As usual, there are two ways to get the new version:

1. Preferred: Use the built-in updater from within Paint.NET. If you are using version v3.36, simply go to the Help menu and click on “Check for Updates.” For v3.5 alpha/beta, go to the Utilities menu instead of the Help menu. Or, just wait for the update prompt to come up automatically within the next week or so.
2. Download directly from the website: http://www.getpaint.net/ . There is no need to uninstall the old version; that will be taken care of automatically.

Changes since version 3.36:

• New: Refreshed user interface with new icons and visual styling. On Windows 7 and Vista, it is enhanced for Aero and "glass".

  

• New effect: Blurs -> Surface Blur, by Ed Harvey
• New effect: Distort -> Dents, by Ed Harvey
• New effect: Distort -> Crystalize, by Ed Harvey
• New: Russian translation.
• Performance and memory usage have been extensively optimized throughout the entire program.
• .NET Framework 3.5 SP1 is now required, which has many built-in performance improvements.
• Disk space usage has been reduced by about 12MB by using NTFS compression on installation files related to staging (.MSI) and diagnostics (.PDB).
• Compression for .PDN images has been improved.
• Effect dialog responsiveness has been improved.
• Images open much faster, especially on single CPU systems.
• Startup performance on most systems will be better by about 20%.
• Memory usage has been reduced when more than one image is open.
• Rendering quality has been greatly improved when zoomed in.
• The selection outline is no longer animated. Instead of "dancing ants", a context-sensitive "XOR" stipple pattern is drawn. This has allowed for improved performance and lowered CPU consumption (and longer battery life).
• The font manager for the Text tool has been completely rewritten, which fixes many problems seen with crashes and missing fonts.
• On Windows XP, the Text tool has improved reliability and font selection (it uses GDI instead of GDI+).
• On Windows 7, the Text tool will use DirectWrite (instead of GDI) which gives better performance and greatly improved quality. On Windows Vista, you may install DirectX 11 to enable this feature; otherwise GDI will be used.
• The toolbar font list has improved usability, rendering quality, and significantly improved performance.
• The toolbar font list no longer requires an application restart to recognize newly installed fonts.
• When many fonts are installed, both memory usage and startup performance have been greatly improved.
• It is now drastically easier to move a very small selection.
• All installation prerequisites are now installed automatically, such as .NET and Windows Installer.
• Updates are now downloaded in the background, and installed after you exit the application. In previous versions, this was a foreground task and you could not use Paint.NET while the update was downloaded.
• Added a "Utilities" menu. Updates, Languages, and Plugin Errors have been moved there.
• Added a "Manage Fonts" command to the Utilities menu. This will launch the built-in Windows font control panel.
• Clicking the middle mouse button on an image thumbnail will now close the image.
• Improved the Unfocus effect.
• The DirectDraw Surface (.DDS) file type now allows you to select the resampling algorithm for auto-generated mip-maps.
• A processor that supports SSE is now required (almost all CPUs purchased this decade satisfy this).
• Fixed an issue with Gaussian Blur and its treatment of alpha values.
• Fixed a crash with the "Units" selector in the toolbar.
• Fixed a crash due to an overflow that prevented very large images from working (64-bit only).
• Fixed many other miscellaneous glitches and crashes.
• The Korean translation has been removed. Sadly, we were unable to find the resources to complete this.

Enjoy!

And, as many of you know, Paint.NET used to be open source. Or rather, it was “released source” – the source code was released, but it was never an open and collaborative project that accepted unsolicited code submissions. I liked releasing the source code this because I felt there was value in allowing others to study it. About a year ago I decided I was tired of seeing plagiarized versions of Paint.NET and I yanked the source code from the website. However, the source code was still out there at various places on the Internet (hardly illegal). Even without the source code, a clever and skilled person could probably still decompile, modify, and recompile the program to say or do whatever they wanted it to.

The biggest problem was that, even though these were clearly unethical and deplorable actions, the MIT License permitted all of it. Or, at least, it was unclear in some corner cases what was disallowed. So, legally speaking, it wasn’t clear what exactly could be done about it anyway. I am not a lawyer and did not want to spend thousands of dollars to get it all figured out. Some people have stated that I chose the wrong license, and in hindsight this is definitely partially true.

Also, this is not just about plagiarism and my own personal blood pressure. Having derivative copies of Paint.NET out there causes confusion and disrupts the mainline user base. I’ve had people e-mail me confused because they thought that Paint.NET had been renamed, but that features were missing in “the new version”. These derivative copies also cause a bit of a mess, because they often 1) uninstall the real Paint.NET (they use the same Windows Installer product GUID), and 2) still have the same updater logic (including the URL for the manifest). Which means you’d install the derivative copy, it would remove Paint.NET, and then once Paint.NET had a new update it would uninstall the derivative version and replace it with Paint.NET, etc. Or, the modified version would crash and the crash log would still instruct people to send it to my e-mail address. There is also a real risk of trojans and viruses.

All that stops now.

For the final release of Paint.NET v3.5, which will be very soon now, I am updating the license. For most users, this will have no impact whatsoever. It’s still freeware. There’s still no claim on any files created, opened, or saved with Paint.NET. You can still mirror the ZIP file on your website (e.g. Betanews, download.com, etc.) without having to ask permission. You can still sell stuff that you make with Paint.NET (assuming you have the legal right to do so in the first place, of course). You can continue using it in a business environment, deployed to as many systems as you like.

However, the license now states that you cannot modify Paint.NET itself, or create derivative works based on the Paint.NET software (that is, derivative software). Nor can you sell it. I don’t believe this will have an impact for anybody but those who wish to plagiarize or rip-off Paint.NET. I’m not putting in any restriction about reverse engineering or decompiling, e.g. with Reflector. I think that would be silly, and I still whole heartedly believe that there’s value in being able to study Paint.NET’s code – even if it’s Reflector’s best-guess disassembly. However, you cannot modify and then recompile a new version of Paint.NET from that disassembly.

There will undoubtedly be some confusion here. For instance, “Are plugins allowed?” Absolutely yes – the program is designed to accept these, and they are not modifications to Paint.NET itself. No doubt I will have to update the FAQ for this, among other things.

I expect there will be a very vocal minority that will condemn this license change. Before you speak out, please ask yourself this question: Does it actually affect you? Were you actually planning to do something that this new license disallows? My guess is that the answer is “no”, but please post a comment if the answer is a legitimate yes. Many people had condemned my decision to remove the source code, but upon further investigation it was purely a matter of principle: they had never downloaded the source code, never knew anyone who had done so, and never planned to do anything that would benefit from or depend on source code access. I’d liken it to being upset that your passport disallowed traveling to Antarctica … were you really planning to do that in the first place?*

The other thing I am planning to do is to release portions of Paint.NET v3.5’s source code, probably under an MIT or BSD-style license. Plugin developers will greatly benefit from having the source code for the effects, and for some WinForms UI controls. The best way to summarize things is that this new license (below) covers “the binaries”, aka “what you just downloaded and installed.” I can still create separate download packages that are covered under different licensing terms. Philosophically it can be confusing, but I’m willing to pay that price.

Here is the new license, for your perusal before the imminent release of version 3.5:

Paint.NET

Copyright (C) dotPDN LLC and Rick Brewster. Portions Copyright (C) Chris Crosetto, Tom Jackson, Michael Kelsey, Brandon Ortiz, Craig Taylor, Chris Trevino, and Luke Walker.

Portions Copyright (C) Microsoft Corporation. All Rights Reserved.

Paint.NET is a registered trademark of dotPDN LLC.

License last updated: November 5, 2009

Paint.NET is free for use in any environment, including but not necessarily limited to: personal, academic, commercial, government, business, non-profit, and for-profit. "Free" in the preceding sentence means that there is no cost or charge associated with the installation and use of Paint.NET. Donations are always appreciated, of course! http://www.getpaint.net/donate.html

Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy of this software (the "Software"), to use the Software without restriction, including the rights to use, copy, publish, and distribute the Software, and to permit persons to whom the Software is furnished to do so.

You may not modify, adapt, rent, lease, loan, sell, or create derivative works based upon the Software or any part thereof. However, certain icons used in the Paint.NET user interface are from or adapted from those in the "Crystal" icon set, http://www.everaldo.com/crystal/, or the "Oxygen" icon set, http://www.oxygen-icons.org/. These icons are covered by the LGPL license, http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/lesser.html. These icons are stored as "loose" PNG image files in the Resources\en-US\ directory where Paint.NET is installed.

The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies of the Software.

THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED "AS IS", WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND NONINFRINGEMENT. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE AUTHORS OR COPYRIGHT HOLDERS BE LIABLE FOR ANY CLAIM, DAMAGES OR OTHER LIABILITY, WHETHER IN AN ACTION OF CONTRACT, TORT OR OTHERWISE, ARISING FROM, OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION WITH THE SOFTWARE OR THE USE OR OTHER DEALINGS IN THE SOFTWARE.

* Like all metaphors, this one has its limits.

Update: Looks like I mixed up the Russian translation, and it comes up in English. That will be fixed of course!

Anyway you can grab it over at the website. If you want the list of changes since Beta 3, you can get those at the forum. Happy Halloween!

At this point, the bar for fixing a bug is quite high. I’m waiting for a few translations to be finalized, but other than that the only bugs I plan to fix are for crashes and data loss.

If you’re seeing a bug that still hasn’t been fixed, and you haven’t reported it, then you should report it. Please don’t assume everyone or anyone else will see it too. I once had someone, after the v2.1 release, post on the forum that some bug still wasn’t fixed after the betas. I asked him if he’d ever reported it. “No, I just assumed you already knew about it.” Well, I didn’t – it was an obscure issue where some ATI multimonitor utility would get confused and force all of Paint.NET’s tool windows to be the wrong sizes. (The fix was actually to delete the ATI utility – honestly, they aren’t necessary after Windows 98 anyway.)

For those new to Paint.NET v3.5 with Beta 1, this is your first chance to try out the new background updater – you can have it download the update without sitting around and waiting for it as a foreground task!

Of note, there’s a new option in the Window menu called “Glass Dialog Buttons.” I really like the glass footers for dialogs and don’t want to give them up, but just enough people have expressed a strong dislike that I decided to make it an option.

Go download it at the forum, or get it via the built-in updater from any Paint.NET version. Make sure “Also check for pre-release versions” is enabled – you can ensure this by first clicking Check for Updates (from the Help or Utilities menus), then clicking the Options button.

This beta is the first to include the newly refreshed user interface, with new icons and enhancements for Aero and “glass” (Windows 7 and Vista only). Here’s a taste of that:

(Click for full-size version.)

You can get the full changelist over at the forum.

In addition to the glass in the image thumbnail list, I have added it to the footer of many dialogs. This includes the setup wizard, and dialogs for File->New, Image->Resize, Image->Canvas Size, Choose Tool Defaults, Save Configuration, Layer Properties, Rotate/Zoom, all IndirectUI-based effects (both built-in and plugins), and Help->About.

Here’s a little preview of that:

(Click for full-size image.)

Please note that if you are using the “Windows Classic” theme, or if you are running Windows XP, then Paint.NET v3.5 will look mostly the same as Paint.NET v3.36.

Also, there are some languages for which the “glass footers” will not be enabled. These include Japanese, Chinese, and Korean. The reason for this is purely technical – the text for the buttons does not render correctly. It appears that GDI+ is actually passing through to GDI when rendering those glyphs, and that causes the alpha channel to be overwritten and the text is illegible.

The domains are named for "the lambda closure", a computer science and programming term. I bought it on a whim because I thought it was a cool name, but not sure if I was going to do anything with it. Well, I haven’t, and I don’t want to renew them. But I’d rather sell them to someone who will use them then let the domain squatting vulture robots snatch them all up. I always thought it’d make a good name for a website similar to Stack Overflow, but maybe more oriented toward academia and/or functional programming.

Variants are included with “the” prefix and without, and with correct (lambda) and incorrect (lamda) spelling. Top-level domain suffixes for biz, com, info, net, and org. So that makes 2 x 2 x 5 = 20 domain names.

Serious inquiries only, please.

http://lambdaclosure.biz

http://lambdaclosure.com

http://lambdaclosure.info

http://lambdaclosure.net

http://lambdaclosure.org

http://lamdaclosure.biz

http://lamdaclosure.com

http://lamdaclosure.info

http://lamdaclosure.net

http://lamdaclosure.org

http://thelambdaclosure.biz

http://thelambdaclosure.com

http://thelambdaclosure.info

http://thelambdaclosure.net

http://thelambdaclosure.org

http://thelamdaclosure.biz

http://thelamdaclosure.com

http://thelamdaclosure.info

http://thelamdaclosure.net

http://thelamdaclosure.org

I’m also playing a bit more with glass. Check it out,

Now, of course there are still a few things to work out, such as the left edge of the menu being offset by 1 pixel.

Unfortunately, a JPEG just can’t do it justice (nor could the PNG, even at 5x the file size). It looks much cooler “in real life,” when it’s drawn over your actual desktop.

DirectWrite is also coming for Windows Vista. Microsoft just released a beta version of the “Platform Update for Windows Vista”, which includes Direct3D 11, Direct2D, and DirectWrite. Check it out here: http://blogs.msdn.com/DirectX/

Paint.NET will automatically use DirectWrite if it is installed on a Windows Vista system. The code for enabling DirectWrite does not limit itself to Windows 7. You don’t even have to wait for the next update, you can do this now! This is all pre-release beta stuff though, so the usual warnings apply. The next update after Paint.NET v3.5 (let’s call it v3.5.1) should automatically install this for you, so that’ll be one less thing to have to remember (computers are good at automating and remembering things, right?).

Now, the visual styling of an application does not affect its functionality. However, it is a key ingredient for a positive, even enjoyable, user experience. Up through version 2.5, Paint.NET used a 16-color “Windows 95” icon styling. The icons were free, and the style and color palette were very easy to emulate for any custom icons:

For version 2.6, I upgraded the whole application to .NET 2.0, 64-bit, and “Windows XP” / “Visual Studio 2005” icon styling. This was great during Windows XP’s heyday:

For version 3.0, much of the styling remained the same albeit with subtle tweaks throughout. Since version 3.36 was released in August of 2008, to borrow a phrase from Stephen King’s The Dark Tower, “the world has moved on.” It’s quickly looking dated compared to other software and graphics trends.

I decided that I wanted Paint.NET v3.5 to look more at home when installed on Windows 7 and Windows Vista with the Aero theme. To accomplish this, I needed two things: updated visual styling, and updated icons. Visual styling refers to how the menus or highlighted items are drawn, and the first part of this implementation is already in the latest, public alpha release. There are some additional styling changes that will be in the next update, and here’s a preview:

(Note that the close button is simulated in this screenshot, since it only shows up when the mouse is over an image’s thumbnail, which is not the case here. But visually, you should get the idea.)

For non-Aero themes such as Classic or Luna, simpler visual styling will be used. There isn’t enough time right now for further changes, such as glass, but I’ve definitely got it on my radar for version 4.0.

However, icons are much more difficult and time consuming to update. Paint.NET has about 200 of them throughout the application. Some icons are standard and can be used as-is from whatever icon sets I’m pulling from, such as “Open” and “Save”. Others must be formed by combining other icons. “Paste into New Layer” is a good example of this. Others must be created from scratch, such as the selection mode and many effect icons. Some icons are extremely difficult to create; the pan tool (“hand”) and lasso tool icons are easily the trickiest icons ever (yes, I made them both myself!).

Icons are a significant problem for freeware software, both financially and with respect to their creation. While Paint.NET is an image and bitmap editor, I am not an artist. Every once in awhile I can take a good photograph, but that’s an exception and definitely not the rule. Custom icons through a professional studio would several thousand dollars (USD$). Even purchasing several stock icon sets to get a large enough pool of icons to work with would cost around $2,000 USD.

There just aren’t many high quality, free* icon sets out there. For years, I have fed off the freely redistributable icons from Visual Studio and from the very popular and free famfamfam “Silk” icons. Tango is another excellent icon set with wonderful licensing (it’s public domain!), and I’ve used a small number of them for Paint.NET v3.5.

I finally found two icon sets that were free, and whose licensing and distribution requirements were acceptable. They are the Crystal and Oxygen icon sets, which are LGPL and have been popularized via software such as KDE and OpenOffice.org. I don’t use either of those, but the icons are absolutely beautiful and fit in well with the Aero theme in Windows Vista and Windows 7.

Be sure to check out the preview pages for Oxygen, and for Crystal.

With respect to Paint.NET, it’s still a work in progress, but check it out anyway:

Like I said, the authors of these icons released them under the LGPL license. To adhere to their licensing and distribution requirements (they’ve posted guidelines that were very useful), and to avoid converting the entire application to GPL or LGPL**, these icons are not being linked into PaintDotNet.Resources.dll. Instead, they are installed as “loose” PNG files in the Resources/en-US/ directory where Paint.NET is installed. Also, I will be releasing the “source code” for the icon set, which means you’ll be able to download the layered PDN sources for any icon that needed it. For example, the “Open” icon above requires a few layers to achieve contrast, and to separate the folder from the blue arrow. Et cetera. The resources DLL will contain all of the old icons, for reliability reasons. The 2nd exception in the Paint.NET license will be removed. It will also be much easier to customize Paint.NET with your own custom icon sets, although this will not be surfaced as a feature yet – for this release, it is simply a side-effect of the way that the resource manager does resource lookup and fallback.

Thinking ahead, for Paint.NET v4.0 I’m figuring out what direction I want to take the UI. My current thoughts include … glass, ribbonization, how that would work with MDI (or not), extensibility extensibility extensibility, and moving to Windows Vista as the minimum OS requirement. The latter will free me from many of the development constraints I currently have, such as not being able to use Direct2D or many of the shell-related APIs. My experience with dual-targeting GDI and DirectWrite for fonts and typography has taught me that doing something similar with GDI+ and Direct2D would be suicide. I’m only 1 guy, and I simply won’t do that.

Oh, and the tentative, nebulous, waving-my-hands release date target isn’t until 2011. So don’t worry if you’re still on XP: you’ve got plenty of time. And, I think you’ll really enjoy the upgrade to Windows 7***.

* Free in this context means 1) no cost, and 2) compatible license and distribution requirements. Licenses such as GPL are incompatible with Paint.NET.

** Ideological opinions aside, this would not be possible for logistical (legal) reasons.

*** I say this honestly, but also bear in mind that I’m a Microsoft employee so I’m probably biased.