phatch-dev team mailing list archive

[Stani <spe.stani.be@xxxxxxxxx>]

Juho wrote:
>> I hope my initial comments were not too harsh. I still have some in
>> store (ie. proper preview and co.). :)
Good you mention preview. In that sense I also have more comments ;-)
I think it is important to do a step back first and look to the big
picture of the future of Phatch. There are many dreams for Phatch
which are not implemented due to a lack of manpower:
- multiple backends besides pil (especially imagemagick and also
necessary command line tools such as dcraw, ...)
- layer support for compositing
- life preview (preview update as you slide)
- jQuery interface (for desktop with webkit like gwibber and for
server as web application)
- interaction with the best graphics software (Blender, inkscape, ufraw, ...)
- multiprocessing (luckily Ido volunteered for this)
- installers for windows and mac (increase market share drastically)

... and once Phatch is perfect for images:
- general purpose batch processor, not just for images, but for
text/xml/yaml/processing/video encoding/...

Some of these will requires a new pipeline structure, so that multiple
command line actions (eg imagemagick and friends) can be efficiently
chained after each other or layers can be handled properly. To tell
you the truth, I would prefer to concentrate first all refactoring
efforts there. These are things which really will push Phatch, which
is an end user program, forward and turn into something huge. As the
current system might be not perfect or leave room for improvement,
that is not what IMO our users are for waiting first. Seeing how much
energy you have Juho, I really would prefer if you would join us to
work on these major features first. Life preview is connected to if we
switch to jquery+webkit. I really would like to do it, if we could get
some jquery manpower on board. It would allow me as an architect and
visual artist to develop the dream interface for Phatch and it would
make more suitable for servers. For every new release we should see
what is realistic with the current manpower and limit ourselves so we
could have a half year cycle release ideally.

I did a poll once before:
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=726547
At the end I decided to start with exif as that was half implemented
as read only and it felt more natural to implement write support. Also
the fact that Robin joined the team, pushed this forward ;-) It is
often good to implement a feature already slightly, as the feedback
from the exif use was necessary to make the write support step now.
That is why I wanted the 'Geek" action (the command line one) as this
will give new feedback when we want to integrate command line tools
such as imagemagick properly.

The refactoring of the UI internals (with or without YAML) seems less
a priority for me compared to these major features. I'm not saying it
is not good or not important, but less important. Everyone should work
on what is fun for him and what has more priority. If that is YAML for
you, let's look at it together and than you can go for it. But just to
seduce you, imagemagick support would be wonderful as this was
designed for batch processing from the beginning, and it fills many
painly holes that PIL has. Just to give one example: gaussian blur.
The blur in the shadow option is really a pain as with PIL the maximum
is a blur with 3px. So the only way to make it more blurry is to
iterate. That takes a lot of ressources and time and besides it will
never be able to achieve blurs with higher radius. Next to the fact
that imagemagick provides basic needed functionality, it can also do
some very cool stuff:
http://www.imagemagick.org/Usage/
http://www.imagemagick.org/Usage/advanced/
http://www.imagemagick.org/Usage/transform/

(I would prefer to use imagemagick rather than pythonmagick as these
bindings are not complete and hard to find for Windows & Mac, unless
this has changed.)

Best regards,

Stani