Development Blog

What's going on with Drawpile's development. Showing off stuff that's in the works, but also ideas, thoughts and plans.


Dev Update: Week 47 and 48 of 2024

November 30, 2024 by askmeaboutloom

The last two weeks have been mostly smaller matters, but in turn it was quite a lot of them. Which makes the “minor changes” section in this one pretty long!

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Drawpile 2.1 Sessions on pub.drawpile.net

November 29, 2024 by askmeaboutloom

Since December 1 2024, pub.drawpile.net no longer allows hosting sessions with the old version of Drawpile on it. That version was released over 3 years ago. Automatic reminders were sent to every session that was hosted with the old version for the past half year asking folks to tell us if there’s a reason they can’t update and nothing came up.

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Dev Update: Week 46 of 2024

November 16, 2024 by askmeaboutloom

The last week has seen some further updating after the beta release, as well as fixing some issues found in it and adding some smaller features.

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Dev Update: Week 45 of 2024

November 8, 2024 by askmeaboutloom

The last week has mostly been spent releasing Drawpile 2.2.2-beta.4, but there’s also a new color circle dock implemented.

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Dev Update: Week 44 of 2024

November 1, 2024 by askmeaboutloom

The last week has been spent cleaning up stuff for the next beta release. Unless any issues are found, the current state will become that beta release.

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Dev Update: Week 42 and 43 of 2024

October 25, 2024 by askmeaboutloom

The last two weeks have been pretty busy development-wise, cleaning up things and getting ready for the release of the next beta.

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Dev Update: Week 40 and 41 of 2024

October 13, 2024 by askmeaboutloom

The last two weeks have mostly been spent on reworking the shortcuts system to let you assign shortcuts to brushes and making the settings for them more usable with regards to finding shortcuts and resolving conflicts.

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Dev Update: Week 38 and 39 of 2024

September 28, 2024 by askmeaboutloom

The last two weeks have been spent with some new hardware in the form of a Surface tablet, which allowed several fixes and additions in regards to UI scaling and touch features.

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Dev Update: Week 36 and 37 of 2024

September 13, 2024 by askmeaboutloom

In the last two weeks, most development work has gone into expanding on brush slots and presets. A few other fixes and features also made it in there along the way.

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Dev Update: Week 34 and 35 of 2024

August 30, 2024 by askmeaboutloom

The last two weeks have mostly been spent on implementing streamed autoresets. This feature should get rid of those disruptive session resets by instead performing them in the background.

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Dev Update: Week 30 and 31 of 2024

August 3, 2024 by askmeaboutloom

The builds for Drawpile 2.2.2-beta.2 are now available to try out! Still gotta write a release announcement, make a Flatpak build and some other stuff, but you can grab them already.

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Dev Update: Week 26 and 27 of 2024

July 5, 2024 by askmeaboutloom

The last two weeks have been some more work on filling and selections. I think this may be the point where no new strings are added before the next beta release, so unless something comes to me, translations will open for it soon.

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Dev Update: Week 25 of 2024

June 21, 2024 by askmeaboutloom

This week has been some major reworking of the fill tool and some minor additions to selections and transforms.

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Dev Update: Week 23 and 24 of 2024

June 14, 2024 by askmeaboutloom

The last two weeks had some selection- and animation-related work. There will likely be a “beta” release for 2.2.2 somewhat soon, since the selection changes could use some testing.

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Dev Update: Week 22 of 2024

May 30, 2024 by askmeaboutloom

Last week’s development time has been mostly spent on implementing transforms on multiple layers at once, plus some ancillary things.

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Dev Update: Week 21 of 2024

May 24, 2024 by askmeaboutloom

Last week has mostly been some additional work on selections and transforms, plus some other smaller things.

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Dev Update: Weeks 18 to 20 of 2024

May 17, 2024 by askmeaboutloom

The last three weeks were pretty busy, but a lot of new stuff hapened. Selections and transforms are totally rewritten, there’s now a pixel ruler and the browser version of Drawpile now works better in standalone mode.

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Dev Update: Weeks 16 and 17 of 2024

April 25, 2024 by askmeaboutloom

The last two weeks have been some designing, some fixing and the start of reworking Drawpile’s selections. The design issues in particular could use some feedback.

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Removal of the Roomcode Feature

April 17, 2024 by askmeaboutloom

The “roomcode” feature will be removed in Drawpile 2.2.2. If you don’t know what this is about, you probably weren’t using it, and I doubt anybody really did anymore.

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Dev Update: Week 15 of 2024

April 11, 2024 by askmeaboutloom

This week has been some work on organizational stuff and some usability improvements.

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Dev Update: Week 14 of 2024

April 4, 2024 by askmeaboutloom

This week has been a bit more work on the OpenGL canvas renderer, adding a software renderer for folks that the hardware one doesn’t work for and some smaller features in the fill tool, the user pointers and layer creation.

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Dev Update: Weeks 12 and 13 of 2024

March 28, 2024 by askmeaboutloom

The last two weeks have mostly been work on getting the OpenGL canvas ready, which is now generally available. As usual, the stuff here is available in the continuous development release.

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Dev Update: Week 11 of 2024

March 16, 2024 by askmeaboutloom

This week has mostly been working on the faster OpenGL canvas view, but there’s also some new features and fixes.

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Animation Plans

March 11, 2024 by askmeaboutloom

The animation system in Drawpile 2.2 was basically written to serve my own purposes. My ideas on how animation ought to work is different to how it’s handled in other software, so I’ve been writing my own animation programs since a long time, well before I started working on Drawpile.

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Dev Update: Week 10 of 2024

March 9, 2024 by askmeaboutloom

This week has been spent on two things: starting work on a a more performant canvas view and handling sessions that run out of space properly.

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Solving Session Resets

March 3, 2024 by askmeaboutloom

Session auto-resets are something that happens when using Drawpile’s dedicated server. Everything stops for a bit, then the canvas rebuilds itself and you can continue drawing.

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Dev Update: Week 9 of 2024

March 2, 2024 by askmeaboutloom

Last week the browser version of Drawpile has been enabled on pub.drawpile.net and, since Windows Smart Screen seems to have mostly calmed down, version 2.1 will now prompt users to update. Otherwise it’s mostly been documentation work.

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Dev Update: Week 8 of 2024

February 24, 2024 by askmeaboutloom

Last week has documenting, bugfixing and twiddling with the servers. There’ll probably be another update for pub.drawpile.net next week so that we can allow joining via web browser on it.

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Dev Update: Week 6 of 2024

February 10, 2024 by askmeaboutloom

Last week has mostly been more fixing going on, while banging desperately around on some Windows issues that are blocking the release of 2.0.1.

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Dev Update: Week 5 of 2024

February 3, 2024 by askmeaboutloom

This week has been more bugfixing, some optimizing, some attention being given to the Windows installer and finally some documentation written up for how to animate in Drawpile.

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Dev Update: Week 4 of 2024

January 27, 2024 by askmeaboutloom

This week has been bugfixing and a bunch minor features that didn’t quite make it into 2.2.0.

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Dev Update: Week 3 of 2024

January 20, 2024 by askmeaboutloom

This week has been spent mostly with some trailing work from the 2.2.0 release, fixing up some issues that came up in it and further work on the browser version of Drawpile.

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Dev Update: Week 2 of 2024

January 13, 2024 by askmeaboutloom

This week, Drawpile 2.2.0 has been released. It no longer carries the beta moniker. This week was mostly spent on getting that ready, but also some work happening to get the web version of Drawpile out to server owners.

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Dev Update: Week 52 of 2023 and 1 of 2024

January 7, 2024 by askmeaboutloom

Happy new year! The last two weeks have mostly been further development and testing of the browser version of Drawpile. Translation activity also seems to have slowed down by now, so the full release version of 2.2.0 will probably be coming next week.

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Dev Update: Week 51 of 2023

December 23, 2023 by askmeaboutloom

Merry Christmas. Last week pub.drawpile.net got moved to a new home and work on a browser version of Drawpile has begun.

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Dev Update: Week 49 and 50 of 2023

December 16, 2023 by askmeaboutloom

We’re closing in on the final release of Drawpile 2.2.0. Beta 11 was released two weeks ago and is expected to be the last beta. There’s mostly been organizational stuff these past two weeks.

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Dev Update: Week 48 of 2023

December 2, 2023 by askmeaboutloom

Another week of bugfixes mostly, but also some work on documentation. Since there’s no relevant open bugs left, next week will probably see the release of 2.2.0-beta.11. Unless there’s further bugs found that warrant another in-between version, it’ll be the last beta release before the final 2.2.0 one.

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Dev Update: Week 47 of 2023

November 25, 2023 by askmeaboutloom

This week has been mostly bugfixes again, encroaching further on the final release of Drawpile 2.2.0. Everything described here is, as always, available in the in the continuous development release.

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Dev Update: Week 46 of 2023

November 18, 2023 by askmeaboutloom

Drawpile 2.2 beta 10 was released last week, shortly after beta 9, to fix a bug that caused a lock-up on startup. You can read more in the news post.

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Dev Update: Week 45 of 2023

November 10, 2023 by askmeaboutloom

Drawpile 2.2 beta 9 has been released today! You can read more about it in the news post.

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Dev Update: Week 44 of 2023

November 5, 2023 by askmeaboutloom

This week was a few further animation and server adjustments. Currently thinking of putting out the next beta release in the coming week.

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Dev Update: Week 43 of 2023

October 29, 2023 by askmeaboutloom

Other than a pile of fixes, this week was spent mostly on making importing animations from Drawpile 2.1 possible, rejigging the server login flow and building stuff on Windows.

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Dev Update: Week 42 of 2023

October 21, 2023 by askmeaboutloom

More server-side improvements this week that should help running perpetually persistent sessions easier. But there’s also been some improvements client-side and a whole pile of bugfixes.

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Dev Update: Week 40 and 41 of 2023

October 14, 2023 by askmeaboutloom

I didn’t have too much actually finished last weekend, but now this post covers the last two weeks of what’s going on. Most of it has been rummaging around in the server backend, but there’s been a few interesting client-side changes.

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Dev Update: Week 39 of 2023

September 30, 2023 by askmeaboutloom

This week, Drawpile 2.2.0-beta.8 has been released. All the changes are in the news post. There were still a few changes in the week leading up to it, mostly fixing stuff before getting it out the door. By the way it’s looking right now, the next beta release may be the last. So, what’s left?

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Dev Update: Week 38 of 2023

September 23, 2023 by askmeaboutloom

This week has been work on the server-side of things. Among other things, this brings back the “host on this computer” option.

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Dev Update: Week 37 of 2023

September 16, 2023 by askmeaboutloom

This week was mostly spent working on the command-line tools. One tool has returned from Drawpile 2.1 and another new one has been added.

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Dev Update: Week 36 of 2023

September 9, 2023 by askmeaboutloom

I didn’t expect to get much done this week, since I was away for most of it, but that was very wrong. There’s been quite a lot of changes – most significantly, Drawpile now works on phones!

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Dev Update: Week 35 of 2023

September 1, 2023 by askmeaboutloom

Last weekend, Drawpile 2.2.0-beta.7 was released. Since then, there’s mostly been work behind the scenes and bugfixes.

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Dev Update: Week 34 of 2023

August 25, 2023 by askmeaboutloom

Drawpile 2.2.0-beta.7 is to be released later today, so this update comes a day early.

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Layer Alpha Preserve in ORA Files

August 23, 2023 by askmeaboutloom

Update: The change proposed in this article has been accepted by Krita and should be in version 5.2.1. Drawpile will have it in version 2.2.0, starting from beta 9.

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Dev Update: Week 33 of 2023

August 19, 2023 by askmeaboutloom

This week has been a some stuff I’ve been wanting to get to for a while: making the application not chug when big changes happen and letting you export brushes. Other than that, there’s also been some smaller additions.

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Dev Update: Weeks 31 - 32 of 2023

August 13, 2023 by askmeaboutloom

First post to this blog! I thought it would be nice to have a place to share updates on what stuff is being worked on and such, rather than that information getting buried somewhere in a changelog.

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