Krita Developer Fundraiser: let’s squash the bugs

The 2018 Krita fundraiser is over! Thanks for participating!

Our goal this year is to make it possible for the team to focus on one thing only: stability. Our previous fundraisers were all about features: adding new features, extending existing features. Thanks to your help, Krita has grown at a break-neck speed! But writing new code is only half the story. This time, we want to focus on squashing bugs and stabilizing the new code. And sometimes things aren’t out-and-out broken, but unpleasant to work with. A bit uglier than needed. More cumbersome than you’d like. That needs fixing as well!

In short, we want to fix bugs, make Krita more stable and bring more polish and shine to all the features we have made possible together!

What’s happening?

Read our last updates!

Why do we need funding?

We have many enthusiastic supporters who donate to Krita through the development fund, or when they download Krita. That’s awesome! But we need an extra push so we can keep funding Dmitry, Boudewijn and Jouni, and who knows? Maybe we’ll be able to grow the team, too, with your help. The money we raise will go directly to the developers to keep improving the program!

These developers also help the Krita wider community and mentor new programmers. The community of volunteer contributor does a lot of great work on the website, manual, bug triaging, community support, as well as improving the program. By having a stable core of people funded to work on Krita, the entire community gets stronger and stronger.

So… What do we propose to do the next year?

The Krita team.

Full time bug squashing!

With your support, we’ll be tackling as many bugs as we can. The goal is zero bugs, but that’s unattainable, of course — bugs, like taxes, will always be with us. But we know we can improve Krita a lot! Sometimes it will be easy, sometimes we’ll have to do major surgery. But armed with compiler and debugger, we are ready!

You vote on what gets improved

You decide which areas of Krita we work on. We’ve grouped together all the bugs and wishes from our bug system into 10 major areas. Ordered by number of reports, the list starts with papercuts and ends with layer styles. Our goal is to clean the bug database. This means that we make an effort to triage and if confirmed, fix every bug. Zero bugs — well, that’s a pipe-dream, but we want to make a really big effort here.

We must have our priorities right, and that’s where you come in! Everyone who joins in the campaign between Saturday 15th of September through Monday 15th of October will be given a chance to vote on priorities, and we’ll get started on what you all agree is the most important. We’re going to try to give everyone a vote as soon as possible and keep the results tallied!

Tell us what you think is most important!

This is what we’re proposing

We’ve been combing through the bugs database to find out what gets reported most often. The actual numbers change day by day, of course, but here’s the top ten!

Papercuts. 229 reports. Smaller or bigger things that hamper your productivity. Things that make Krita look less polished than it should be. But related to how tools work, or the docker panels. Usability issues. Places where a little more work would make a huge difference in your daily work.

Brush engines. 82 reports. Things to do with how Krita paints, or switches between eraser mode and painting mode. Usability issues when working with brushes, actual bugs where the painting goes wrong.

Animation. 64 reports. Animation is still new to Krita, and not only are there bugs, there are also many things that still need to be implemented. This is all about rounding out animation, making it dependable and more fun to use.

Color Management. 46 reports. Krita is already really good with color management, but things could be better. We could focus on improving the color selectors, fix issues with blending modes, improve support for higher bit depths or where rounding errors give weird results.

Layers. 43 reports. These are the tough bugs. Where under certain circumstances, the image doesn’t get recalculated correctly. Or where exporting a group doesn’t work as expected. Or where the layer panel could be easier to use. Or where using file layers is a bit shaky.

Vector Objects and Tools. 27 reports. We gave this a lot of love in the past year! But as soon as things get easier to use, more people start using them, and more and more things turn up that would be really nice, really useful to have. As well as bugs. A feature that doesn’t get used, doesn’t have any bugs, right? So, if you care about vector layers, tools, objects — this is your chance to make us spend some more time on them.

Text. 19 reports. Ah… The text tool and text object. It’s better than it was, but there are still problems here. We won’t be able to solve all of them: we originally wanted to create a complete new layout engine, but never actually had the time for that. This topic is about making the interaction better, and making more of the SVG text standard available. We probably won’t be getting into improved text layout or text on path here.

Shortcuts and Canvas Input. 18 reports. A complicated topic, this is all about how shortcuts can be redefined, and then conflict with each other, or not. How we’re loading and saving shortcuts. How some buttons cannot be adde to the toolbar because they only exist once an image has been loading. A perennial headache, and we need your help to make it possible for us to sit down and take the time to solve this for once and for all!

Resource Management and Tagging. 18 reports. Work on this topic has already started… We’re working on making resources load faster, take less memory until they are actually used and making adding, removing and tagging resources work better. But it’s much more work than we originally thought, so we need your help here!

Photoshop Layer Styles. 16 reports. Krita is unique in supporting Photoshop Layer Styles. We got a long way! But there are still bugs, performance issues and missing features — in short, more work is needed!

Rewards

We have something extra for our most generous supporters. If you donate 50 euros or more, you will get a free download of Ramon Miranda’s Digital Atelier brush present bundle. And it’s not just a bundle with awesome painterly brush presets — it also includes two hours of in-depth video tutorials on creating new brush presets for Krita!

Not an “All or Nothing” Campaign

We’re not using Kickstarter this time, or any other 3rd party funding platform for that matter. That means that you can donate right away using paypal, or one of the banking options, or even bitcoin. Not just credit-cards anymore, though those are supported, too!

There is also no minimum amount needed for this campaign to ‘succeed’. The money you spend can immediately be put to use: as a ball-park figure, €3500 gets a month of full-time bug squashing.

When you donate, there is an option to sign up for future updates. This will help you stay up to date with with what is going on with the fundraisers or the bugs that we fix from the campaign. During the campaign there will be regular updates; afterwards we will only announce new releases and really important things.

Support Krita!

That’s it! With your help, we can make Krita better than ever before. We will do everything in our power to keep Krita going at the pace that it currently is going. The future is going to be an exciting place. If you have any questions or comments, please leave a message at the bottom of this page.

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