On Tue, Oct 11, 2005 at 08:22:39PM -0300, bulia byak wrote:
Another focus of Xara is on bitmap manipulation. They have a
built-in
Picture Editor, something like a primitive Photoshop. I think it's safe to bet Inkscape will never have such a thing - why do it if we can just call Gimp instead.
Well, depends what you mean by "have such a thing": calling gimp code would count as having such a thing; though currently we don't do that at all to my knowledge, and we certainly don't currently make it easy to edit embedded bitmaps, or have gimp layers implemented as separate <image/>s, or allow other vector objects to be visible when editing a bitmap.
pjrm.
This point reminds of another area we could cooperate. We do have an integrated bitmap / photo editor, because in principle I don't believe you can or should separate the two worlds. Real users want to mix photos and vector artwork, and so it's simply more convenient to be able to do this directly from within your vector editor.
(And Microsoft Expression will be majoring on this point - integrated bitmap and vector editing, indeed the only significant change MS have made to Expression they bought, is adding a fully integrated bitmap editor)
So in Xara X we added an API to call an external photo editor, so that you could double click a photo, (or a bitmap fill) edit your picture, close the window and the edited result is passed back. The theory was that we could use any external editor and were not going to make it specifically the Xara Picture Editor. So in principle this is exactly like you guys calling out to GIMP.
But our Xara <-> Picture Editor API sucks, partly because it's very COM based and partly because it's become very specific to our implementation of the photo editor. Worse, our Picture Editor component is going to be an absolute dog to port to Linux because unlike Xara X, it was never designed to be the slightest bit platform portable. GDI+ code everywhere, transparent fading, rounded dialogs, the lot. This remains a major potential stumbling block for the port down the road (it will be the last component we do). So we should also be changing our API to be more general purpose. So the user can configure their favourite photo editor to be called when they want to edit a photo.
So, if this is a feature that you guys are thinking of adding to Inkscape, lets have a common API to call external photo editors. Then we can be compatible - we can both use and call Photo editors in a compatible way. What's more this provides an added incentive for the various photo editors out there to support this API and so greatly increase the interop and choice for all users.
I might be talking b**ls here, because for all I know Linux already has an open, common API to pass photos to and from the various picture editors. But it seems another area where we could both possibly develop a feature in parallel, but both benefit equally from it.
Or is this rubbish?