Ever since our first kickstarter in 2014, we’ve been building every release of Krita for OSX. The initial work to make that possible took two weeks of full-time hacking. We did the work because Krita on OSX was a stretch goal and we wanted to show that it was possible to bring Krita to OSX, not because we thought two weeks would be enough to create a polished port. After all, the port to Windows took the best part of a year. We didn’t make the stretch goal, and the port to OSX got stuck.

And that shows. We build Krita on a mid-2011 Mac Mini that runs Mavericks. That has a couple of consequences: Krita doesn’t run well on anything but Mavericks, and the hack-build-test cycle takes about half an hour. That means that fixing bugs is nigh on impossible. Some things have been broken since the start, like OpenGL, other things broke along the way, like proper tablet support, loading and saving jpeg files. And more. Still, though we didn’t make the stretch goal, the demand for Krita on OSX is there: we’re getting about half a dozen queries a week about Krita on OSX. So, what should be the next steps?

Krita is a free, Open-Source painting tool designed for concept artists, illustrators, matte and texture artists, and the VFX industry. Krita has been in development for over 10 years and has had an explosion in growth recently. It offers many common and innovative features to help the amateur and professional alike. WARNING: Mac OS X 10.10.5. August 13, 2015, 11:24pm #1. WARNING WARNING WARNING. Do not install this update. The version of BugSplat bundled. The XP-Pen Star G960S/Star G960S Plus is compatible with Windows® 10/8/7, Linux (Detailed versions), Mac OS X® 10.10 and above, Android 6.0 and above. Also works with many major software such as Photoshop®, SAI®, Painter®, Illustrator®, Clip Studio®, GIMP®, Medibang®, Krita®, Fire Alpaca®, Blender® 3D and more.

Step one: define the goals. That’s easy. Krita on OSX should run on all versions of OSX that are supported by Qt5, be a good citizen, that is, come as an app bundle in a disk image, save settings to the usual locations, use the regular temporary file location and provide the same feature set and performance as on Windows and Linux. (Which might be difficult because of problems with Apple’s OpenGL implementation: Apple wants developers to use their platform-specific alternative.)

Os X 10.11.4

Step two: estimate the effort needed. With the Qt5/Kf5 port of Krita, estimation is more difficult because only now people are creating the first Kf5-based applications on OSX, and are running into new and interesting problems. Things like finding resources in standard locations: for Krita 2.x, we had to hack KDE’s standard paths implementation quite severely. The main issues are: OpenGL, tablet support, standard paths, bundle creation, platform integration and optimization.

My best effort estimation is three to four months of nearly full-time work. That’s similar to the Qt5 port, and comes to about 12,000 to 16,000 euros. Add in a decently fast Mac, and we’re looking at, roughly, an investment for 15,000 to 19,000 euros. Add a bit for unexpected events, and let’s say, 20,000 euros. A lot of money, but actually quite cheap for a development effort of this kind. It’s more than the Krita Foundation has availabe, though…

There is a secondary consideration, borne from experience with the Kf5/Qt5 port: if it will take three months of development time, then that development time is not spent on other things, like bug fixes or kickstarter features. That will have an immediate impact on the project! The port has already made the bug list grow horribly long, because work on the port meant less work on bug fixes.

If we decide to it, step three then must be: do it… There are a couple of possibilities.

Os X Download

The first: run a kickstarter campaign to get the money. Wolthera and I actually started setting one up. But we’re just not sure whether a kickstarter campaign is going to succeed, and to fail would be really bad. It would reflect badly on Krita as a wider project and might jeopardize the 2016 kickstarter campaign to fund the next round of feature improvements. It might even cannibalize the 2016 campaign. We’re not sure how likely that is, though, because we’re not sure the campaigns would be targetting the same user group. Right now, our campaigns are supported in equal parts by free software enthousiasts and by artists. We’re not reaching the OSX community, because Krita isn’t ready on OSX, but conversely, we don’t know how to reach the OSX community. We don’t even know whether the OSX community can be involved enough to reach a funding level of at least 15,000 euros.

That makes starting a kickstarter campaign (which is in itself two months of full-time work) a really dicey proposition. Even cutting the goal up into tranches of 5000 euros for the basic port (and a new Mac) and then stretch goals of 2500 euros seemed chancy to us. Plus, if we get stuck at 5000 euros there really is not enough money to do a decent port.

The second possibility: fund it out of pocket, and try to get the investment back. That could be done by making Krita for OSX exclusively available on Steam, or by a possible increase in donations because we can now reach the OSX user community. The first option could be scotched by someone taking our work and making Krita available gratis on OSX. That would be totally OK of course: Krita is free and open source. Nothing says we have to give our binaries aways, but on the other hand, nothing can stop anyone else from giving our binaries away. Or making their own, once the hard work is done. The second possibility, increased donations, is a kind of gamble. It might work out, or it might not…

Krita For Os X 10.10 S X 10 10 For Mac

The third possibility: fund the development out of pocket, but take a longer period to work on it. Get a Mac and devote, say, two weeks of initial work, and then invest a day a week to OSX. Slice up the week. A bit like I’m now doing four days a week of paid non-krita development to fill up my empty bank account, one day a week of porting and one day a week of stable-version bug fixing.

Krita For Os X 10.10 Download

The final possibility is to do nothing. Maybe a capable OSX-loving developer will come around and start doing the work out of love for Krita. But I’m not sanguine about that happening, since we’ve seen four or five people trying to build Krita on OSX, and all but two failed. The first attempt was using MacPorts, which doesn’t lead to an installable app bundle, and the second attempt was the one done for the 2014 Kickstarter.

Krita For Os X 10.10

Which brings us full-circle to the question: what now?