I've worked a bit on the scale dialog for Krita. Neither the old one from the 1.x series nor the new one in current KOffice2 alpha releases were good enough. I've mailed a bit with Ellen which only confirmed that it is indeed a difficult dialog to get right.

In the end I reordered some items, so I hope it's a bit easier to figure out how to use it. I think it has become quite good, but judge for yourself. So much cool stuff coming in KOffice 2.0

I've just created a new product called "Oxygen" in bugs.kde.org.

It has 4 components: style, window decoration, icons and sound. So please use these in the future if you know the bug belongs there. I'll be adding known bugs from our wiki in the coming days

I'll use this opportunity to also ramble a bit about bug reports. Because though in general we love reports and wishes there is one kind that isn't very useful, and that is the category I'd call "I don't like the look of.."

Graphics and sound is a very subjective matter, so bugs.kde.org just isn't the place for this. And the reason is quite simple: There will never be an agreement.

Instead add comments about like/dislike to the blogs of our artists when they present new stuff. But please do it with taste and respect as you would like to be treated yourself.

I've started to work more and more on Kreative3D. Although it's not useful for anything right now, I expect that I can have 2d sketching done within a month or two. For those of you who don't know anything about parametric solid modelling a sketchplane is a plane in 3d space where you can draw on. And sketching is the process of drawing on that surface.

You draw with lines and arcs and you then assign constraints to those. A constraint could be that two lines should always stay parallel or stay tangent to an arc or something.

As you can see from the screenshot: The sketchplane is there and I can draw lines, but that is just about it. So what I plan to do in the following months from now is to add tools that create arcs and lines in various ways. I've ripped the tool system from KOffice flake and made a 3d version out of it, so it's actually pretty easy to make new tools. The hard part will be implementing constraint and a solver to make sure they are followed.

I'll also be working on the view tool (the only other tool currently implemented). I can already postion the viewpoint anywhere around the plane so I can see it from any angle, but the view tool needs to be much more powerful to be really usable.

On Friday I'll fly to Milan for the upcoming Oxygen coding sprint. The objective is to get the Oxygen style into shape so it can be imported into kdebase. There is a lot of work for us to do, but Nuno and David are there for the artistic side and Riccardo (ruphy) and I will be coding on the spot. In addition Thomas will try to be online as much as possible from his home.

Ruphy have been kind enough to offer his house for a place to work and there is a nice cheap hotel down the corner where we'll spend the 3 nights. Apart from the excitement of getting Oxygen style ready, I'm also looking forward to some nice Italian food and icecream

We'll be sure to blog during the event

For Google Summer of Code Sven Langkamp was assigned the project of adding different kind of selection visualisations for Krita 2.0. Being his mentor is very easy as already now before gSoc has even started officially he has completed 2 out of 3 items in the project description. Krita 2.0 is now capable of showing selections as:

* Marching ants
* Overlay (as known from Krita 1.6)

Marching ants involved analysing the bitmap of the selection and extracting a form of path from it. Pretty wellknown algorithm, but Sven nevertheless had to adapt it to the render pipeline of krita. And he had to make some optimisations as well. For the overlay visualisation he could reuse some code from 1.6 but he still had to change it to fit with the new Krita 2.0 display pipeline.

Additionally he has worked on the selection tools as well.

For the remaining 3 months of Google Summer of Code he will be focusing on the last item which is to be able to modify the selection as if it were a true path. This might turn out to be a somewhat larger task, but we have the opportunity to reuse Emanuele Tamponi's gSoC work from last year.

Thanks, Google for hiring Sven

I've committed a new widget to KOffice which is a combobox-like widget consisting of a numeric input and a slider that pops up. The really neat thing about this new widget is that it's themeable right out of the box because I've reused QStyle to draw it.

I'm trying to create some interest in this curve widget for a wider audience. For almost two years now Krita have had it, though it originates from digiKam where it adjusts colors. I took the original code and pretty much rewrote it to be more generic. And that was a good call, because a year later Bart Coppens used it for something completely different namely the pressure sensitivity of tablets.