The past few weeks I've been working on a new project: a photo editor. It's both an opportunity to learn something new, and hopefully a piece of software I can build for my own use in the future.

I enjoy photography greatly, but recently haven't been enjoying the process of editing my photos. I use Lightroom and have been plagued by corrupt libraries and a poorly performing app. To add insult to injury, Adobe litters my PC with crap like Creative Cloud, processes that never disappear, and charge me a monthly subscription for the pleasure. I've tried alternatives, but they don't work for me. Affinity is great, but lacks the organisation and library features, and Darktable is pretty cool but I can't get past the UI.

So I've decided to create my own, which I'm calling Spectra. I've completed the UI designs for roughly how I want it to look. Now to build the thing.

This is going to be a large undertaking. My experience with software development has never extended to desktop GUI applications, so I'm excited to see what it's like. I've started writing the application in a new language - Rust - and have started implementation of the UI using Slint.

I made a high-level list of what I think I need to do (there will surely be more that I haven't thought of) and it's a rather beefy list. Will give me an opportunity to learn a large variety of things and an excuse to try out Rust, something I've been meaning to do for a while.