Hi!
This is a first weekly report from the development campaign, which is started on August 1st, 2013.
As you might remember, in May 2013 I have received a Shuttleworth Foundation grant, which I decided to use for two targets:
- Produce Synfig training DVD (see my report about that here)
- Establish the full-time development for Synfig (starting from August 1st, 2013)
When I have announced that, my plan was to handle position of full-time developer by myself. But things have changed a bit since then. I have found a freelance C++ developer Ivan Mahonin. He lives in the same town as me and have a good reputation. So I thought that the skilled C++ developer under my direction could deliver more benefit to Synfig than just me coding alone. I have talked with him and he agreed to step in as full-time developer. That brings some shift into the initial disposition: Ivan stepping in as full-time developer and paid for full time, while my role is to act as coordinator of his work. Also, I plan to post weekly reports about the development progress.
At the moment we have enough funds to pay for Ivan’s work till the 1st of November. What will be after is depend on us all. Anyway, I believe that will be an awesome experiment and I’m sure we will have a lot of fun. 
OK, let’s get to the report itself.
On August 1st we had an initial setup session and on August 5th there was a Q&A session with Carlos. We set up the build environment and Ivan started to dig into the code.
Getting familiar with the code obviously should take some time, but we already have something to show - its the drag’n’drop feature for importing images (see the bug #243). Now you can drag images onto canvas, and even import multiple images at once: youtube.com/watch?v=XTprP7oDOuo
Meanwhile, my plan is to continue improving the Windows version of Synfig. I would like to get the ability to compile the Windows binaries of Synfig right on my Linux box, using the Fedora’s cross-compile environment. Earlier I have made a first attempt, but stuck with some issues. Now, after we finally got the initial build working, I can get back to the problem. Also I would like to try prepare 64bit windows builds.
That’s all for today, stay tuned!
Finally! I’m happy.