Year: 2007

Paint.NET v3.08 BETA is now available

2 Comments


This is mostly a service release that fixes some bugs, while also improving keyboard / accessibility cues for some dialogs. Get it via the built-in updater, or from the website: http://www.getpaint.net/

Fixed: Pasting an image from Office 2003 applications now works (e.g. Excel 2003 graphs).
Fixed: Some dialogs were not indicating which command button was the default. These buttons now have a highlight to indicate which one will be activated if the user presses Enter or Space.
Fixed: Some minor keyboard navigation issues with task dialogs
Fixed: Performance issue with the File->Acquire submenu taking a long time to appear
Fixed: Window activation issue when the Print wizard was finished / closed
Fixed: Crash when there was 1 image open and the user pressed Ctrl+Q and then Ctrl+W
Fixed: Minor performance issue if the user had 1 modified image open and then canceled the “Save changes?” dialog
Fixed: Misbehaving filetype factory implementations (plugins) will no longer cause a crash

This is mostly a stop-gap release to fix some bugs before work begins in earnest on the next release with some cool new features. Stay tuned!

Window Clipping 2.0 just released!

If only I had used Window Clippings back in January when I redid the screenshots in the Paint.NET documentation … I would have saved so much time! It has this great ability to capture a window in Windows Vista along with the drop shadow, but without the stuff behind the window. (You know, the blurry stuff.) For example:

The steps to do this before were:

1. Make sure the window is on top of a white background
2. Press Print Screen to capture the whole screen.
3. Paste in to Paint.NET with Ctrl+Alt+V.
4. Crop the image to a large rectangular area that encompasses the window and the drop shadow, but nothing else.
5. Switch to the Magic Wand tool.
6. Make sure the Tolerance is set to 0%.
7. Click on the white area just past the drop shadow.
8. Press Ctrl+I to invert the selection.
9. Press Ctrl+Shift+X to crop the image to the selected area.
10. Create a new layer.
11. Fill the layer with white
12. Move the layer below the “Background” layer
13. Flatten the image
14. Save!

It was a repetetive and error-prone process. But with Window Clippings, this is a much simpler process:

1. Press Ctrl + Print Screen.
2. Double click the window that I care about.
3. Paste it into Paint.NET with Ctrl+Alt+V.
4. Save!

Anyway, Kenny Kerr just announced that the new 2.0 release is available. Looking at the new features, I can immediately see a use for inclusion of the mouse cursor and tooltips in screenshots.

Paint.NET ranked as the 19th Best Product of 2007

4 Comments


So I was drinking my morning coffee and I happened to do a quick ego search for Paint.NET at http://blogsearch.google.com . To my surprise I saw half a dozen blogs linking to a new PC World article where Paint.NET had been ranked as the 19th Best Product of 2007!

19. Paint.net
(image editing software; free) This open-source photo editing application packs tons of muscle into a measly 1.3MB download that doesn’t cost a dime. Impressive.

The word I use to describe my reaction is floored. Regardless of the footnote-worthy review text, that ranking puts Paint.NET above industry heavyweights such as Gmail (#31), YouTube (#34), Firefox (#35), Picasa (#36), and Digg.com (#58)!

Thank you PC World! That’s definitely an issue worth buying 😉