v2.0 DevLog #5


The last developer blog on the upcoming v2.0 Studio release was in April last year. This shows you how busy I have been with the Community Edition until now. I consider v1.5.7 to be the last community edition release for a while, so I can focus all of my efforts into completing the v2.0 version of Studio.

Today is another dedicated development day. In case you don’t know what I’m talking about I did mention my plans for this year in this post. This is only the third development day so far. I have a log of my progress on these days to measure and keep track of what I have completed each day. I’m happy to list them out here:

Day 1

  • Updated v2.0 src based on recent fixes from CE.
  • Created a new pricing page for the website.
  • Added a login to the downloads page for the new members area.

Day 2

  • Finished the Studio members area.
  • Branded the new Studio version.
  • Started layer support for Studio. (OpenRaster Support)

Day 3

  • Updated the website CMS and Plugins/Themes.
  • Fixed the front page JS becoming corrupted on page save.
  • Added back in Google Analytics and Ads via new Plugin.
  • Reduced image size on website to speed up load times.
  • Worked on splitting the PaintWidget class into LayerWidget and LayerItem classes.

As you probably noticed, Layer Support is high on the agenda now. We will be aiming to use the new layer system for normal images but also to support the opening and saving of OpenRaster as the default file format.

OpenRaster learnings

I don’t know everything about OpenRaster yet but basically to save you some reading. OpenRaster is a format that uses a zip like format for saving your layered image. A .ora file is similar to a zipped folder containing images and a stack.xml. The stack.xml will have layer items which point to the image source inside this zipped folder and will also have certain attributes like visibility, opacity and x, y coords. The folder will contain a mergedimage which is a layer flattened image to be used by image viewers.

Speed up Studio progress?

To help give me more dedicated days on this project to complete v2.0 of PhotoFlare you can subscribe to one of the new pricing plans.