Smudging
We're all working hard on Krita 2.0 -- but now and then Cyrille codes a little tasty something for the 1.6 branch. Just to keep in form. The smudge paintop is one he coded yesterday. As Bart Coppens said, so laughably simple that we could have done it three years ago. Today Bart added some more support for playing with the pressure of your tablet, and presto: a nice feature for Krita 1.6.2, which will be released in January. Ronan Zeegers, who did the great toolbox icons for Krita is going to do a nice icon for this paintop.
Paintops, by the way, are a rather a special thing in Krita. We've got the ordinary tools, like freehand and line and curves, and the ordinary potato-stamp brushes every paint application since Mac Paint 1.0 has had -- but for added power, things like airbrush, soft brush, smudge, chinese brush (in 2.0) and others are implemented as little plugins that work with every tool that wishes to draw a line, including the selection tools. I'm rather proud of this idea (I came up with it myself a year or two, three ago), and it is working out really well.
If you feel like giving coding a paintop a try, begin with reading our plugin writers' manual -- and don't hesitate to contact us on freenode, #koffice or on the mailing list!