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Comment by henningtegen | Hacker News Reader

I am the lead developer of a application called Leonardo that we hope will be a future "Photoshop killer" when it comes to digital painting: http://www.getleonardo.com The main focus for us is speed and Leonardo is way faster then any other application including Photoshop (and it is still raster based).

Leonardo is not finished yet, but it is possible to sign up on out beta list.

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What does "way faster" mean more specifically? E.g. how does it handle a 100mpixel image?

It handles a 100 mega pixel image very well.

The trick Leonardo use to be this fast is that your screen only has a fixed amount of pixels and it is enough to update does pixels super fast for the application to feel fast. Then you have a lot more time to update the rest of the pixels.

This makes Leonardo kind of "resolution independent" and is always super fast whatever the canvas size and brush diameter. On top of this we also have a streaming mechanism of tiles between RAM and file so that you never run out of memory.

Will it support vector drawings also? The screen cast with "nobel english" was very nice and the tool you used to draw the box was cool, never seen that before.

In the first version there will be no vector stuff, we are focusing on raster. (but maybe in the future)

Thanks ;-)

No Linux, no sale. Krita's been on Linux since 1998.

Sorry dude. We are focusing on Windows and Mac. But in the far future we might support Linux too... ;)

Maybe this is a simplistic view, but isn't the development process itself much nicer on Linux, simply because of the ability to program in a Unix environment? I guess you have that with OS X (which I use at work), but even there, is it that much of a leap to make code that works in OS X work in Linux?

That aside, it looks like an awesome product, good work so far. I like the focus on super fast and smooth operation; that's why I use Sublime Text :)

I haven't developed that much on Linux so I can't really compare. Visual Studio for Windows which I mostly use is really good in my opinion.

Leonardo use as little OS specific stuff as possible to make porting easy so going from Windows to Mac (and maybe Linux in the future) shouldn't be that hard.

Thanks. Sublime Text has been one of the many inspirations for Leonardo! :)

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