From kde-devel  Mon May 24 17:33:24 1999
From: Michael Koch <m_koch () bigfoot ! de>
Date: Mon, 24 May 1999 17:33:24 +0000
To: kde-devel
Subject: Re: KImage Shop? [was:Re: K abiword port]
X-MARC-Message: https://marc.info/?l=kde-devel&m=92756018422117

Am Mon, 24 May 1999 schrieb Matthias Ettrich:
>[snip]
>
>> 
>> If I remember correctly a KDE- and a GNOME-compile-option would have
>> been 
>> accepted ...
>
>I didn't receive any reply on my last offer. Noone event wanted to see the
>patch I made.
>
>> In spite of having used this program for a long time now: *please* have
>> mercy!
>> Anyone, please restart the KIMP-project -- I really hate this crappy 
>> GIMP-user-interface ...
>
>Everyone does, apparently except the GIMP developers. I always thought, GIMP was
>a Photoshop clone. I was wrong. When I recently installed a Photohop demo for
>SunOS it was by surprise more kgimp-like than gimp-like :-)  They also had a
>proper menubar, to mention one difference. 
>
>On the other hand, gimp development also suffers a bit from the chosen
>programming language, I think.  C++ could do so much better for this task,
>resulting in less and more flexible code. Qt on the other hand made it easier
>for plug-in designers to provide nicer plugin-interface dialogs.
>
>If someone here is interested, maybe it would just be the best to start a
>kimage shop from scratch. The internal data structure may be designed similar,
>so that it would be possible to run unmodified gimp-plugins with it. 
>
>It's a big project, though, but as the gimp showed, there's also some
>commercial backing possible for an application like this (support, selling
>documentation, special extensions, etc.). The GIMP kernel application is about
>130.000 lines of code. But it's very elaborate C-code with large parts dealing
>with GUI. So I'd estimate that a similar application with KDE/C++ will need
>much less code, maybe something < 30.000 lines.
>
>Michael Koch's KImage (now in KOffice) is supposed to offer lightweight and
>small image manipulation. But what about doing a full-featured thing as well?
>:-)

I agree totally with you. KDE needs a fully featured image manipulation app.

I also think, that we need a small image app for KDE/KOffice. I had a look at
KView. It is also CORBA-based now. We can use it for KOffice.

We should use KView as simple image app and making KImage as good as GIMP or
better  ;-)

We have to compatible with GIMP-Plugins. This way we can use many features of
GIMP with a KDE-look-GUI.


Last month (or so) I wrote a mail into de-devel to help me making KImage a
great choice for image manipulators but noone replied to me. This was very
frustating. If there is someone who helps me with KImage I will work on it for
a better Image manipalting app.

Or we split KImage in

    KImage Editor

and

    KImage Shop

KImage Editor could be todays KImage. KImage Shop could be a GIMP-like image
manipulation app with compatiblity to KImage Editor. Should we do this ?

CU
Michael Koch


student of computer science at
university of applied sciences
Darmstadt, Germany

KDE Enthusiast, fan and developer
Projects: KPat, KImage and Katabase
Documentation of KOM/OpenParts

mail: m_koch@bigfoot.de
www: http://heaven.riednet.wh.tu-darmstadt.de/~mkoch