For the past couple of days I've spent a bit of time getting KidDraw into shape. It's not there yet, not at all, but with the foundations in place I should be able to get a nice version in KDE 4.2 (January). Screens inside!

First let's take a look at the old Windows version, made in Delphi:

Now what you see is a fully working version. You can pick a color and line width (no need to click for those), load up to 5 images you made before, clear the current canvas and stop the program. Oh, and you can draw, of course.

Enter the new KDE/Qt version: It's largely the same. Except that it's cross platform. And that it supports multiple color palettes. And that it isn't finished yet. But: progress is there!

Painting was already possible somewhere around last year, well before I got it into KDE. This week or so I've done some housecleaning, made saving and reloading of drawings possible - in a straightforward self-made binary format, to keep the files of reasonable size. I might still change to XML though, probably compressed, so extending the format is more flexible.

Another thing I'm happy with is the palette support. I'm planning options to download and install new palettes, but I'm not that far yet. The most important stuff already exists though. The next screenshots all show the same image, but with different palettes. You can cycle through them and you'll see the image change colors.

The amount of colors in the palette doesn't matter. KidDraw keeps the original information so when you go back to the original palette, all colors will still be there.

As for the big gray area on top: that's where you'll be able to open/save images to in the future... but that's for another update.

All this currently lives on the SVN server of KDE, in Playground/edu. If you want to try it out, you'll most likely need to build it yourself.