I have some more ramblings about the property system, as well as three bits of news for the v3.20 release.
The more I keep using this new property system and UI generation code, the more I like it. I’ve been able to add a few features to some of the effects, such as the ability to move the center of rendering. This is important for things like radial and zoom blur, as well as many of the distortion effects.
In this screenshot, the “Center” property allows you to click and drag to move where the radial blur is centered on (it is centered on the cat’s right eye – well, your “left” but the cat’s “right”). Adding this to an effect takes as little as one line of code with the way I have set this up (I actually spread mine over 4 lines of code for readability’s sake). I’m really looking forward to extending this system to the Save Configuration dialog (would make it super fast to add 8-bit PNG support yes?), as well as other parts of Paint.NET. The “Layer Properties” dialog could be done very quickly using this code. The Resize dialog would also be a great application for this, and eventually I really want to redo the Colors floating window with all of this. I might redo the “About” dialog as a good starting exercise. See, a lot of UI development is really just an exercise in layout and data binding. And this takes care of it all.
The first news I have is a release date for Paint.NET v3.20: December 15th is the planned date. This means I am hoping to have a beta out by mid-November at the absolute latest. Which means I need to kick it in to high gear and wrap things up really soon!
The second news is that HD Photo support is being dropped from the v3.20 release. The reason is simply that the .NET Framework 3.0 is an enormous download and I’m not ready to require a 1.5 MB image editor to require an extra 50 MB download on 32-bit Windows XP just yet. I wanted to pull in .NET 3.5, but apparently it is 140 MB on 32-bit XP (at least that’s what Beta 2 says) which is just way too much. Maybe after the busy Christmas season I’ll be braver and make the next release require .NET 3.0.
Also, the plugin management that I talked about in previous posts will not
be making it into the v3.20 release. There just isn’t enough time to do it right now while also ensuring the highest quality for the aforementioned property system / UI generation.
paint.net blog 
A specification for HD Photo is available:
http://www.microsoft.com/whdc/xps/wmphoto.mspx
If you are will to implement it by hand, then you will not require .Net 3.x.
Man, why does November seem so far away now?… 😀
Dono, the whole point of having it built in to WPF is that I don’t have to implement it by hand :-\ There’s only so much time that I can hope to allocate for this stuff, and doing that could easily take weeks. I think it would be fun to implement it (probably hehe), but it’s just a matter of cost / benefit.
So apart from the new property system, what features are coming in 3.20 ?
Mickiscoole, you can expect a blog post on that soon 🙂 There’s really only 1 more feature I’m adding but it’s one that people have been clamoring for for quite some time.
This…is exciting. 😀 Looking forward to…everything!
Thanks for the good work. I appreciate the time you’re able to spend on this, and how you’re incorporating other people’s ideas into PDN (zoom blur deluxe, etc)…any chance of getting stuff like curves+, frosted glass+ and performance stuff like that in as well?
T_L, the Frosted Glass+ stuff from pyrochild is already implemented and served as a good test case for the property rules system (constraints). The other “+” or “deluxe” versions may be integrated as time allows.
I think it is a good idea not to rush using Framework 3.0 (or 3.5).
A lot of people have XP SP2 and FW2.0 but it will take some time for the newer frameworks.
Too bad for HD Photo however.
Thanks for your great soft !!
You probably figured out by now that HD Photo is just a small plug-in that comes with WIC, which is itself a 1.2MB download that does not depend in any way on .NET 3.x, moreover XP SP3 includes WIC and the HD Photo codec so the “entry barrier” is now a lot lower than it used to be.
WIC also support RAW plug-ins from Adobe, Canon, Nikon, Sony, Pentax, Olympus… so supporting it would also let you support all those Camera RAW formats with little or no additional effort…
Just my $0.02
–Axel