Krita/KOffice Preview Version and Video Available

xiando writes "Developers aim at making Krita a user-friendly image manipulation program where users with no computer experience or slim experience with other light-duty image programs like Paint Shop Pro should feel right at home. LinuxReviews has a 5.5 MB preview video by developer Bart Coppens available, showing how the app looks and feels. Check it out or download the source preview packages by Daniel Molkentin to try it yourself. Developers hope to make Krita a part of the KDE office suite KOffice 1.4, scheduled spring 2005."

Comments

Re:Same ol' joke.

[WPIDalamar]

I never bother with software if there isn't screenshots available (assuming it has a GUI). In the future do you think that will be movies instead of screenshots?

Nice

[Anonymous Coward]

Seems to be an application linux has been missing. While gimp is great imho it's simply overkill for most users and though I don't think gimp's interface is nearly as terrible as a lot of people want us to believe it is simply unfamiliar for someone who has only experience with paint shop pro for example. /me is looking forward to krita being released.

Good grief

[Anonymous Coward]

Looking at that video this app looks very similar to photoshop! this would be a great app to get people to move from windows to linux, and leave photoshop behind... now we just need the ever important CMYK support and some poweruser features, and we'll finally have a photoshop killer, maybe?

I know the gimp is too different for many people to replace photoshop, but maybe this will do it. Well, if it can't replace photoshop, at least it will take the place of paintshop pro. Very nice job!

Re:Huh?

[telstar]

"Developers aim at making Krita a user-friendly image manipulation program where users with no computer experience or slim experience...

Are these people running Linux?"

• Which came first ... the chicken or the egg?

Re:Huh?

[StevenHenderson]

Exactly...very well said. If only it were a different way, but you know your [insert computer-illiterate family member] isn't going to be running this.

Better Translation

[phorm]

For the 60% of people that just want to view their picture, resize it, and do some various simple edits... he's a program for you.

Seriously, whilst Adobe is an excellent program for high-end image editing, it's not the be-all-end-all. For many users, Adobe is very much overkill.

While I do use the functionality of strong programs such as PhotoShop every now and then, I've found the PSP interface quite convenient for much of what I use. At this point I'm stuck between PSP and GIMP, with GIMP having been my only choice for 'nix.

Based on the comparison to PSP though, I'll probably check out Krita (wish there were screenshots). Sometimes you don't want to do a lot of cool "stuff," in fact most of the time I just want to resize my image and fiddle with the colour depth to make thumbnails for my webpage...

The Ugly Duality

[GroundBounce]

From the web page regarding "Why another paint program":

"This program will integrate with KDE better than GIMP does."

Great. Half of my applications integrate with KDE, and half integrate GNOME. (Actually, a few integrate with nothing).

I've had to explain this to my Windows-using friends who I am trying to convince to use Linux, and not surprisingly they answer "Well, why not just use Windows, where everything integrates with everything else?". They don't buy the idealistic "more choice" argument when more choice means less functionality.

Re:The Ugly Duality

[Anonymous Coward]

Then make an effort to only use one DE. It's not hard. The only GTK application I currently use is The Gimp (I used to use Firefox as well, but found that moving to Konqueror wasn't bad at all).

Most KDE apps have Gnome analogues, and vice versa, and most non-integrating apps have integrating analogues. They might not do everything the exact same way as each other, and some might have features that the others don't. But by and large, anything you can do in one you can do in the other.

Further, you can get similar themes for both Qt and GTK so that they at least look integrated with each other.

If you don't get the functionality you need from integrated programs on one DE or another, file bugs and wishes against those applications so that they eventually do.

Also, how exactly do Windows apps integrate with one another. Many have the same widgets, but many don't. Many store settings in many different places. It's certainly not anywhere near KDE where the text editor part is starting to be used across many applications, and you can swap it out for other text editor.

Basically, your argument comes down to, "I choose to use applications from several different DEs, so they don't integrate." It's very possible to have nearly all your applications integrated with one another, which is no less than Windows can claim.

Re:The Ugly Duality

[GroundBounce]

"Most KDE apps have Gnome analogues, and vice versa"

This is part of the problem. First of all, it's a waste of developer resources. True, most open source projects begin because the lead developer want's to "scratch an itch", but in many cases, with the KDE people insisting that there be a "K" version of everything and the GNOME people insisting that there be a "G" version of everything, the only "itch" was that the existing project wasn't using Qt or GTK, which ever the case may be.

The second problem is that although there are both "K" and "G" versions of most types of programs, it is often the case that one or the other is much more mature. You yourself use GIMP even though you are otherwise a KDE fan. In my case, I have found that even more of a mix is right for me. For example, I use GIMP, Evolution, and InkScape (GTK+), and Scribus, Quanta, and a few other smaller KDE applications (Qt), as well as Mozilla and Firefox, which use their own interface. If you tell a windows or Mac user that if they want interoperability, then they can only choose from half of the available apps (the ones that match their main DE), they will think you are crazy, and in a way they are correct. I would like to choose the *best* applications (according to my own preferences) *and* have full interoperability (see below).

The problem is not so much the different toolkits, rather it's the different standards for things like drag and drop, clipboard formats, and compound documents. Many times, you can't even do things as simple as drag a file from your file manager window to the applications if one is GNOME based and the other is KDE based.

In Windows, even though different applications use different toolkits and have different user interfaces (someone mentioned Adobe), certain interactions are always guaranteed. I can always drag a file from the explorer to an application, regardless of which development environment was used to build the application. If the developer chose to support drag-and-drop, it will work with any other Windows app that supports drag-and-drop.

This kind of consistency is important to many end users, and Linux currently lacks it. Hopefully, freedesktop.org will eventually have some success in standardizing some of these interoperability functions between the various DE's. This would be the best of both worlds - pick a DE that you like because of it's features, and still have basic interoperability between the DE and all the available applications, regardless of whigh DE it was "written to".

"other light-duty image programs like Paint Shop"

[doktorstop]

I wonder if the author has, by any chance, had the possibility to play around with PaintShopPro lately. To call it a "light-duty" is one of the biggest over-simplifications I have ever seen. Just have a look at its features, it almost beats Gimp and is as close to Photoshop as one can get (treating, of course, PhotoShop CS as a reference point!)

Re:I always liked...

[Anonymous Coward]

Apple already has wrappers for at least some QT functions. The Safari browser is based on a khtml core.