In this week's KDE Commit-Digest: A security fix developed for KDM, covering KDE 3.3.0 to 3.5.7. A KioBrowser data engine, HDD monitor applet, and general layout work in Plasma. More refinements in Parley (formerly KVocTrain). GeoData subproject in Marble to support popular geographic data formats. An AI player added to Kombination. Development renewed on the KPicross game. Basic printing support in Gwenview. Improved mimetype detection, as per the cross-desktop specifications. More work on text highlighting in Kate. Continued developments and optimisations in Akonadi, including the OpenChange (Exchange) connector. Further work on the GStreamer Phonon backend. Colourspace work in Krita, greater definition given to KChart2. File management part in Konqueror is replaced by a shared Dolphin part usage. More KDE SVN reorganisations.
Comments
It's cool to see KTabedit being worked on. I wonder if there would be any overlap there (eg synergy possible) between that app and the notes thing in KOffice?!?
And I see Clarence wonders if he can get Kolourpaint finished in time... bleh, as Kolourpaint rocks ;-)
I mean, imagine you use Gnome. And you want to quickly edit a picture. YOU HAVE TO START THE GIMP! That's horrible, even if you want to do something complex ;-)
In KDE, you have Krita for the complex stuff, Kolourpaint for the basics and Showfoto (from Digikam) for Photo retouching. We got it all covered very neath.
While I appreciate your recent work for the KDE Ministry of Propaganda I don't see how this inflammentory posts you keep occasionaly churning out helps the relationship between the communities. Ah well, must be that I was always sitting on the fence between my brain telling me to use KDE and my guts to go for GNOME so I never actually felt negative feelings towards Smallfoot. ;-)
++
Jos's KDE advocacy is helpful, but his off-topic side-swipes at GNOME are childish, irritating, and are really putting people off the KDE project. As one person in this article ( http://osnews.com/comment.php?news_id=18662 ) just remarked:
"If you think that your bashing to GTK+ applications will makes us switch to Krita or KDE think again, it really sucks that a good project like KDE is infected with trolls like you. "
Please, Jos - knock this off. KDE has plenty of merits of its own to talk about without resorting to belittling the "competition".
I think it was a rather funny joke actually and I think gnome devs/users would also think it's funny (or at least wouldn't mind the joke).
The problem is, of course, that this sort of joke works for about 5 percent of Internet readers. Not necessarily because the rest is to thick for that, more because the average Internet forum has far more trolls than it has comedians.
Meh, I get a bit carried away, that's for sure. Sorry. Though, in that thread, I thought the 'I only start gimp if I need a good laugh' actually was a good joke... And aside from the joke, who would disagree?
I would. I actually use Gimp on a day-to-day basis, because it's the only Free Software program that actually does the job well enough for me. Krita is just not there yet although I have high hopes that some day it will. Krita needs more polishing, it's somewhat slow in some operations and it doesn't support all the things I need (think of guides, for example).
Other than that, let's just all keep in mind that we're not competing against GNOME, but against Windows (and to a lesser extent MacOS).
I don't agree with you Sebastian.
We are of course competing with other open source applications. But as with all competition, it shall be fair competition. No bashing.
Windows is of course the main competitor on the desktop space, and I agree that most of our efforts should go towards that competitor.
It must not come to the situation that it is politically incorrect to be an advocate for the solutions one believs is the best in the long run.
Birger
Jos made a good point in that having to use a complex graphic tool like GIMP for making minor changes to a photo is crazy. Look at the Windows world: there's good old MS Paint and then there's Adobe Photoshop. Targeted for different tasks and different user-skills. KDE's got it right, IMHO.
As for the assertion that GIMP's UI is horrible, well... I think plenty of people would agree with that, even GNOME users.
i would think that's a fairly safe assumption - witness the current drive towards a GUI redesign for the GIMP :)
Well since we are on a KDE board, let's worry more about Krita's interface.
Like for example, is there a way to open more than one image at a time without starting multiple Kritas yet?
Sure you can. You can do that already. But all images will get into a separate window. And unless KOffice 2.something-but-not-0-or-1-or-even-2-most-likely will decide that having a tabbed interface is a good thing, it will stay that way. We won't do the Photoshop-on-windows-which-sucks-for-any-real-Photoshop-user way of having a master window with multiple child windows.
Hi Boudewijn,
I was wondering - GIMP is obviously the GNU *Image Manipulation Program*, whereas Krita bills itself more as a painting app which integrates with KOffice. Are you planning to focus more on the "painting" side, or more on the "image manipulation" side as time goes by? Put more simply - do you ever intend for Krita to be a direct competitor with the GIMP, with the same abilities and use-cases, or is Krita really a different sort of application with different goals to those of the GIMP?
Cheers!
As far as I understand the whole issue, drawing/painting and image manipulation aren't an either-or thing. So Krita does want to do what Gimp does (and as far as I can tell, it already can - Gimp probably only has more plugins).
> As far as I understand the whole issue, drawing/painting and image
> manipulation aren't an either-or thing.
This is not entirely true. Photoshop and the GIMP have some painting / artistic creation related functionality, but there are applications that are more geared toward such tasks (Painter: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corel_Painter, which attempts to better simulate different painting media, for example). In a broad sense they are all raster image editors (in contrast to vector graphics programs like Inkscape or Illustrator), but certainly they specialize in different areas under that umbrella.
I would love to see Krita go more in the drawing/painting direction than photomanipulation, since the GIMP is definitely better suited to the latter. It is also an area that the free software ecosystem could stand to have an app specialize in... ;)
I want Krita to be a Corel Painter competitor: that includes a hefty amount of image manipulation, including vector and text objects (thanks to KWord and Karbon based flake shapes), including 16 and 32 bit/channel image hacking. But it also includes dynamic, natural media paint simulation. Like we got this summer: natural paint mixing, complex brush loading, programmable brushes.
Right now, if you want to manipulate your 16 bit/channel raw image in the L*a*b colourspace you've got no free software choice but krita; but we're not good enough yet. I know that. My personal goal (because, yes, there's some rivalry, but keep this in mind: I really like and respect the gimp people, they are great guys and gals to meet, and there's lots to learn from their work) is to release a Krita with natural media simulation and dynamic everything layer stacks before Gimp 2.6 is released.
But my main point of reference is Corel Painter: if I can follow the tutorials in the main Corel Painter magazine in Krita, not to the letter, but to the intent, and with more ease than would have been the case had I used Corel Painter, I'll be a happy man, and feel I can stop hacking and start painting again.
Great; thanks for the detailed and comprehensive response - Krita is in very good hands, I think :)
If it's inspired by Corel Painter, does that mean it won't compete with e.g. Photoshop or Pixel? Will artists use the two programs together (e.g. krita for art creation, then gimp/photoshop/pixel for manipulation)?
My point was that pixel manipulation is simply needed in a painting application, so there is nothing in the gimp/photoshop that Krita won't need to do.
Drawing/painting is EXTRA on image manipulation. So Krita can do stuff Gimp and Photoshop can't but there is no reason the opposite should be true.
Just wondering if anyone was found to help out with that program. It looked very promising and it's a shame the developer had to leave...
Others have taken over, I believe, though progress appears to be very slow. Development is not carried out in KDE's svn, unfortunately, so it's hard to say how it's going and even harder for KDE devs to contribute to it. I wish the basKet devs would import it into main KDE SVN so that everyone can have a shot at it - I bet someone would have ported it to KDE4 and translated it into dozens of languages already if they had ...
I realise Scribus is a Qt-based app and independent of KDE, but does anyone know how it's going? I heard that with the port to Qt4 they may start integrating even better with KDE.
Given the way KDE4 is getting ported to Win32 and OSX, this might become a possibility, but finishing the port and the new text engine are priorities. That does not mean we do not want to have the option, but it is just not yet the highest priority.
It is realy great to see all these improvemnts comming in to Dolphin(and Konqi).
I tried to search for acl handling and Dolphin , but came up with little. Any information on Dolphin in that area?
Will it be possible to manipulate ACL entries? Any possibility of reading user and group names from authentication sources? AD/LDAP++?
Regards Birger
> Will it be possible to manipulate ACL entries?
This is already implemented (long time ago). Just mount a partition with ACL option and open Konqueror. In "properties" you can handle ACL permissions perfectly. ;)
> Any possibility of reading user and group names from authentication sources? AD/LDAP++?
That is already possible and it's not depending on user desktop, but in libnss-ldap package and nsswitch.conf configuration.