Krita Now

Krita currentlly has the following welcome screen:

It offers easy links to get started with a new or existing file, recent documents, an indication you can drop a file on the welcome screen to open it, a bunch of community links and a news ticker (off by default because it accesses the internet, as well as an open source notice and request for support.

On Android and ChromeOS, users can support Krita by buying a batch.

For Krita 5.2, slated for September 1st, we want to update this with at least a campaign banner on top for our 2023 September fund raising campaign.

Although the current welcome screen is intentationally understated and doesn't grab the attention much, it also looks old-fashioned and people simply aren't paying enough attention to it. Since our income is dependent on users realizing that they can support Krita and that there's cool stuff to be seen, we want a more attention-grabbing welcome screen.

Clip Studio

One example is Clip Studio. Clip Studio has a separate startup application that takes the role of welcome screen and allows the user to start one or more applications. We do not want a window separate from Krita's main window, though.

This offers a variety of options on the left hand side. Irionically, the home page (shown here) is accessed by the Clip Studio button in the top bar that also has the clip sutdio clould login stuff on the right, and that doesn't look like it's part of the page selector on the left.

Recent files are shown in the Works bar, unimportant news like new versions in the News section in small blue letters, and more flashy news stuff in the cards views underneath that. This is the same page as the News/Highlights tab option at the bottom.

There are various other options: Manage Works is a complex projects manager, Manage Materials is about resources bought through the Clip Studio cloud. There are tutorials, an asset (resources) browser, a way to share your work, a link to the forum and a link to the bug tracker (literally a link, it doesn't open an embedded but report page).

Requirements for Krita

For Krita 5.2, we need at least:

• A colorful banner announcing the fund raiser, running for a month (ideally, we can later activate the banner and replace it by changing something on krita.org)

and preferably

• A news section that shows the first image in the news item as a thumbnail
• A more attractive display of the recent documents

In Krita, this is currently implemented as a combination of QWidgets and HTML. We can easily move things around, as long as we keep in mind screensize limitations. Optionally, we can decide to haide the toolbars, toolbox and dockers when the welcome screen is visible.

Going Forward

We have already tried to create a new welcome page in QML/Kirigami: https://invent.kde.org/graphics/krita/-/merge_requests/1522

Initially this was also meant to figure out how to integrate Kirigami and QtQuick2 into Krita. During development, we noticed that it would be much easier to begin with a good, modern design and then turn it into a welcome page in QML than to develop the design while coding...

Requirements for the completely revamped welcome screen are:

• Easy access to recent files
  • Recent files and Krita news must be shown in the default page
  • Krita news must be shown with thumbnails of images if present
• Easy creation of new and opening of existing files
• A showcase of featured images from artists (see https://phabricator.kde.org/T15892) from https://krita-artists.org
• Access to the manual, bug tracker, community forum and tutorials (in the form of our youtube channel)
• A way to dynamically add content (if internet access is allowed) such as campaign banners or release banners
• Hide the toolbox, toolbar, statusbar and docker palettes
• if too big, be scrollable both on scrolbar and touch systems