Update on Niepce
Here we go, when I started that project in 2006, I had plenty of ideas. I still have, but everything else is in the way, including me.
Since there have been some amazing apps, like RawTherapee, Darktable, and possibly some other I miss, apps fullfilling some of the uses I envisioned for Niepce back then. Not to mention a few other apps that did just disappear ; that's life, it's hard to find maintainers or keep being motivated.
Anyway.
Still slowly working on it, far from an MVP.
But here are some recent developments:
- Port to Rust: most of the backend including the database (but not sqlite3) is written in Rust. I squashed a few bugs in the process, improving the architecture. There are some technical challenges involving bridging C++ and Rust. Some widgets have been rewritten in Rust and progressively everything is getting the treatement. Ideally I'd not write a single new feature in C++ anymore but sadly that's not how it work.
- Port to Gtk4: the app started with Gtk2 back then. It was
quickly ported to Gtk3 early in the last decade, thanks to the help
of Gtkmm. A few weeks ago I did port it to Gtk4. And it's still a
mess of C++ with Gtkmm and Rust. I do have plan to add
libadwaita. - Library import: this one I worked on it out of spite between the Rust port and the Gtk4 port, and it's not merged yet. The goal is to import an Adobe Ligthroom™ library (up to version 6). I wrote the base code in Rust a while ago, and last November I just worked on integrating the crate into Niepce. The current status is works slowly, as there are some serious reachitecturing that need to happen. For the longer term, I have support for Capture One and Apple Aperture 3 it two other crates. The Aperture 3 crate was actually one of my first practical Rust project back in 2015.
To be fair I don't know where this will be going. It's more like permanent construction.