Future of RealWorld Paint

Published by Vlasta on March 25th 2013.

"I must simplify RWPaint, no new features, it is too big already." That's what I keep telling, but it does not work. I just cannot overcome my nature, 'cause this one new function would be so cool and I simply must add it to the software. Oh, well.

Near future - documentation

In the next weeks and months, I'll try to work on the biggest weakness of RWPaint - the documentation. It is incredibly boring, compared to coding, but it needs to be done and I have neglected it for far too long.

Hey readers, is there any particular topic I should focus on? For me, it is kind of hard to guess what are the most problematic points for new users of RWPaint. BTW did you know that you can track my progress on the recent changes page?

As soon as my strength of will is depleted, I'll most likely get back to coding. One thing that I wanted to put into the current RWPaint, bud decided to postpone it, is the "Stroke" tool.

A Stroke tool?

Yes, let's look on the Shape tool in the current version. You may think about it as a parent of Rectangle, Ellipse, Polygon and Text tools. Everything you can do with these tools, you can also do with Shape. More importantly, in a vector layer, if you create an object using one of these tools, you can convert it to Shape and then further modify it. For example, you can draw an circle and then cut a section out to get a piece of a pie graph.

The Stroke tool should eventually act in the same way as Shape and unify Lines and Curves. Just as the Shape tool is more difficult to use that Rectangle tool, the Stroke tool will be harder to use than Line or Curve. On the other hand, it will allow you to combine straight and curved segments and refine any part of the stroke without affecting the rest.

It would be also very nice if the Stroke object could be converted to a Shape object, but that is more difficult than it sounds. So, no promises.

A plug-in or a media pack

I have already published a bunch of new and old plug-ins for the current RWPaint. I might release more in the future. Also, I will help anyone, who wishes to create their own plug-in or media pack.

Far future - more simplification

One of the changes in the new RWPaint was the redesign of the the color and fill style panels. You can expect similar changes in other parts of the application in future versions.

Let me give you one example: image cropping. There are 4 different ways to crop an image. You can use the dedicated Crop tool or you can use the Transform tool and its context menu to crop the image to floating selection. Another option is the Canvas size operation and the last one is the elusive and mysterious Remove empty border operation.

Each of these tools and commands works slightly differently and their functionality overlaps a lot. My long-term goal is to somehow unify them and make the application easier for new users.