Krita Lime PPA: always fresh versions for Ubuntu users!

A great piece of news for Ubuntu Krita users is coming today! We have just opened a repository with regular builds of Krita git master!

Link: https://launchpad.net/~dimula73/+archive/krita

The main purpose of this PPA is to provide everyone with an always fresh version of Krita, without the need to update the whole system. Now one can get all the latest Krita features without a delay.

At the moment git master version has at least three features, which are absent in Krita 2.7 Beta1 (and cannot be merged there due to code freeze):

• New "New Image From Clipboard" dialog with a nice preview widget implemented by our new contributor Matjaž Rous
• New "pseudo-infinite" canvas feature (read here) for dynamical image resizing
• New "Overview Docker" which lets you see the whole image at a glance

To install the newest Krita you need to do a few steps:

1. Check that you don't have any original calligra or krita packages provided by your distribution or project-neon (we don't check that automatically currently)
2. Add the PPA to repositories list:
   

   sudo add-apt-repository ppa:dimula73/krita

3. Update the cache: 

   sudo apt-get update 

4. Install Krita: 

   sudo sudo apt-get install krita-testing krita-testing-dbg 

Update: (not needed anymore)
After installing this package you should restart X-server to get environment variables updated!


Of course, being based on git-master may sometimes result in a bit of instability, so make sure you report any problems so we can fix them! :)

Krita 2.8 (prealpha): New "pseudo-infinite" canvas feature

— "Darn it! Again no space on my canvas for the feet! What now?"

Does this sound familiar to you? Does going to the canvas resize dialog break your workflow? Don't be frustrated anymore! Now you can just scroll down, click and... Presto! Add those happy feet to your drawing!

Now if you scroll the image behind the edge a wide button appears which you can use to expand your image up to the size of your screen!

A short example:

Upcoming Krita 2.7: Updated Drag & Drop and Clipboard functionality

Recently we spent some time on polishing the Drag & Drop and Copy & Paste functionality in Krita. It turned out that these simple things are very important for users, since they allow integrate Krita into user's workflow better. It's a pity we were not able to pay much attention to them for some time, so as time passed they became a bit buggy. Now the bugs are gone and I can say for sure that there is no bugs in these systems! (at least bugzilla and me don't know any :)

Here is a short list of capabilities you can use to integrate Krita into your workflow (will be publicly available starting from Krita 2.7 Beta 2):

1. Clipboard. Now the pasted image always gets centered right. And thank to the patch by our new contributor Sahil Nagpal the Custom Image dialog doesn't go insane when finds something in the Clipboard :)
2. Drag-and-Drop of Image-objects. You can drop any image (from Gimp or Chromium) to Krita canvas and it will be centered in the image. If you want it to be centered around the mouse position, just press Shift key while dragging. You can also drop an image directly into the Layers docker, which will allow you to choose the position of a newly created layer in the stack.
3. Drag-and-Drop of a URL. If you drop an image from Firefox (yes, Firefox doesn't wrap images into image objects) or from Dolphin, it will also be added to your image as a layer.
4. Drag-and-Drop of many images at once. Not many people know about this feature, but Krita will also handle this case =)
5. And of course, Drag-and-Drop of layers between different instances of Krita app. This feature was a tough one because of some bug in Qt's QTreeView implementation of D&D. It was always generating some spurious MouseMove events which were canceling the incoming drop. But now this finally works.

Enrico Guarnieri's beautiful 

splash screen for Krita 2.7