From the promising-but-not-yet-usable-department.
Scripting
Cyrille Berger has been working on re-using Kexi's Kross scripting engine with Krita. Kross can potentially use a variety of language interpreters -- from Java to Python, from Ecmascript to Ruby -- to give scripts access to the objects in an application. Together with the regular bindings to Qt and KDE, you get a rich environment that makes it easy to extend and automate an application. Of course, all the Krita plugin does for now is show the traditional "Hello World" message, but Cyrille hopes to get experimental, but useful scripting done before the 1.5 release in February.
PNG Export
Cyrille has also been working on a separate PNG import/export filter. Currently, most common image file formats are handled by the Magick filter. This filter uses ImageMagick's coders and decoders to read and write png, tiff, jpeg -- almost everything but openEXR and Raw. But the Magick filter is written against the primitive C API, instead of the C++ or MagickWand interface to ImageMagick. This API changes often and besides, it's far from clear how to set export parameters like JPEG compression quality. While we will probably keep the Magick filter around for the wide variety of formats it supports (and especially tiff is supported very well), it's really better to have our own filters based directly on libpng, libjpeg and so on.
Active Layer Visualization
A French artist who is strongly influenced by the aesthetics of the better bande dessinee and who goes under the alias of Mr. Youp came to the mailing list with a suggestion on making it easier for the artist to be aware of the active layer. It happens quite often, especially in images with many layers that you start messing with the wrong layer. After much back-and-forth, Mr. Youp posted a link to a mock-up (in Photoshop!) of what he meant. Casper did a quick hack to give it a try, and I must say, it works very well. Mr. Youp is a very fine artist, by the way -- his website is full of amazing drawings. I wish he'd publish a bande dessinee of his own. It would fit in right next to my collection of Gibrat.
Color adjustments
Not a really new feature, but now it's implemented the way it should. Instead of converting every pixel to 8-bit RGB, we now use LCMS to adjust the individual channels. This means we can now adjust the individual channels of, say, a 16-bit/channel CMYK image without doing any conversions. Also not my new preview widget: it has its shortcomings, but it's fast and the display doesn't get messed up. Based on a widget from Amarok.
Finally
Bart Coppens has fixed the duplicate tool and given it a useful tip (we still need to fix the layout of the tool option panes, though. I'm working on a Raw importer, but I'm hampered by a bug in the mimetypes database KDE ships: some raw files are recognized as tiffs. Of course, some raw files, like Adobe's DNG format are tiffs, making the situation even more complex. And I'm finally working again on a painterly feature: a hairy brush that smears paint on the canvas. Not sure whether I'll be able to get that to work, though. A lot of maths is needed.
