the ISI students this year and committed just yesterday.

Kaushal is going to work on integrating KOffice with online services like Google Docs, blogging services, Facebook... And maybe others.

Pramod SG and Srihari Prasad will be working on a new ODF->html export filter, initially for KWord and KSpread, as a start for making KOffice suitable for use in webservers, through koconverter.

To Bangalore, where over a dozen students from IIIT are eager to start working on KOffice and the KOffice's Maemo offspring, FreOffice (and its successors) as Nokia interns. These students are really eager, they are already offering patches up for review on reviewboard.kde.org and there is a large number of cool and interesting ideas for projects for them to work on.

They are being taught Qt, and I am going to try to help them get running with the KOffice code. Since they seem to be really smart and committed, I hope I know enough to satisfy them! I've spent some days digging for interesting topics that go beyond "this is what you need to do to compile KOffice", since obviously they already have leaped that hurdle.

My plane will leave tomorrow morning really early, so I'm staying the night at a hotel at Schiphol. Arrival around midnight, then five days of training, workshops, code camp and project discussions. Girish and Roop have offered to take me around a bit on Saturday, so I'll finally be able to see all that architecture and sculpture I have only been able to admire from pictures. I'll be bringing my n900 to take pictures myself...

When I was done with the She Tripped over the Cat, I started on something new. I was dithering between two designs, which I actually made sketches in wax for:

Here you can see the copper wire frame for the actual sculpture, and if you look carefully, two wax models. One is for a woman who is bent over backwards, like the Egyptian goddess Nut, but belly-up. And a couple of cats playing on her belly. The other was a young man sitting on the ground with his pregnant wife sitting in his lap. Since I'd already done cats last time, I was going for the second option.

And then it started getting interesting, at least for me. When working on it, I started feeling that the whole sitting-in-the-lap idea was a bit static, and also a bit the end of the movement. So my next step was to try having her stand between his legs, and him keeping his cheek to her belly, perhaps listening to their child. Very sweet and something Annelies and my daughters favoured very much, but I still wasn't happy. It was a beautiful pose, but still quite static.

So then I decided to make her walk to him, and have him stretch out his arms to her. I think the pose works very well, it's not static. I can't show it here, where various planets would pick it up. The full set is on Flickr. Do not click if you don't want to see quite explictly male nudity or even more explictly female pregnant nudity. I think they look innocent, others may disagree.

Technically, I feel I have made progress again. The heads are still in comic-book proportions instead of fully realistic (though not as big as some of the pictures show it: I need to learn compensate for the macro effect), but that's either something that fits the way I work now, or it's something it fits the work, or it's just something I'll improve on next time. I'm not done: I still need to work on hands and feet, and maybe tweek some positions. And there's some work to be done on her mouth.

Six students are going to work on KOffice this summer: Marc Pegon is going to create an awesome transformation tool for Krita. Adam Celarek is going to make selecting colors a snap. Pentalis is going to add a brush engine and impasto feature to Krita. Dmitry is going to make Krita multi-threaded (and his selection means the Krita project might very well have enough funds to help create a good manual and have it edited!). Cyril is going to build a mind-mapping application based on the KOffice libraries, validating our architecture and creating features useful for the existing apps all along, and finally, Benjamin is going make KPresenter swing by adding animations and improving the animation framework!

Yay for the students, yay for the mentors, yay for Google and especially yay for the KDE gsoc administrators, who have done and are doing an awesome job!

I've used the word at least twice, but I'm going to use it again: awesome!

Since my last post I have had three more sculpture lessons. I felt I couldn't really improve the previous attempt, so I started something new.

It began with a little sketch in wax which has long since been incorporated into the main project -- I was very unsure about the exact position of all the limbs, wanting to make something with a delicate balance and a bit of action in it. The lion's tail sort of followed from the whole attitude.

I think I did make some progress, and I call this toute ensemble "she tripped over the cat". The weird foot is an accident of using the macro function of my camera: in reality it's very dainty and well-formed.

(Complete set on flickr -- as with all sculpture, there's nudity. Clothes are boring to do.)

Oh, and yes, it is in balance like this: no strings attached.

Not having two mortgages, not coming home from work at 20:30 -- circumstances conspired together to make it finally possible, after a hiatus of more than twenty years, to do sculpture again. I can't do anything 3D with a computer, but I'm quite decent with my fingers. And I love working with wax above all other stuff: I'm a lumper, not a splitter or a cutter.

We had three sessions working with clay from a live model (Irina, actually, who models a lot for different art courses), and by now three sessions working on my own idea, with wax. Many people prefer clay, but I like wax because you can make thinner, more detailed things with it and because it's not as soft and pliant. Even so, I regularly hold my work under the cold tap to make the wax harder.

This kind of sculpture starts with soldering together a frame of copper wire, bending it into a position and then piling on the flesh^Wwax. Small errors have big consequences: I put the bend for the shoulders too high, which meant that from the start it looked like the subject was lifting something fairly heavy.

Given that the idea of sculpture, at least for me, is piling on flesh, the subject turned into a woman fairly quickly, which made it easy to decide on what she would lift: either a tiger cub, or a child. And then I suddenly had a chunk of wax in my fingers that made a very good baby belly, so I went with the trite and the cliché: mother and child.

the other people in the class liked it a lot, but were divided on what I had made: someone suggested a mother laying down her child during a famine, another thought it was a grandmother with her grandchild (no doubt because I have been having fun with the drooping plum-like breasts), another thought of Moses and the Egyptian princess, yet another of baptism. Poly-interpretability rules!

For me the weird thing is that this work is a clear and straight continuation of what I was doing twenty years ago: the touch is the same, the way I distorted the woman's anatomy is the same. The size is a bit bigger. And strangely enough, without any practice, I still think I've become a bit surer in my touch and I am also more conscious of the sculpture in the round, as it were, so I've put a set of pictures from all sides on flickr (Deviant art has trouble uploading a dozen pictures in one go).

Our teacher is Annelies van der Drift. If you can read Dutch: more information about the classes can be found here. There is a great set of students in this group: some of them are very advanced, extremely good, others are just beginning -- and one is picking up old threads.

Mostly my captcha system keeps spam away -- at the cost of the occasional real comment. However, I just checked an old entry and found I had contracted the vile disease again. For now, comments are closed and I've removed all of them until I've had a chance to clean up.

One of the dangers of having a real interaction designer look at your application is that they are apt to suggest that some special widget might make your app much nicer, much more efficient, much more usable. And they are right, of course. Which sucks because writing a custom widget that respects the application style is not fun, at least not in Qt, but I haven't seen any toolkit that makes it fun.

And a custom widget in this context is not a form with two or three existing widgets in a layout and some signals to connect them.

So let's look at the widget Peter suggested we use instead of KDE's or Qt's spinboxes and sliders. The needs are clear: we need a numerical input widget that shows visually what part of the total is enabled. Mouse wheel, tablet tilt and drag need to decrease or increase the value, clicking somewhere in the widget needs to set the value to that level. It should show the value as numbers inside the widget. Spinbox arrows and behaviour would be nice. It should have double and int support. And finally, it should have an option for exponential or segmented behaviour (1 - 10: stepsize 1, 10-100, stepsize 10, 100-100 stepsize 100).

So, what we are creating is a sort of legitimate bastard child of a progress bar, a spinbox and a slider, all in one area. Something that looks a bit like this, but less like a progressbar:

Well... Sven has spent half a day on this, I've spent a day on it... I guess this is not our forte. There doesn't seem to be much documentation on the topic of creating widgets from scratch. I've also been looking for exising Qt implementations, but haven't found anything. So... If there is anyone who knows where I can find a widget like this, or who would like to help Krita by implementing it, please, please, please tell me!

Don't worry -- tomorrow I'll do a Last Week in Krita for krita.org, but it's so long since I last blogged about Krita personally, and besides, I need to think-think before writing down dot story and krita.org story about the Krita sprint. (Short version: it's a blast -- not everyone could come, but we have seven great people and me in one room and working together and having fun and being productive.)

So... Cyrille has already let the cat out of the bag: Peter Sikking joined us this sprint to help us define a clear vision -- and stayed on afterwards to help us with our various and manifold usability and interaction problems. I think most people in the libre graphics world will know Peter from his work on the Gimp and OpenPrinting.

Well, our vision session wasn't characterized by any real friction, but it still took many hours. In the end we arrived at a real and coherent vision. Cyrille already blogged it, but it's still worthwhile to post it again: (I also put it up on krita.org.)

Krita is a KDE program for sketching and painting, offering an end–to–end solution for creating digital painting files from scratch by masters.

Fields of painting that Krita explicitly supports are concept art, creation of comics and textures for rendering.

Modeled on existing real-world painting materials and workflows, Krita supports creative working by getting out of the way and with snappy response.

Now this is a really short statement, and as any short statement it deserves some careful parsing. Let's go through it, because it shows what the Krita team -- seven of them were present in Deventer -- has decided they want to create.

Krita is a KDE program. That means we're a program, not just an experiment, and it most importantly means we're part of the KDE Software Collection, and that we are proud of it. It's also important for what it doesn't say: it doesn't say KOffice. Now Krita is very clearly built upon KOffice technology, which sometimes gives us a lot of advantages, and at other times is, frankly, a bit of a burden. Our use of KOffice technology is not going to change for now. But we are trying to be a KDE program for sketching and painting, not an office program for working with raster images. I feel it's good to have that clear and in the open: it is something we have been struggling with for years in our minds.

"Sketching and painting": these are different but very related things. Sketching is freeform, exploration-oriented, not process-oriented. Painting is directed, goal-oriented, process-heavy. But there is enough overlap that it's important to support both, otherwise, we wouldn't be end-to-end. "End-to-end": an artist opens Krita, starts working on his ideas, and finishes their creation. And their creation is a file: not a printout. Other apps are better in reproducing the work on paper. Not our job, in other words. And "by masters" -- that means that Krita is not going to hold your hand until you've learned enough to graduate to another application. We feel that if we focused on beginners and intermediate users, we would punish users who learn to use Krita really well.

Note also that there's a full-stop after this sentence: so we don't intend to support photo collage, photo manipulation, graphical production work (make 300 pictures glossy, for instance), icons, animated smiley gifs, web mockups.

Then we are making a bit more explicit what areas we are interested in, and that is a commitment: maybe not immediately, but throughout the development of Krita, we want to explicitly support artists working on concept art, cartoons and textures. That means that if we need special features tailored to those endeavors, we will want to include them and make them as good as we can, or preferably better.

Finally, we're making a promise: we want to make working with Krita a good experience: if you are a trained artist, Krita will not alienate you. If you want to work without all this computer-folderol around your painting process, we want to make that possible. We're taking an artist's process as our guideline. And we want to achieve a good performance -- on master-level hardware, of course.

There are, after all, some physics laws, and you're not going to get a 20,000 x 5,000 multilayer image in a netbook. We are still discussing the minimum screensize, since I have a 1024x768 tablet pc that I cannot replace quite yet...

Now this is my personal explanation of the vision statement: read also Cyrille's blog.

Oh, and it seems that Canada has won the hockey think in Vancouver -- which makes our Canadian Krita hacker Vera very happy!

And Dmitry made a photo of me that I recognize myself in:

Hm... Guess I should have used Gimp to crop it :-)

Oh -- and might I bring the following to your attention:

Last weekend, Casper Boemann and Boudewijn Rempt visited Thorsten Zachmann, the KPresenter maintainer for some dedicated and focussed work on KPresenter. Not so much to discuss issues and set out future paths, but to do some high-bandwidth design and development, on bugs, but also in particular on one big missing feature in KPresenter: animations.

KPresenter, being a KOffice application, is a dedicated ODF application. ODF defines that animations are to be saved in the SMIL format (Synchronized Multimedia Integration Language). And while there was already some code that implemented animations, loading and saving was not implemented at all.

Casper and Thorsten got the basic design and implementation were done this weekend, for loading, saving and animating. Of course, there are tons of animations in other presentation applications, like Impress, Keynote or Powerpoint, and we've only scratched the surface. Implementing presentations would be a very rewarding and fun pursuit for a beginning hacker -- or even a Google Summer of Code Project.

There were other issues, such as dealing with a long-standing OpenOffice bug (that got fixed for OpenOffice 3.2), where you'd see the contents of the master page placeholders on every slide. Boudewijn and Thorsten came up with a clever workaround for that. We investigated arrows on line-ends -- unfortunately, that needs more work, as well as a bug in the handling of date and time variables. All in a days work, of course, but this was special, since we could be together and bounce ideas off each other at a really fast rate.

Thanks go out to the KDE e.V. for sponsoring our travel and to Margot and Thorsten for their hospitality!