Moving to Qt
This is something that people have requested for some time in the comments.
I paced the floor in circles, trying to make up my mind where the future of Linux development lies. I came to the following conclusions:
- Big projects like the Openshot video editor are switching to Qt
- Qt is now the official Ubuntu SDK
- Qt has more industrial support and better dev tools
- Qt is much more than just a C++ lib, its a whole framework of libs
Moving to Qt will allow commercial development (try looking for Gtkmm companies), a much faster path to version 1.0 and most importantly PhotoFiltre LX as a project will have a future.
Commercial Support
Next big news item. We have gained commercial support to get this Qt port and development work completed. The company
involved has made many donations to Open Source projects in the past and to give you a hint, they really like the colour
blue and its in the name. I will leave you figure out the second half of the name, shouldn’t be difficult. 🙂
The next step for me is to find the right company to parter with or put together a solid development team. I have the full spec document ready to rock,
its just about finding the right people to deliver a solid application.
Now while this is great news, the company involved will expect to make their money back at some point in time. To sort this
issue out I will need to charge money for a copy of the application, not to make profit but just to cover development costs. However, this is only a minor setback as the other option was to let the project just drop dead, since I have limited free time to develop it further.
PhotoFiltre LX – 1.0 Coming Soon
After the port of current features is completed PhotoFiltre LX will be developed all the way to version 1.0. Soon doesn’t
mean tomorrow or next week. We are looking at more of a 6 month development cycle.
I think I will start the port myself to get a feel for it and a structure in place for a company to take over.
Note: Most likely this 1.0 version will go under the name
PhotoFiltre LX Studio (same as PhotoFiltre naming scheme for Windows).
While in the beginning PhotoFiltre LX Studio will be the only PhotoFiltre LX
available, later on there will be an Opensource free PhotoFiltre LX for everyone!