2. Introduction

2.1 Project Genesis

In the summer of 2016 I was playing around with rgbPaint (which I had created nearly 10 years before in 2007) and I thought it might be nice to revisit the idea of a very basic image editing program.

I wanted to update the ideas from 2007 and put them into the context of 2016 so I decided to use Qt 5 and my collection of libraries that did not exist in 2007. I also wanted to try some new ideas for a more flexible interface that would work equally well on small low resolution monitors with old PC's as well as more modern high resolution monitors with new PC's.

2.2 General Philosophy

I have always wanted mtPixy to be small, light, and reliable as I think these are the qualities which will give me the best tool for my needs:

• Small means a codebase with each part being small enough to manage easily.
  • No feature creep, bloatware, or old cruft. This makes the end product much more focused on the user's needs. It also makes the code easier to manage in the long run, such as porting to a new widget toolkit library.

• Light means resource frugal.
  • Less CPU usage than other programs for the same job, which means the job is completed more quickly.
  • Less user time wasted on navigating rarely used GUI widgets.

• Reliable means bug free, and deterministic program behaviour.
  • No nasty shocks for the user due to sloppy coding or poor UI design.

I want a simple tool that will tackle about 90% of my image editing tasks. For the remaining 10% of jobs I can use a more sophisticated tool like mtPaint or Gimp.

An important decision I have taken is to release it as free software using the GNU General Public License, which gives users various freedoms. If you are not aware of these freedoms and the work of the GNU project, I would strongly encourage you to read about them here: http://www.gnu.org/

2.3 Development Timeline

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