Graphics Archive

In January of 2021 I was exploring the corpus of Skins I collected for the Winamp Skin Museum and found some that seemed corrupted, so I decided to explore them. Winamp skins are actually just zip files with a different file extension, so I tried extracting their files to see what I could find. This ended up leading me down a series of wild rabbit holes. ↫ Jordan Eldredge I’m not going to spoil any of this.

Twenty-five years. A quarter century. That’s how long we’ve been working on Krita. Well, what would become Krita. It started out as KImageShop, but that name was nuked by a now long-dead German lawyer. Then it was renamed to Krayon, and that name was also nuked. Then it was renamed to Krita, and that name stuck. I only became part of Krita in 2003, when Krita was still part of KDE’s suite of productivity applications, KOffice, later renamed to Calligra… And I became maintainer of Krita in 2004, when Patrick Julien handed over the baton. That means that I’ve been around Krita for about twenty of those twenty-five years, so I’ll hope you, dear reader, will forgive me for making this a really personal post; a very large part of my life has been tied up with Krita, and it’s going to show. ↫ Krita website While it may not be as popular as something like LibreOffice due to fewer people needing it, Krita is a cornerstone application of the Linux desktop (it’s also available for Windows and macOS), and I honestly can barely believe it’s been around for this long. I’m about as far removed from being an artistic painter as a squirrel’s tail is from being a functioning propeller engine so I don’t have need for Krita, but I’m always surprised by how many people mention using it for their painting endeavours. I wish the project and its developers another successful 25 years, and they’re going to need it – Krita 5.3 is coming soon(ish), and the much more involved Krita 6.0, which makes the jump fro Qt 5 to Qt 6, is also in the works. On a personal note, I’m online acquainted with the lead maintainer of Krita, and as she alludes to at the end of the article, COVID hit her hard, and maintaining such a huge open source project isn’t easy to begin with. Much respect for keeping it up, and of course, to everyone else contributing to the project.

But despite all this chaos and temptation, operating system vendors knew better. To this day, they follow THE convention: checkboxes are square, radio buttons are round. Maybe it was part of their internal training. Maybe they had experienced art directors. Maybe it was just luck. I don’t know — it doesn’t really matter — but — somehow — they managed to stick to the convention. Until this day. Apple is the first major operating system vendor who had abandoned a four-decades-long tradition. Their new visionOS — for the first time in the history of Apple — will have round checkboxes. ↫ Nikita Prokopov Unsightly. A lack of taste always betrays itself.

Adobe has announced that it’s acquiring Figma, a popular design platform, for around $20 billion in cash and stock. After rumors surfaced early on Thursday about a potential acquisition, Adobe made it official in a press release shortly afterward. It’s big news in the design and development world, particularly as Figma has been competing heavily with Adobe’s XD products in recent years. I had never heard of Figma before, but it seems it’s actually quite popular – for example, Microsoft uses it to design Office and Windows. This seems like a big catch for Adobe, but a competitor less, too, and that’s not exactly great for the market.

Wayland (the protocol and architecture) is still lacking proper consideration for color management. Wayland also lacks support for high dynamic range (HDR) imagery which has been around in movie and broadcasting industry for a while now (e.g. Netflix HDR UI). While there are well established tools and workflows for how to do color management on X11, even X11 has not gained support for HDR. There were plans for it (Alex Goins, DeepColor Visuals), but as far as I know nothing really materialized from them. Right now, the only way to watch HDR content on a HDR monitor in Linux is to use the DRM KMS API directly, in other words, not use any window system, which means not using any desktop environment. Kodi is one of the very few applications that can do this at all. This is a story about starting the efforts to fix the situation on Wayland. This is a great article to read – and an important topic, too. Colour management and HDR should be a core aspect of Wayland, and these people are making it happen.

If you have used tools like Google’s PageSpeed Insights, you probably have run into a suggestion to use “next-gen image formats”, namely Google’s WebP image format. Google claims that their WebP format is 25 – 34% smaller than JPEG at equivalent quality. I think Google’s result of 25-34% smaller files is mostly caused by the fact that they compared their WebP encoder to the JPEG reference implementation, Independent JPEG Group’s cjpeg, not Mozilla’s improved MozJPEG encoder. I decided to run some tests to see how cjpeg, MozJPEG and WebP compare. I also tested the new AVIF format, based on the open AV1 video codec. AVIF support is already in Firefox behind a flag and should be coming soon to Chrome if this ticket is to be believed. Spoiler alert: WebP doesn’t really provide any benefits, and since websites generally use JPEG as a fallback anyway, you end up with having to store two images at the same time, defeating the purpose entirely.

Inkscape 1.0 has been released. A major milestone was achieved in enabling Inkscape to use a more recent version of the software used to build the editor’s user interface (namely GTK+3). Users with HiDPI (high resolution) screens can thank teamwork that took place during the 2018 Boston Hackfest for setting the updated-GTK wheels in motion. This is just the tip of the iceberg of this massive release.

Today, it seems we’re on another track completely. Despite being endlessly fawned over by an army of professionals, Usability, or as it used to be called, “User Friendliness”, is steadily declining. During the last ten years or so, adhering to basic standard concepts seems to have fallen out of fashion. On comparatively new platforms, I.E. smartphones, it’s inevitable: the input mechanisms and interactions with the display are so different from desktop computers that new paradigms are warranted. Worryingly, these paradigms have begun spreading to the desktop, where keyboards for fast typing and pixel-precision mice effectively render them pointless. Coupled with the flat design trend, UI elements are increasingly growing both bigger and yet somehow harder to locate and tell apart from non-interactive decorations and content. I doubt anyone here will disagree with the premise of this article, even if you might disagree with some of the examples. These past few weeks I’ve set up virtual machines of all the old Windows releases just to remind myself of just how good the graphical user interface introduced in Windows 95 was perfected over the years, culminating in the near-perfect Classic theme in Windows XP and Server 2003. Later iterations of the Classic theme, in Vista and onward, would sadly retain some of the Aero UI elements even when setting the Classic theme, ruining the aesthetic, and of course, the Classic theme is gone altogether now – you can’t set it in Windows 10. Similarly, Platinum in Mac OS 9 is still more coherent, more usable, and more intentful than whatever macOS brought to the table over the years. We can find solace in the fact that trends tend to be cyclical, so there’s a real chance the pendulum will eventually wing back.

Glass is a simulated operating system user interface (UI) project and it is being made with Unity 2018.4. It is not a real OS, although everything in the package is functional and can be changed easily. Not really an operating system, of course, but still a fascinating project. It also highlights just how versatile modern game engines really are – this is the same engine some of my favourite modern cRPGs and Cities: Skylines are running on.

What explains the popularity of terminals with 80×24 and 80×25 displays? A recent blog post “80×25” motivated me to investigate this. The source of 80-column lines is clearly punch cards, as commonly claimed. But why 24 or 25 lines? There are many theories, but I found a simple answer: IBM, in particular its dominance of the terminal market. In 1971, IBM introduced a terminal with an 80×24 display (the 3270) and it soon became the best-selling terminal, forcing competing terminals to match its 80×24 size. The display for the IBM PC added one more line to its screen, making the 80×25 size standard in the PC world. The impact of these systems remains decades later: 80-character lines are still a standard, along with both 80×24 and 80×25 terminal windows. As noted, a follow-up to our earlier discussion.

A rollicking and surprisingly political blog post takes us through a fascinating history, connecting 1860-era US bank note presses to the 80×20 terminal standard, passing though the Civil War, the US census, mechanical computers, punch cards, IBM, early display technology, VT100, ANSI, CP/M, and DOS along the way.

Rendering text, how hard could it be? As it turns out, incredibly hard! To my knowledge, literally no system renders text “perfectly”. It’s all best-effort, although some efforts are more important than others. Text rendering is, indeed, in the eye of the beholder, and often preferences revolve around what people are used to more than anything else. Still, displays with higher and higher DPI have taken some of the guesswork out of text rendering, but that doesn’t mean it’s a walk in the park now.

This is the real, full photoshop - the same codebase as the regular Photoshop, but running on the iPad with a touch UI. The Verge's Dami Lee and artist colleagues at The Verge got to test this new version of Photoshop, and they are very clear to stress that the biggest news here isn't even having the "real" Photoshop on the iPad, but the plans Adobe has for the PSD file format.

This does seem to be much more than a simple cash grab, and I'm very intrigued to see if Adobe finally taking the iPad serious as a computing platform will convince others to do so, too - most notably Apple.

This program has been around since the early '90s, and runs, among other platforms, on Haiku today. Amazing.