Something to think about for the future anyway... This definitely wouldn't be a small job, but I think it would be very useful. Just putting the idea out there in case others find it interesting.

Thanks for all your work on this amazing piece of software.

PROBLEM:
Screen real estate is always at a premium in a drawing/painting application. The user wants to be able to see and use as much of the canvas as possible. Dockers, like the colour selectors, layers list, tools list, preset selector, etc. are also needed by the user, and they take up valuable screen real estate.


POSSIBLE SOLUTION:
Most Krita users have a smartphone in their pocket all the time when they're using Krita, and/or an android or ipad tablet. Smartphones and tablets have a touchscreen interface that makes it ideal for use as a remote control - for users without a touchscreen on their krita device, this would actually make the dockers easier to use, rather than having to use a mouse or stylus. Even for users with a touchscreen Krita device, the onscreen icons and controls are small and hard to work with using a touchscreen. Smartphones/tablets do not typically have digitizer pens, but you don't really need a pen to work with the docker windows.

My idea is this:

Create an infrastructure in Krita that would allow a remote application running on an android or IOS (or another computer, I suppose) to display the dockers, and allow users to control Krita parameters, choose tools, work with layers, etc. from their smartphone, thereby freeing up space on the device running Krita, so that device could have an uninterrupted view of the canvas.

Other control elements, such as the brush editor, could also be made accessible via this smartphone remote control.

A touch-oriented UI for the Krita controls on a separate device could have large icons and controls that would be much easier to work with than the small controls on the main Krita screen.

Communication between Krita and the smartphone could be done via wifi or bluetooth directly to a server running within Krita. If the krita team created an API, others could create the Android/IOS apps, or the Krita team could take on the task in order to ensure consistency in usage, UI, and look.

This could be implemented in stages. Developers could identify the most necessary and the most simple dockers to "remotify" first (eg: maybe the tool selectors and the layers docker), and start with those - every docker that could be moved off of the main Krita device to a remote would represent a very significant gain in canvas screen real estate.


EXTENDING THIS IDEA A BIT:

Problem #2
Users of tablet-type devices may not have access to a keyboard while using Krita. So, they can't easily key in shortcuts (SHIFT+space to rotate canvas, etc.) or trigger modifier keys (shift, ctrl, alt, etc.)

Possible Solution: Extend the smartphone remote control framework to allow users to send keystrokes to Krita. Possibly with the option to use virtual buttons, sliders, rings, etc. like the hardware controls on Intuos tablets.

I know that it's not what you are asking for, but if you use KDE you can at least send button presses and mouse clicks from your smartphone with https://community.kde.org/KDEConnect.

I know an app fully integrated into Krita would be much more useful to you, but i don't think the core team will have resources to work on something like this soon.

Maybe someone else likes your idea and writes a Krita plugin for KDE-Connect...

torpak wrote:I know that it's not what you are asking for, but if you use KDE you can at least send button presses and mouse clicks from your smartphone with https://community.kde.org/KDEConnect.

Cool, that looks like it could be useful, and it might solve a few usability issues when I'm using Krita on a tablet with no keyboard. I hadn't seen KDEconnect before. I'll try it out.


...and yeah, I'm definitely not thinking the full krita remote control idea will be a top priority right away by any means, or that it'll ever be. But I think it'd be pretty useful, and I figured I may as well throw the idea out there in case it gets anyone interested.

I'm the guy who originally posted the thread - this move to the KDE Identity thing means I've lost my original username apparently. So it goes.

Anyway, I found an app for android called Unified Remote:
https://play.google.com/store/apps/deta ... Paid&hl=en

It lets you design custom remotes. I've designed one for Krita. In case it's useful to anyone else, you can get it here: http://community.unifiedremote.com/topi ... are-remote

This is so cool, might be worth adding to the resources section of krita