From:	 "Michael J. Hammel" <mjhammel-lwn@graphics-muse.org>
To:	 Marklister@satoripaint.com (Mark Lister)
Subject: Re: Satori Software
Date:	 Wed, 22 Aug 2001 10:26:53 -0500 (CDT)
Cc:	 lwn@lwn.net (Linux Weekly News)

Thus spoke Mark Lister
> We are developers of professional 2D graphics software with bitmap and
> vector graphics capabilities. You may have already heard about the award
> winning  Satori graphics software for Windows. 

I actually follow the graphics industry fairly well, but only from the
point of view of Linux solutions and mostly in the VFX industry.  I haven't
followed Windows based graphics tools in some time.

> You might be interested to learn that we have received much feedback from
> some of our users who tell us that there is great market potential for our
> product under Linux.

There could be.  I noticed on the satoripaint.com website that one of your
plugins was used in the film "The Matrix".  Linux as a graphics platform is
making huge gains in the VFX industry - to the point that the entire
industry is moving - en masse - to Linux as both a rendering and graphics
workstation platform.  So there could be a strong market there for you.  

> We have looked at the Linux market before but the community and support
> (graphics tablet and other peripherals) for graphics products was not
> sufficiently advanced at that stage.

"Community support" is a broad topic.  If you mean are there users of Linux
in the graphics world, then certainly the community is large and getting
larger.  If you mean are there developers supporting open source graphics 
applications, the answer is yes, but not as many as with the operating
system itself.  In general, there is a strong, if not really well
organized, graphics community behind Linux these days.  Part of the reason
is that the underlying display tools - known as the X Window System - has
just recently reached a point where applications can do the things they
need to do on Linux.  It's a long story, but in summary - the platform is
ready now.

As for peripheral support, this is still weak.  Wacom tablets are supported
better out of the box than anything else right now.  Other tablets will
come soon, mostly as someone finds a need for one and spends some time
trying to write the X Input Extension driver for it.  I know that
DreamWorks ported some of their own input capture tools over to Linux for
in-house work.

> We would appreciate your thoughts about the requirements for a new graphics
> application for Linux and what tools exist to assist developers. 

Since you come from the Windows world, there are two routes you could take
here.  The first is to find a Windows emulation tool that your products can
coexist with in a reasonable manner.  Options here include Win4Lin and
VMware, among others.  Emulators provide a Windows environment under Linux
in which your application runs unmodified.  The drawback to these solutions
is that users will probably need rather fast systems and lots and lots of
memory.  This requirement, however, is not unreasonable in the VFX market.

An alternative in this category is to port your application using WINE,
which is a set of libraries which translate Windows function calls directly
into Linux/X Window System calls.  That means you need to be sure that your
application, when compiled with the WINE libraries, works as expected.
This would make your applications "native" to the Linux environment - a
much preferred option.  However, WINE has never been particularly stable
and has had a problem with being a bit behind in the Windows API.  If you
use a lot of DirectX, for example, chances are WINE may not be able to help
that much.

The best solution if you want cross platform products is to use cross
platform UI's.  There are lots of options here - Qt and GTK+ are the
current kings of the hill.  The problem here is effort:  you're going to
need to separate your underlying application code from the UI in order to
replace your existing UI with GTK+, Qt or whatever cross platform widget set
you choose.  This option is the best choice when it comes to stability
because you're using a native widget set and native application code on
whatever platform you want to run on.

If you plan on getting into the VFX market more seriously I recommend a
native port using cross platform UI's.

That said, if you do decide to move into the Linux space you have one big
bonus:  there are *no* professional-level vector tools that run natively on
Linux at the moment.  There is one under development (Mediascape's
Artstream) but it isn't released.  CorelDraw runs under WINE and I haven't
had much luck running it on my systems.  Additionally, if you move into the
Linux space and try to join in the Linux migration by the VFX industry,
you'll want to support the GIMP, the native Photoshop-like application for
Linux.  Aside from color management issues, GIMP is a Photoshop killer in
many respects.  You're Photoshop plugins should be ported to GIMP since
many VFX houses will be using (if they aren't already) GIMP in some part of
their production pipelines.  You don't *have* to make your plugins open
source - you can keep them proprietary and sell them, but you'll make lots
of friends if you do (you can still sell them even if they are open
source).

You can find links to the applications mentioned here on the Desktop page
of the Linux Weekly News:  http://lwn.net/desktop.php3

Hopefully this will help you get started.  Best of luck!

> Kindest regards,
> 
> Mark Lister
> Satori Product Manager
> Marklister@satoripaint.com


Michael J. Hammel
Senior Editor, LWN.net

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