We still haven't released, and at the Calligra sprint we decided to have at least one more beta, but that hasn't prevented Linux Format to give Krita as their "hottest pick" award in their Christmas issue, issue 152, which you can get from good news agents everywhere!
This weekend, Animtim, Irina and I have been busy preparing the first batch of orders for the Comics With Krita DVD + Comic pack!
Check out the pictures of this event on valdyas.org! Animtim spent two full days drawing a dedication in every copy of the comic book we shipped:
But we're not out of stock, so don't hesitate to order a copy for yourself if you haven't done so!
DVD & Comic Book Pack: {source}
[[form target="paypal" action="https://www.paypal.com/cgi-bin/webscr" method="post"]]
[[input type="hidden" name="cmd" value="_s-xclick"]]
[[input type="hidden" name="hosted_button_id" value="EYVHSEGYF7GE4"]]
[[input
type="image"
src="https://www.paypalobjects.com/en_US/i/btn/btn_cart_LG.gif"
border="0" name="submit" alt="PayPal - We're only using it until BitCoin
catches on!"]]
[[img alt="" border="0" src="https://www.paypalobjects.com/en_US/i/scr/pixel.gif" width="1" height="1"]]
[[input type="hidden" name="lc" value="US" /]]
[[/form]]
{/source}
And don't forget to vote for Krita in the 2011 Packt Open Source Awards. Any proceeds will go towards more bug squashing! You can vote until October 31st!
We're still only in beta phase, but LWN's Nathan Willis has published an overview of where we're going with Krita 2.4: "A quick sketch of Krita 2.4". It's a pretty good read! Also, check out David Revoy's overview of Krita 2.4: "KRITA 2.4 beta : screenshots , features and PPA".
Soon, we hope to have a real release candidate. There are still plenty of bugs to be fixed, more than one hundred that we know of. But please help us with finding the bugs we don't know of yet on Saturday, during the krita bug day on #krita on freenode!
Next Saturday, November 5th, the world-wide Krita team will be all ready and preset in #krita on freenode for the Grand Annual Krita Bug Day (well, it's not really annual, at least not intentionally so). We're getting closer and closer to the final release of Krita 2.4, and we want it to be Good (that's Good with the capital E of Excellent). And for that, we need your help. Please install Krita from git or the latest beta from packages, and either try to reproduce the Krita bugs in http://bugs.kde.org and tell us whether they are still valid, or just try to find new bugs. Try to break Krita!
The only thing worse than finding we need extra time to fix all the bugs you find is to release Krita with bugs we haven't discovered -- so help us out. Since the last announcement, there are some updates on the packaging front for Gentoo, *buntu and Debian:
First came Andreas Huettel for Gentoo. He says:
I've just committed the ebuild for Calligra 2.4 beta 3, i.e. in Gentoo app-office/calligra-2.3.83, to the portage tree. If all goes well this is going to be the last beta version before Calligra 2.4
Gentoo users rejoice!
Then Jonathan Riddel told me that Paolo Dias has packaged the latest beta for *buntu -- *buntu users now have a choice between project Neon (follows git master) and the official releases of the Calligra and Krita teams. This is the ppa:
https://edge.launchpad.net/~paulo-miguel-dias/+archive/peppa/+packages
It's experimental of course, but very, very welcome!
Finally, for Debian users there's great news: the qt-kde debian project has packages available as well now, thanks to Adrien. Right now it's beta2, but when Adrien returns from his well-earned vacation, he will update it to beta 3. Just follow these instructions:
According to the webpage (http://qt-kde.debian.net/), You have to add the following to your /etc/apt/sources.list:
deb http://qt-kde.debian.net/debian experimental-snapshots main deb-src http://qt-kde.debian.net/debian experimental-snapshots main
In order to get repository key, install the pkg-kde-archive-keyring package:
aptitude install pkg-kde-archive-keyring
then you can install calligra with :
apt-get install calligra
Help make Krita as good as possible by finding bugs for us to slash!
For yours truly and for Timothee Giet, the weekend will be doubly busy, since we'll also be sending out the first batch of dedicated training dvd+comic book packs! If you order now, you could get your copy dedicated -- but it's the last chance, after that, only boring, undedicated copies will be available! Press the button to order:
DVD & Comic Book Pack: {source}
[[form target="paypal" action="https://www.paypal.com/cgi-bin/webscr" method="post"]]
[[input type="hidden" name="cmd" value="_s-xclick"]]
[[input type="hidden" name="hosted_button_id" value="EYVHSEGYF7GE4"]]
[[input
type="image"
src="https://www.paypalobjects.com/en_US/i/btn/btn_cart_LG.gif"
border="0" name="submit" alt="PayPal - We're only using it until BitCoin
catches on!"]]
[[img alt="" border="0" src="https://www.paypalobjects.com/en_US/i/scr/pixel.gif" width="1" height="1"]]
[[input type="hidden" name="lc" value="US" /]]
[[/form]]
{/source}
Today the Krita team together with the Calligra team have released the third and hopefully final beta of Krita 2.4! This beta incorporates the strokes framework developed by Dmitry Kazakov during his Google Summer of Code project as well as the first results of Siddharth Sharma's Photoshop import filter project. We really need a good hammering of this beta to make sure we're in excellent shape for the final release!
The Krita team is organizing a bug day where the team will be on irc from early in the morning until late at night across a selection of time zones to help everyone get the latest version of Krita up and running and to help you test Krita and triage bugs. Help us by finding new bugs and confirming existing bugs!
Join us all on #krita on irc.freenode.net on Saturday November 5th!
The Swordman of the Apocalypse by Alvaro Dopazo -- featured on the beta 3 splash screen, to inspire all developers and everyone else. He is ready to slash some bugs. Are you?
New Features in this beta
The strokes framework is a new design for handling your painting. All painting is done in the background, so Krita is always ready for your next action. This means that even if you're giving Krita and your computer a hard time, for instance by painting with enormous brushes on a ginormous canvas, Krita won't drop any subtleties in your stroke. To test this all you need to do is paint, paint, paint and paint some more. And then of course show of the result in our gallery forum!
Krita now also has preliminary support for 8 and 16 bits RGB Photoshop files. Support for other colorspaces is being worked on. We have a fairly limited selection of test files, so we would love it if people started testing this feature and if they have a file that fails, sending it to us so we can improve the psd support!
Geoffry Song has implemented a new kind of autobrush mask, "gaussian", which has much smoother results that the other options ("Default" and "Soft brush"). However, it is also a bit slower, and best suited for smaller brush sizes, compared to the other two options.
The default order of tools in the toolbox has changed. Now we first have the generic vector shape manipulation tool and the text tool, then the krita specific tools and finally the other vector tools.
Srikanth Tiyyagura has made it possible to share ICC profiles using Get Hot New Stuff. However, dynamically loading a new profile is still broken and can lead to crashes.
Ramon Miranda's Gimp Paint Studio set of resources has been integrated: the brush tips, patterns, palettes and gradients from Gimp Paint Studio now form the default resource set. We are still working on a set of improved brush presets.
There's a new cursor type: a tiny circle, designed by David Revoy, for precise work.
Bug fixes: loading and saving of clone layers if there are layers with the same name in the stack, the color preview is now grayscale if the image is grayscale, the pixellize filter is fixed. The fill and select-by-color tools should be quite a bit faster now, as is the default canvas. The location of the swapfile is now configurable with the "swaplocation" key in Krita's configuration file. And many more!
Check out the Visual Tour for more information!
Known issues in this beta
We still have more than one hundred open bugs, so there's plenty to do before we're ready for a Release Candidate. These are the most important caveats
- Some operations crash the OpenGL canvas. See bug 28447: we have a fix in some instances, but need thorough testing of the OpenGL canvas.
- Exchanging brush presets using GHNS is broken.
- The selection/transparency/filter mask painting system still only uses opacity, instead of the gray value. This means that you need to enable Eraser mode if you want to remove parts of a selection using a brush.
- The canvas still is centered wrongly after operations like zoom, crop or resizeis
- We are still working on a new set of default brush presets, so currently no full set of presets is preinstalled.
Other News
Timothee Giet will visit Deventer in the weekend of November 5th to dedicate the comic + dvd packs and help them send out
But there are still some copies left, so you can order yours if you haven't done so!
DVD & Comic Book Pack: {source}
[[form target="paypal" action="https://www.paypal.com/cgi-bin/webscr" method="post"]]
[[input type="hidden" name="cmd" value="_s-xclick"]]
[[input type="hidden" name="hosted_button_id" value="EYVHSEGYF7GE4"]]
[[input
type="image"
src="https://www.paypalobjects.com/en_US/i/btn/btn_cart_LG.gif"
border="0" name="submit" alt="PayPal - We're only using it until BitCoin
catches on!"]]
[[img alt="" border="0" src="https://www.paypalobjects.com/en_US/i/scr/pixel.gif" width="1" height="1"]]
[[input type="hidden" name="lc" value="US" /]]
[[/form]]
{/source}
And don't forget to vote for Krita in the 2011 Packt Open Source Awards. Any proceeds will go towards more bug squashing! You can vote until October 31st!
To Conclude
"Just got a mind-blowing demo of #krita by @davidrevoy. Awesome stuff! Once released, that will be "da bomb", to quote him." -- Sebastian König on Twitter.
See for yourself, and install our third beta, now available from these fine Linux distributions:
Source
The source code of the third beta is available for download: calligra-2.3.83.tar.bz2
Debian
Debian currently hosts the Calligra beta packages in the http://qt-kde.debian.net/ project. To try Calligra, add the following to your /etc/apt/sources.list:
deb http://qt-kde.debian.net/debian experimental-snapshots main
deb-src http://qt-kde.debian.net/debian experimental-snapshots main
In order to get repository key, install the pkg-kde-archive-keyring
package:
aptitude install pkg-kde-archive-keyring
then you can install calligra with :
apt-get install krita
Then apt-get update will update Krita when the new betas are packaged.
Ubuntu
Users of Ubuntu and Kubuntu are urged to try the daily snapshots prepared by Project Neon. Paste the following in a terminal window and you'll find Calligra installed in /opt:
sudo add-apt-repository ppa:neon/ppa \ && sudo apt-get update\ && sudo apt-get install project-neon-base \ project-neon-calligra \ project-neon-calligra-dbg
You can run these packages by adding /opt/project-neon/bin to your PATH.
Official Kubuntu packages are also expected soon.
Arch Linux
Arch Linux provides Krita packages in the [kde-unstable] repository.
Fedora
Fedora is working on packages and expects them to be available soon
OpenSuse
There are OpenSUSE Krita packages in the unstable playground repository.
Gentoo
Gentoo has Krita packaged in Portage, tagged as unstable.
FreeBSD
Krita ports will soon be available in Area51.
Yes! We're getting somewhere! We're going places! Krita is a finalist in the 2011 Packt Open Source Awards. Of course, there's some very strong competition, for instance Blender has made huge progress in the past year.
But hey, so did we! Krita 2.3 was the first no-quibbles, user-ready
release, and that's already ancient compared to the 2.4 beta's we're
releasing right now. And Krita has some pretty unique features, like the
OpenGL canvas, the wide range of colormodels and channel depths we
support and the outstanding variety of brush engines... And much, much
more.