Fading Memories

On two laptops, prior to running the unittests again. Last time I tried them -- four hours ago -- I had zero failures. And yesterday, Krita's bug count in bugzilla had dropped below 40; today it's 42 again. And that includes a couple of nasty crashers, where we might have a choice between leak and crash, or worse: between disabling a feature and crashing. And there are some important issues among the non-crashers, too, issues that really should be solved.

But we've been fixing bugs like mad, mostly me and Sven Langkamp, since Lukas is working on his thesis (which is about brush engines for Krita, yay!) and Cyrille is finishing up his phd. There are a couple of bus that we really need Cyrille for, even.

The bug fixing has been very rewarding, even though our ace beta testers, Enkithan, M4v, Gaizka and Bugsbane have been doing their darnest to keep the bug count at over 42. And there's more cool stuff: Kubuntiac (on the forum, who is Bugsbane in bugzilla) has been working on Krita's website, and when we've migrated the content from the old website over, we're ready to flick the switch and krita will have it's own website, with lots of content, links to techbase and to userbase.

(Note: we have disabled the following plugins for 2.1: glsl filters, painting with the wave filter, kross-based scripting, together cooperative painting, panorama stitching, the chinese paintbrush (not sumi-e, that's in), an experimental brush engine, the graphicsmagick import/export plugin (photoshop, gimp, gif etc.) if you have GraphicsMagick newer than 1.2 and the perspective transformation tool.)

And have you all seen Enkithan's wonderful Dungeon girl illustration, all done in Krita? That's why I'm spending twenty leisure hours a week on Krita!

Tomorrow Cyrille will tag the first release candidate of KOffice 2.1...

---

And another contributor: Edward Apap, better known on irc as Antiquark, has created a new dialog for krita that makes it possible in an easy way to extend the canvas size. This is a patch that we had in readiness for some time already, but with the imminent release of 2.0, we can add stuff to trunk again!

Welcome to the Krita team, Antiquark!

---

Yesterday, I took a day off from serious things like redesigning the library structure of KOffice, working on the Krita part of the redesigned KOffice website, trying to optimize the hell out of freehand painting and several other things, like being too sick to actually think straight for two consecutive moments and so not making much progress with any of these things.

I took a holiday, in short, a chance to add a nice little feature to Krita: image backgrounds.

An image background is a pattern that is tiled beneath the root layer, so that if there is anything transparent in your image, the pattern is seen below. Most useful to have a nice background, perhaps paper-like, when sketching.

This morning it was done:

Now this was just a little thing to play with, but there are several fun things about it: for one thing, I have resurrected a class that Patrick Julien wrote in 2002 and was originally responsible for painting the checker pattern. We've got different code for that now, that makes it even clearer that the checks aren't part of your image, but this class is very well suited to painting a tiled background.

Another thing is that MyPaint has a similar feature, so ideally we'd like to be able to interchange, through OpenRaster, images made in Krita and in MyPaint. We'll need to extend OpenRaster for that, though, since MyPaint saves the background as a layer as big as your image filled with the tiles, and Krita (will) save(s) the background as a property of the image.

And there is a small list of TODO's caused by this little feature, todo's that are actually almost all simple Junior Jobs:

• enable Add, Remove, Reset buttons for background pattern management.
• label the background patterns somehow, allow tagging
• add solid-color background patterns and use a categorized view for them
• add a custom-color background pattern
• add lots of nice patterns
• integrate with custom image widget (the one you see on startup)
• integrate with image properties dialog
• add to loading/saving of KisImage in .kra and .ora
• set pattern on double click
• allow non 64x64 pattern tiles

---

For the Hyves Desktop application we are building at work, we really want some sort of automated crash reporting. Not that our code crashes a lot, it's a fairly simple application and mostly done in Javascript inside webkit, but still. We've already clocked up about 50.000 users, and we're not even out of beta.

There seems to be basically one choice in the open software world for crash reporting: the combination of Breakpad for integration with your desktop application and Socorro to handle the crash dumps on the developer side. As used by Last.fm, Google Chrome and Firefox.

This combo has a big advantage: they work with a dump format that's independent of the presence of debug symbols on the client computer, so work fine with release builds. And because you get dumps for all crashes, you can quickly get insight as a develop in which parts of your application get hit most: similar dumps are really easy to recognize. I would really like to have this in KOffice, too... But of course, the server-side infrastructure is going to be pretty demanding.

The problem with this solution is the complete lack of releases (just use svn trunk...), a relative lack of documentation, and a big slew of dependencies for the web application. And since I hadn't looked at apache since the version 1.x days, I'm a bit out of my depth installing modern web applications. Still, we'll get there.

And it might be useful for KOffice, after all.

---

We've been working on Krita 2.0 since 2006; it looks like we'll release early 2009, which means it'll contain three years of work. That's about as much time as went in to 1.4, 1.5 and 1.6! (If you start counting the work towards 1.4 from when I started hacking krita.)

Read more ...

---

But here it is, and shows a nice picture of the app we've been building together. At the same time Nine's Hyves blog about the photouploader was replaced by a more official, but slightly less accurate blog by one of the Hyves founders. It gets downloaded quite a lot, which adds to the general feeling of having done a good job that this Gang of Four share.

Meanwhile, we are learning about this cross-platform binary release business. Apparently our linux version, which has always been perfectly anti-aliased on our machines, suddenly shed its anti-aliased font rendering on Thomas Zander's computer. And the sound, which works on Ubuntu, doesn't work on OpenSUSE. There's only one real solution, I'm afraid: making it GPL and getting our users to compile it for themselves :-).

And today? I'm giving Qt 4.5 a try and taking a look at the Qt Creator source code. It's pretty interesting to see the code of a big Qt application that's not part of Qt or KDE, and it makes me think of platforms. I mean, an application like Krita is built on a stack of platforms: Qt, KDE and KOffice. What advantages and disadvantages does that stack give us? But that's a topic for another, longer entry.

---

So, today we not only have Canarias, the second beta of KDE 4.2 (which is seriously cool), and the release of OpenSUSE 11.1 (which is seriously cool), but at Hyves, Arend (ex-Krdc hacker) and me (krita hacker...) released the first version of the Hyves Desktop!

It's "only" a beta, and right now only Gold Members of Hyves can download it, but they are free to pass installers onto their friends and their friends unto their friends unto the nth generation.

But we did it! In only about four months we, that is Arend, me, Girish and Roop (of KOffice ODF fame) managed to hammer out a chat application with built-in photo uploader and blog/photo/news viewer. And it runs on Windows, OSX and Linux (though you probably won't have sound on OpenSUSE -- blame the gstreamer backend of phonon)

I'm a bit dizzy (also because of the celebratory beer) and excited and all that. This has been a cool ride. And now for a nice holiday and then for the final release -- which will be usable and useful for just about half the population of the Netherlands.

And I even managed very nearly at least one commit to KOffice this week, even though those were small commits :-)

---

Oh the shame! It so happens that I have only two running versions of Krita: 1.6, to compare trunk with, and trunk. Now, as I said earlier, I happen to be working on loading and saving, and I suddenly thought that it would be way cool to be able to test loading Krita images saved from older versions.

But I don't have those versions, and I don't have images saved with those versions either... So: todays plea for help is "anyone who has Krita images, preferably with more than one layer, saved with Krita version 1.4 and 1.5, please, please contact me -- then I can test whether Krita trunk can still load old images."

---

It's really, really, really a pity KOffice is in feature freeze: just after the freeze went into effect, Lukas Tvrdy, the Summer of Code student who created the sumi-e brush engine (which simulates brush hairs), created another way cool brush engine: the deform brush, apparently inspired by the Gimp's iWarp filter. (Is that really with a small i and capital W?). This means that you can paint deformation on you canvas, and that's just so must fun!

For instance, quickly throw down a couple of semi-transparent radial gradients, and then use the star tool to paint star-shaped deformation onto the canvas:

In other news, there are people out there in the real world using Krita, which is always gratifying: Creating Storyboards.

And thirdly, I've done a lot of work on our brush engines lately, but right now I'm first going to finish our saving and loading code. I feel I have to, having read Cyrille's latest blog entry! (But in a good, gung-ho, way)

---

That was one intensive Sunday. Not helped by an awful bout of flu, either, so I had to crash early in the (CET) evening. But for Krita, the koffice bug day was a great success. The triagers -- Lemma, dtritscher, jtamate, gkiagia, m4v (who is also the author of the picture in my previous blogpost), Med, Hum and Blauzahl (and isn't it weird when you start thinking of people by their irc nicks?) went through the bugs like there would be no tomorrow. Nothing better to get into release mode than a clean slate in bugzilla. We managed to close at least 19 bugs and the rest of the bugs have, for the most part, become much clearer.

Many, many thanks to everyone who participated!

---