Hello! I’ve been building Graphite for three years for the FOSS creative community. My vision and Graphite’s mission is to finally create the 2D counterpart to Blender: versatile across all 2D disciplines; innovating instead of imitating proprietary software; leaning fully into modern concepts (non-destructive, procedural, pipeline-driven); and focusing on an intuitive and attractive UI and UX.
This is my first time joining the Libra Arts/Pixls.us community. I hope this is the appropriate category to post our first big blog post in. Here’s the post:
To be honest, I never learned that Graphite existed, but I’m definitely open to a better alternative to Inkscape, and ween away from Affinity equivalent.
EDIT: After trying it for a bit after learning it’s a online tool, I’ll stick with Inkscape and Affinity Designer.
Thanks for trying it out! It’s still in alpha and has many rough edges, but a focus on polish is the new goal as we start out 2024. I’d encourage its use by adventurous users interested in trying new things over anyone hoping to use it as a production-ready tool, but I expect by next year that will change. Also, a desktop version is coming in the next couple months, but we have thus far not really needed it because the web app provides nearly every functionality that a desktop app can muster. We’ve custom-engineered our architecture to be lightweight, speedy, and bloat-free so its interface feels much more snappy, typical of a desktop app, than your average sluggish web app that’s often built with a bloated tech stack that has given the web a bad reputation from the prevalence of those development choices. With the right choices, the web can be just as native-feeling as the average web app. (And gosh, even native desktop apps like Photoshop have gotten extremely bloated and sluggish in recent years— it takes me about 3 seconds to new open the export dialog in PS on my fast desktop computer.) Graphite can slow down due to some temporary architectural bottlenecks, like lack of hardware acceleration, but we’re resolving those limitations in the next few months alongside the desktop app release. So stay tuned!
Interesting but the terminology is mostly beyond this old man. e.g. “add an operation to the end of this layer’s chain of nodes” went right over my head.
Sorry, I have no idea what a “node-based editor” is - and have no experience of “blender” or “vkdt” whatever they are; so not much help to me, unfortunately.
Our goal is to make Graphite’s users never have to learn how a node editor works by building extensive tooling to abstract that away. But naturally a blog post about our development journey will cover those details for the subset of our readers who are familiar with the concepts and terminology. Right now, Graphite works mostly without needing to touch the node graph, but you’ll occasionally need it to do something a bit more advanced or work your way out of a snag. We’re constantly building tooling to reduce the snags and increase the level of advanced features that can be done through the traditional editor UI. The goal, when we’ve hit 1.0, is to have the ability to do any editing that’s possible in traditional editors through an equivalent UI in Graphite without needing a node graph. But the graph is a good way to get a bird’s-eye view and to work entirely in the land of procedural generation.
