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Hey Everyone.
Kubuntiac here, filling in for Boud this week to help keep you up to date with some of the many improvements that have just taken place in Krita. A word of warning though... I'm an ordinary user like most of you with little/no ability to read svn commit logs! That's why this weeks summary is just a tasty slice of just some of the improvements with easy-to-understand comments in the commit logs! Stay tuned as we'll surely be adding corrections and important things I missed next week! That said, on with the show...
The pop up palette (soon to be renamed) by Shicmap made its appearance in revision 1049275
, allowing artists to quickly select favourite brushes from a shiny,
transparent container. The palette can be accessed and hidden by double
clicking, making it fast and easy to change tools, even in
fullscreen mode or with dockers hidden (more on that later). Shicmap's
also started adding the ability to choose recently used colours to make
painting even faster! 
For working fullscreen with the pop up palette, Boud also committed the ability to hide the dockers and toolbar as simply as pushing "Esc" (somewhat like tab on Photoshop). Now you can work using the fullscreen, quickly and easily jumping between favorite brushes using only the semi-transparent favorite brushes pop up pallete. A big improvemet for distraction free painting!
On other news, the very talented LukasT, continued to expand the spray brush into one of the most flexible tools around by adding new rotation control. Image particles, already let artists "spray" any image they like with control for how the duplicate images change colour, position and transparency. With revision 1049237, rotation control lets users choose their own blend between keeping particles facing the same direction, a random direction, or following the curve of the brush. 
Then we saw Cyrille go storming through the codebase, starting by removing Krita's dependence on Graphics / Image Magic in revision 1048335 as noted on his blog. That lead on to comitting support for a whole range of image formats including ppm, pbm, pgm, .jp2 (jpeg 2000) and -in revision 1049262- basic layered Gimp files! (.xcf)
Ironically, the other file format to be ressurected this week in revision 1047067 by Boud was Krita's own .kra format. A nasty crasher bug with the Histogram docker was fixed so we can once again load our beloved full-feature .kra files. The histogram docker however looks like there's still some improvements to be made before it plays nice again.
Krita was made even more stable as a whole bunch of crasher bugs were squashed, including crashers with the exposure setting with the openGL canvas (thanks page!), adding transparency masks to a shape layer (langkamp) and docks without child widgets (boud).
Zachman entered a fix so we can load grouped shapes (vector objects) to separate layers, while Boud granted a wish by improving undo usability, and another by adding foreground/background colour switching keyboard shortcut, fixed actions for some devicetypes so they don't cause shortcut conflicts and also added thumbnail support back to Krita. Some work is still needed to get Koffice to see the thumbnail, but the base code is there, so hopefully soon we'll see .kra thumbnails in both Koffice, Dolphin etc!
Last, but not least, we saw Boud commit Enkithan's icons for alpha locking and Kubuntu release their packages for Koffice 2.1RC1.
Phew! I can hardly imagine what we'll see next week as the march towards Koffice 2.1!
Feel free to discuss any of the new features and enhancements on the forum here!
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Every bit you can do to help make Krita better, helps every part of the community... to help you! Krita is free software and is therefore under continuous development. We welcome contributions, whether that is code, documentation, tutorials, or ideas and expertise from artists and users. Join us on #koffice at irc.freenode.net, or on 
