So what is going on in the konv land? Version 1.2.2 will be released soon, which is great enough but I have something even better for you.
Post 1.2.2 we will have DCC Whiteboard!
(imagine the 20th century/fox music: “dadadadaaaa…dadadadaa”)

A basic “multiplayer paint” which implements dcc whiteboard, specs can be found here. It won’t be in 1.2.2 as it is not ready but, as you can see, it basically works :)

Now to the show-stoppers, the whiteboard specs lack many things to keep the drawing 100% in sync.
For example it is impossible to keep the size of the image in sync, it has no real size, but how can you save an image without a size? I ended up resizing the image as needed but with a limit to 2048×2048 pixel, for the sake of all broken gfx drivers. And now imagine one side uses floodfill with a different image size than the other, the result will be different. I *could* implement a extra resize signal, but that is not part of the whiteboard specs.
Also for text if one side uses a really fancy font there is no guarantee that the other side has it as well, so we need another extra “has font” check.
Until now nothing unsolvable, but I have no clue how to keep the picture in sync if both sides draw a rectangle on the same place with a time difference smaller than the network delay.

As conclusion, dcc whiteboard is meant for fun painting, it will never replace a krita or gimp, not even kolourpaint (ok maybe kolourpaint at some point). And dcc whiteboard also shows that dcc is not only made for filesharing ;-)
Try sharing your files with kolourpaint, hm… well I think you could if you really want, but please don’t.

This entry was posted on Thursday, January 21st, 2010 at 21:30 and is filed under KDE, Konversation. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.