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:
