Akira: Qt

[rnd-ash]

Please support QT?

[alichay]

What benefit would this gain from running with Qt?
Anyway, that's kind of a massive undertaking, so I doubt @Alecaddd would go through the effort of building Akira for GTK+ and Qt.

[TixieBorg]

For multiplateform I suppose.
Alessandro said he plan to dev Akira to be a linux app, not a multiplaform one.

[Alecaddd]

Hi, thanks for the request but I won't refactor the application in Qt. It's a completely different code base from Vala and I'm not planning to support Windows or MacOS, like ever 😃
Just a native Linux app.
Cheers

[julientaq]

Not reopening the issue @alecaddd, but i want to give my two cents about that, because, if you dont support other OS (which i can understand without any issue) you need to be sure that you'll be able to support collaboration between OS and computers.

The way i see it, we, linux designers, are put outside of the design game not only because the support for our beloved OSes is not there, it's also because the app dont let you share assets. I am curently in the situation where i need to set a working space for two designers using Mac and sketch, Windows designers using Adobe XD and myself, going from figma to inkscape, to code svg to show animations.

We're stuck.

There is no options for now to work together first and foremost, because SVG is implemented partially in the different applications. It would be good, if the export and import of svg was made the right way so we could create some spaces for discussions between users, whatever tool they work with.

This is the best way to show that linux and akira, are powerful tools, but are also friendly and open to others.

[alichay]

Probably, what'll end up happening is someone (either @Alecaddd or someone else just making a pull request) will add support for the filetypes of other design software. Probably not PSD, at least for a while, because it's a trainwreck, but afaik the .sketch format is just JSON, so it wouldn't be hard to support something like that. Linux exclusivity doesn't mean that the project can't play nice with everyone else.

[julientaq]

exactly my thoughts.

But i'd rather have a complete svg export/import than just an import from sketch.
Especially with all those coming and already here apps: figma, invidion design. etc.

And at the same time, sketch being json, it should be easy to create an importer.

This is become out of scope of the issue that is already out of scope.

[Alecaddd]

@julientaq thank you so much for sharing your point of view, I totally agree with you.
I have "big" plans for Akira in terms of collaboration between designers, shared assets manager, export/import, etc. But for now, it's all too early and a bit complicated.

The main goal is to have the default saved file form in JSON, in order to properly handle future version and updates of the application. It's always awful having issues while opening a file created with an older version of the software, and to avoid that, JSON is the most flexible option for me to handle and update without destroying the work of the designer.

A full SVG export, including per-layer export, is the next step. The app is natively using SVG to handle shapes and text, so that should come pretty natural.

For now, it's still a bit up in the air as we're still developing the main canvas library to properly handle objects in a sketch-like way. Nothing like that exists in Open source right now, so it's a lot of tries and fails process.

Thanks for your passion and your interest in Akira, I'm working every night after work to make it happen.

Cheers

[julientaq]

Go @Alecaddd !

[Alecaddd]

Ahaha, thanks, everyone.
I should probably start writing all these stuff into the Wiki of this repo, just to prevent future questions that I already answered.

I'll do that, sooner or later, right now, I'm struggling with SVG v2 in generating cone gradients....it's...so...painful 😭