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

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.

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

[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!)