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I have missed the last two weeks of "Last Week in Krita", but to make up, here's "Last Year in Krita". Trying to remember January 2009 is quite hard!
To begin with, there hadn't been a release since Krita 1.6.3 in June 2007. In 2009, both Krita 2.0 (let's call it a line in the sand for us developers) were released, as well as Krita 2.1 'the almost stable'.
In January 2009, there were four developers working regularly on Krita -- but in December 2009 we saw ten developers actively working on Krita, some of them completely new to the project, like Adam Celarek, Vera Lukman, Edward Apap or Dmitry Kazakov and some of them old hands who have recentely started working on Krita again like Casper Boemann and Adrian Page. Dmitry Kazakov was the 2009 Krita Google Summer of Code student and Vera Lukman the 2009 Krita Season of KDE student. Both have delivered excellent work, and more importantly: are still active developers.
In January, we didn't have a website, in December our website is almost taking over from koffice.org/krita as the starting point in Google searches. Yay for Kubuntiac, our webdesigner, webmaster and all-round forum activist! Congratulations also with the birth of his first daughter on Boxing Day! And let's also congratulate Cyrille Berger, who got his Phd near the end of 2009.
In January, We didn't have web forums, which are a preferred way of communication for many users: thanks to Lukáš Tvrdý and KDE forum admin Neverendingo, we've got our forums now, with a nice gallery, as well.
And in January, my own feeling was that we did not really have any clear direction. We started porting Krita to Qt 4 and KDE 4 in 2006, and three years is a long time. In the meantime, projects like MyPaint had started to come into their own, and Gimp has started integrating gegl and set huge strides towards usability. Was there are a niche left for Krita? But during 2009, we regained our focus and our direction. Both the excellent usecases written up by Enkithan and Lukáš Tvrdý's interest in making Krita useful for Blender led us to define a clear action plan. When I am writing this article next year, we want to be able to say that Krita is suitable for everyday usage, without any 'ehms' and 'yeah, buts' -- no apologies should be necessary.
To achieve that, we started a fund raiser campaign on pledgie. Our target was €3000 and we thought we'd need three months to get there -- it turned out to be three days. Thanks to the more than 170 sponsors, we are now at over €4500! We'll spend every cent of it on Krita development, and when we've spent all of it, I'll account for it on krita.org.
Now, on the cusp of 2010, Krita has 84 bugs reported against it, and 111 wishes. That's a far goal from my 2.2 release target of having only 20 bugs and no known crash bugs, but I'm happy with all those reports, because entering a report in bugs.kde.org is quite tiresome, and shows real dedication from our users and a real desire to help out. And we're returning the honor: we have fixed 211 bugs in 2009. I'm sure the number of fixed bugs will be higher in 2010!
It's almost impossible to enumerate the improvements that went into Krita in 2009. At a rough count, there have been 1850 commits to Krita alone in 2009, a number which excludes all the work that went into the KOffice libraries and plugins that form the base for Krita and extend Krita with functionality like the text shape. It is very hard for developers like us to actually look back on the work done, we are always focussing on the next issue. I can tell you that when the KOffice team assembled in Oslo right after the 2.1 release, there was no partying, no celebratory mood -- we seemed to have forgotten already about that achievement and were all gung-ho to go on to 2.2!
Highlights were of course the Summer of Code work by Lukáš Tvrdý and Dmitry Kazakov, who worked on new 3d brush visualization and canvas improvements and a new tile engine and mipmapping for the QPainter-based canvas, respectively. Vera Lukman's quick brush and color selection palette was developed as part of the Season of KDE and will help a lot in making Krita more usable for creative artists. We removed the troublesome dependency on GraphicsMagick -- Krita was originally designed to be just a gui layer over the ImageMagick library! -- and we started implementing our own xcf, ppm, gif and psd filters. Lukáš managed to convince his university that he could develop brush engines for his thesis, which has resulted in fun and useful brush engines like the deform, spray or the grid brush. But all parts of Krita have been continuously improved during 2009, and we ended up with a sort of a December sprint, with Adam Celarek improving the gui and the code sharing of the selection tools, Edward Apap has worked on making the convolution filters (like Gaussian blur) much faster, Sven Langkamp has started the long-awaited work to make it possible to load and save brush settings as presets, Casper Boemann has redone the image resize dialog based on Ellen's usability suggestions -- by now, Krita 2.1 feels so old!
One area where I suspect we will continue to lag are documentation -- we had a pretty good manual, but it was completely outdated so I had to remove it. We'll have to find a volunteer to write/record tutorials once our gui stabilizes -- which we hope to achieve in with the 2.3 release.
So, what's for 2010? There will be a Krita sprint in Deventer, the Netherlands, which will be attended by many Krita developers as well as Peter Sikking, the interaction designer who has helped Gimp's team find their way towards a high state of polish and usability. He will help us develop our vision and hopefully point us towards measures to improve Krita's usability for creative artists. Following that, there will be week long hacking session with part of the Krita team in Deventer. Lukáš Tvrdý will be working on Krita for three months following the action plan. And since our supporters have been so incredibly generous, it is possible for Lukas to work full-time on fixing bugs for at least a month after he finishes school as well. We have planned at least two releases: 2.2 and 2.3. While 2.2 should already contain many performance improvements, 2.3, planned four months after 2.2 according to the KOffice schedule, should be completely usable.
See you on our forums, #krita on irc.freenode.net or on our mailing list -- or the Libre Graphics Meeting in Brussels.
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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 #krita at irc.freenode.net, or on 
