Talk:Development/Releases/0.8

From MyPaint

(Discussion on IRC or Mailing list is also fine, as usual...)

Contents 1 Status of Portnov's branch (in general) 1.1 Features/Changes that are not ready for merge 2 Resizeable brushlist icons 3 Layer Dialog 4 About documentation 5 About other/external things

[edit] Status of Portnov's branch (in general)

This branch contains a significant amount of work. There is some really great stuff in there, but also a lot of things that I think are not release quality yet, from my point of view as an user. It requires some work to cherry-pick features there because many of them depend on infrastructure changes that must be merged in first.

I'm also suspecting there are still experimental commits that screw up some random things, having seen a few of them already. The worst one was causing Ctrl-Shift-S to overwrite the current file instead of asking for a new name; I want no such "just fix some bug without understanding what the old code did" commits in the release.

Because of those two reasons, I will be picky and not just merge the whole branch. Merging, reviewing and testing changes takes quite some time, so help is appreciated to speed this up. You can help by discussing which are the most important features to pick and how they should be improved, or by pushing "bite-sized", commented commits that apply to mypaint master. I will be less picky about newly added code, and more sceptical about code that modifies the existing infrastructure. --maxy 22:43, 1 October 2009 (UTC)

[edit] Features/Changes that are not ready for merge

Things that will not be included in this release.

• [?]Settings changes

• [REWORKED] Brush grouping

A reworked implementation that was based on this branch is in the main repository now. maxy 10:05, 27 December 2009 (UTC)

• [DROP] More settings available

I'm not happy with most of them; palette stuff should be directly in the palette; brush icon size should be configurable below the brush list, and certainly not require restart; the ability to change the preview size is a very bad idea, and already causing some sneaky bugs if you use it. maxy 21:45, 8 November 2009 (UTC)

• [DROP] Refactored Brush/Background selector to use IconView

Dragging brushes around was more intuitive before, the drag cursor feels like a regression. maxy 21:45, 8 November 2009 (UTC)

I have reviewd this code and I don't see any big disadvantage or advantage of using IconView. The complexity of both approaches seem to be roughly the same. Some users seem to dislike the blue (I guess gtk-themed) selection color. maxy 16:06, 28 November 2009 (UTC)

• [DROP] "user input" "mask input"

This should not go into the release. It adds the mask checkbox to a highly visible place (layer dialog), trying (and failing) to teach users something they most likely didn't want to learn. maxy 21:45, 8 November 2009 (UTC)

• [DROP!] Autosaving

I think it is useless currently because saving takes so long and interrupts you in the middle of painting. It should be modified to trigger mainly during natural painting breaks. As it is now, I'm mostly against adding this feature, and certainly against enabing it by default. maxy 21:45, 8 November 2009 (UTC)

It also sets the filename to the autosaved one, which is quite a screw-up. maxy 16:06, 28 November 2009 (UTC)

And looks like there is also a bug that prevents disabling it. [1] maxy 15:06, 11 December 2009 (UTC)

• [POSTPONED] tilt support

My impression is that everyone wants it and nobody needs it. People have already claimed that mypaint supports this before it got implemented. Still nice-to-have. But some users had related bugs that made mypaint unusable - are those fixed cleanly now? maxy 21:45, 8 November 2009 (UTC)

Many users are seeing tablet specific bugs, and there was discussion on IRC about doing it differently. Let's wait with this until after the release. maxy 16:06, 28 November 2009 (UTC)

[edit] Resizeable brushlist icons

Would be great to include this in the release; definitively a good idea, and it's already implemented in portnov's branch. Needs review, merging, and some polishing:

• Brush icon spacing/frame must scale together with the icons.
• The preference that requires restart is cumbersome. Would be better to have zoom in/out buttons in some normally-hidden "details" part directly below the brushlist.

--maxy 22:45, 1 October 2009 (UTC)

• Antialiasing for icons, some text are not really readable after resized.

--Deevad 16:28, 2 October 2009 (UTC)

[edit] Layer Dialog

IMO relatively useless as it is currently in portnov's branch because it lacks thumbnails. I don't think any user will enjoy having to name all layers just to find them again. As mentioned in IRC I might change my mind about this...

What do other users think, does it make sense to integrate this already as it is? It has some very nice features already (toggling visibility, drag&drop...) but I think there will be some time needed for debugging the existing features (eg. the current layer does not update when using undo/redo, etc.). --maxy 22:43, 1 October 2009 (UTC)

Is there any (major) technical issues involved in getting thumbnails to work? --85.166.162.57 09:55, 2 October 2009 (UTC)

It will need some work; I don't think it's easy, but no major obstacle I guess. Infrastructure might need to be added to get notifications about layer modification to the widget that shows the thumbnails, so thumbnails also get updated after undo, etc. but without slowing down display updates for a stroke that is still in progress - so it has probably to be done in a GTK idle callback. maxy 11:02, 2 October 2009 (UTC)

Ah, and there is also the question of the thumbnail size. I would love to experiment with having thumbnails at different zoom levels, depending on how big the layer is - and, the ability to re-zoom the thumbnail must be implemented anyway because the canvas size can change at any time. Several solutions possible here. maxy 11:06, 2 October 2009 (UTC)

Having a "layer window" without thumbnails is far better than to not have one. ( I love the thumbnails idea , but I'm against return to the menu+shortcut layer :) ) I like to use the one of the Portnov version. I think it's a good step for new user to work with a simple dialog. I basicaly start a lot of project by a black and white sketch ; after I open the dialog , reduce the opacity of the current layer to get a light grey sketch, add a new layer above and start a more well drawed art above. At the end I remove the first sketch under to keep only my good drawing. To proceed to all this step, I use only the portnov layer dialog with the icons embeded into. It's a proove it can be usefull.

Deevad16:23, 2 October 2009 (UTC)

Okay, convinced. maxy 06:18, 3 October 2009 (UTC)

I also think that even without thumbnails, the layer dialog should go in. I think that most users would prefer to have some (gui/dialog) functionality there instead of none. And from a maintenance point of view; an old and growing diff is not very nice. Also, I'm not afraid that this will stay an "unfinished feature" (as might be an argument against merging) because its limitations are clearly visible. Releasing it might even make it more of a priority to fix it ;)

But one thing struck me as "nice to have" that might increase its usefulness without thumbnails. When hovering with cursor above a layer in the dialog with a modifier down (shift/ctrl): put the canvas into single layer mode and switch layers when you move the cursor above other layers. That way you can fairly easily identify which layer is which. --85.166.162.57 17:54, 2 October 2009 (UTC)

[edit] About documentation

What format should the documentation be in? And where should it be? It needs to be accessible and explanatory. --Jonnor 18:48, 7 November 2009 (UTC)

We will have quite a bit of new features, and those should/need to be documented. This is an excellent way for non-coders to contribute to making the release and MyPaint in general to be as awesome as possible. --Jonnor 19:15, 2 October 2009 (UTC)

I can provide some picture of painting / sketching made to illustrate Mypaint new feature. Let me know what is needing here just under with a list. Deevad Sunday, October 04 2009 21:30 (UTC)

I can provide some basic introduction walk-through videos. --SeanJM 21:11, 5 October 2009 (UTC)

[edit] About other/external things

Are there any external things that should be done by this time/release? OpenRaster stuff (file format, oratools) or anything else? --Jonnor 10:21, 2 October 2009 (UTC)

It would certainly be good to test the GIMP plugin before the release, or any other ORA implementations, while we still could make changes to mypaint. Check what gets lost during load&save cycles, and whether we can do anything about it. Also, maybe install a copy of the mime type, as Krita does? Check whether we can push thumbnailers further upstream [2], or just make it easy for distributions to pick up. Something like ora2png / ora2jpeg would be cool, but nothing that really absolutely must be done before the release, I think...? maxy 10:53, 2 October 2009 (UTC)

I think we should ship a mimetype, as a workaround before that upstream package gets around. As far as OpenRaster implementation go I see the fact that MyPaint and the GIMP plugin discards all unknown/unused information in the files as problematic. Perhaps this behavior should be defined in the standard? Also, if we are to ship something that use "visibilty" layer attribute, that should be standardized as per previous discussion on #create. --85.166.162.57 19:12, 2 October 2009 (UTC)

Version 0.70 of shared-mime-info which has image/openraster available has just hit Debian unstable, so we shouldn't need to wait long for this. --Achadwick 15:22, 8 October 2009 (UTC)