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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."
"Krita" means 'chalk' or 'crayon' in Swedish. "rita" means 'to draw'.
IKN.
after messing with the gimp for a bit (sounds dirty doesnt it).. i am relieved to know there is a simpler program for linux out there where i can do my image editing... not saying gimp is bad.. just a little hard to figure out at certain points
Paint Shop Pro in the past because it was a good and easy program compared to Photoshop and have used Gimp but find it to be a bit more complicated than PSP. Still Gimp is an excellent choice for mst image manipulation operations. I just hope Krita brings the ease of use and intuitive part of PSP to Linux.
My penguin ate my sig
Paint Shop Pro's functionality has been anything but basic for the past three releases. In fact, in some areas (like vector layers) it's been far superior to Photoshop for a long time.
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It looks like this project has been going for some time and potentially very interesting. I am primarily a KDE user although I run GIMP under KDE and have done for several years. I've learned enough of GIMP to be fairly competent with it. I kinda like it now I've learned how to use it. Although I've always hoped for a "Kimp" using the QT toolkit although with the exact same functionality.
I might give this thing a try but as of yet I'm not about to unlearn my Gimp!
Nick...
Electronic Music Made Using Linux http://soundcloud.com/polyp
Are these people running Linux?
I managed to coralize the first video just before the server went bye-bye: here
Hi there
IMHO the open source world needs a simple piece of software that does what every digital photographer needs:
...
* Eliminate red eyes
* Lighten, darken picture (or areas of the picture)
* change contrast
* sharpen contrast of picture
* cut picture frames
* import pictures from camera
* archive pictures
* send pictures to online printer
Every piece is there. But not in one package and not user friendly.
When you read about GIMP, many people think it's not as good as Photoshop, cause it does no colour separation. But GIMP is featurewise more than enough for millions of digital photographers. But sadly not usable for Joe Sixpack.
IMHO open source could attract much more new users by making specialized solutions, that are simple to use, than by making the featurewise ultimate solution. But of course every developer is free to do what he wants to do
Bye egghat.
-- "As a human being I claim the right to be widely inconsistent", John Peel
Koffice, although its import/export filters historically have left something to be desired. Unlike OpenOffice, you just get a "clean" feel when you start it up. Not super bloated, and the default layout doesn't waste lots of screen space with wide margins around the image of the paper (I know that's a stupid nitpick, but it's been driving me nuts about OpenOffice.org)
Now the KDE integration efforts for OO have made it quite a bit nicer to look at under KDE, for which I am grateful. But I still have to say I hope KOffice becomes a front runner for Linux office suites. If everybody uses the OO XML document standard that's in the works they can all compete on an equal footing, and Koffice documents could be read by OO on Windows. Koffice is a nice piece of work, but (partially due to their KDE only status) they have had a hard time getting the critical mass of developers needed to do what they're trying to do. Without the power of KDE+QT they wouldn't be anywhere NEAR where they are now, as far as I can tell.
I wish Apple or someone would decide to use the KOffice setup (yeah that would be a lot of work, but still...) and give KOffice enough full time developers to get all the annoying little features stuffed in. Feature parity with OpenOffice.org is a must, and with MSOffice would be ideal. People are used to those features, and in a game like Office software that's all that matters.
"I object to doing things that computers can do." -- Olin Shivers, lispers.org
"Pre-development", do you mean this is before any code is written? Were those screenshots drawn in crayon? If you're releasing code for public consumption it's no longer pre-development. Call it alpha/beta whatever, but it's time to stop hedging bets and call everything "pre-pre-pre-release".
If part of the greatness of the open source model is people using code early and often and giving you feedback, then punting all issues back saying "we're not going to support you, this is pre-pre-pre-release" just goes against that model.
If they want to make it easy, they are going to need to do something like what was done in Kai's PhotoSoap. This is the *only* image editing app (besides iPhoto) that I've seen computer novices be able to figure out. The tools were simple, made sense, and the UI was great. And it worked well, too.
Luckily, Digikam performs all of these functions except for the last one. Try it! You might like it:
http://digikam.sf.net
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.