Paint it Black

Hi all,

It has been long time I do not write anything here, so it is a good time for an update.

The news:
well, this year I got accepted to Google Summer of Code and last week I started working on my proposal.
The first feature I suggested is the support to send Ink Draws, and I’m working on it right now.
Just for the record I’m posting here the first screenshot of what I have done so far.

Now the bad news:
MSN supports two kinds of image formats: Gif and Isf (Ink Serialized format, from Microsoft).
My first idea was to store the draw to a QImage (from qt4) and then save it to gif, but unfortunately there is no gif writing support in Qt. The Isf format is now open, and there is a library made by the aMSN people to manage the Isf images, but unfortunately third party clients still does not support Isf.
People from kopete-devel@ ML said that it is ok to link kopete to an external library (like giflib) to manage that, but the right approach was suggested by my mentor, that is to write a QImageIO plugin to deal with this gif stuff.

At the moment I’m busy fixing other bugs and adding some more stuff to the Ink plugin (pen color and size), but as soon as possible I will evaluate what is the best approach (giflib, QImageIO plugin, other? suggestions are welcome) considering my programming skills.

For now I’m using a dirty trick: I save the image in PNG and then.. well.. QProcess::exec(“convert old.png new.gif”);, but do not worry, I will not keep that in the code 🙂