First off I just want to say that this blog post should have been posted up much earlier than this. The server that
my website is hosted on experienced some downtime, as upgrades were being completed.
So I have taken yet another step towards my goal, the 0.0.4.5 Alpha release turned out great despite my worries about
the colour dialog. Some people have asked me about the dialog and will it remain the way it is currently. I know that
people are concerned that you can only choose a single colour and it will not provide the same features as the original
PhotoFiltre colour dialog. However this colour dialog along with the current text tool are only placeholders until
I can come up with something better or I get a contribution of something better.
Now onto my plans for the next Alpha release. I think at the moment it would be the perfect time to try out
creating a new file using the new file dialog. I lack knowledge regarding the theory of image editing,
so this could be most difficult. If you have an understanding of how image editors work or should be programmed
then please send me an e-mail to help me out!
The way I understand it is: An image is pixels on a canvas and this canvas is contained inside a child window or
internal frame to use Java terminology. It sounds simple but I have a feeling it must be more complicated than this!
Next I think its important to do some code optimisations on how the GUI is loaded. Currently it is not as efficient as
it could be but I have been putting off these performance improvements as I expect them to be time consuming and very
difficult. It is vitally important that they are done early before the codebase gets very large and it will benefit
the project greatly as it only needs to be done once.
Lastly I want to try and get mouse icons working for the tools on the toolpalette. It could prove most difficult as
even editors like Pinta do not have such a feature yet.