After an anxious month, I am writing a Krita Weekly again and probably this would be my last one too, though I hope not. Let’s start by talking about bugs. Unlike the trend going about the last couple of months, the numbers have taken a serious dip. The net change in the number of bugs was 40 last week and is pretty obvious from the graph. I will just hope that this continues so that finally we can have the magical number 0.
Even amidst this situation, the team is working on to release Krita 4.3. The 1st beta is already out and by the next couple of weeks, the stable version would be released after the 2nd beta. There has been a lot of new stuff coming, for which this blog would be too short to list, but you could just take a look at the release notes.
After successfully porting to Android, Sharaf is going to bring Krita to Chromebooks. If you have one, in the coming weeks, you could find Krita in the play store beta channels. We would love some feedback about it since Sharaf is unable to get a Chromebook for himself due to the lockdown restrictions imposed in India.
Talking about the Android port, the students selected for GSoC were announced last Monday, and just like previous years, we have 4 students this year too. Starting with Amyspark, he will be working on adding dynamic fill layers using SeExpr. His project will allow anyone to script fill layers without touching the source code of Krita. And do you know what this means? It means procedural paintings in Krita are coming in. Sharaf is back again this year for GSoC, he will be working on SVG mesh gradients like the ones Inkscape has. Talking about Inkscape, the 1.0 has been released and so far pretty well received, don’t forget to give that a try.
Saurabh, a new contributor would be working on adding storyboard support to Krita. Psst, you can give the credit of popping in the idea to me btw, I needed a drawing software to create pdf slides and tada. Last but not the least Ashwin will be working on supporting MyPaint’s brush engine inside Krita.
I would have been working on SVG flowing-text too, but got a job, will be starting next Monday so I had to withdraw from GSoC. And regularly blogging with a full-time job while not impossible would cramp my schedule, so I won’t promise any Krita Weeklies from now on. :wq for now.