First, I’m very glad that Obama won the election. It was the first time I’ve ever voted, in fact. I think he will provide some much needed hope and invigoration. Congratulations!
Anyway, on to the stats! I haven’t posted on this since September 2007, and it’s way long overdue for an update.
Since then, usage of Paint.NET is up an amazing 222%. Wow! Vista share has grown a lot, from about 15% all the way up to almost 28%! The share of 64-bit users has also doubled, from 1.24% to 2.66%. Windows 7 is even making a peek-a-boo appearance, at 0.01% 🙂 These are all very good indicators for me. The number of Russian users has grown significantly — it used to be at 1.67%, but is now over 4.0%. Turkish share grew even more — from 0.73% up to 3.0%.
Standard disclaimer: As a reminder, these statistics represent hits to the auto-updater manifests, which means they approximately reveal the Paint.NET application’s usage (as opposed to the number of installed copies). Unless the auto-updater is disabled, it will check for updates up to once every 5 days at application startup. This is done by downloading a text file whose filename is decorated with OS and language information. Having 2.7 million hits to the manifests does not mean that Paint.NET has 2.7 million installations, or 2.7 million active users. It is merely a tool for comparing usage trends amongst different time periods (month to month, in this case).
Let’s see, some other thoughts, especially since I’ve haven’t blogged in a full month:
- Nehalem, aka Intel Core i7. It rocks! It will be the absolute fastest chip on the planet for Paint.NET, as publicly reported by some benchmarks over at bit-tech.net. These numbers agree with what I have seen in my own benchmarking. Paint.NET loves cores, loves threads, and loves Nehalem. The 2.66ghz i7-920 will be a very popular chip over the next 3 months. I really hope the next chip generation from AMD packs a punch, to keep things interesting.
- Windows 7. I’ve been using it a lot, and it’s awesome. I am very encouraged by the direction things are going. I watched many of the PDC sessions on what’s going on with the likes of Direct2D, DirectWrite, and Direct3D, and had to borrow a mop to wipe up my drool.
- Windows XP. All the new graphics API’s are going to be for Vista/Win7 only. However, I obviously cannot stop support for Windows XP right now (we’ll file that under D for “duh” :)). However, its days are numbered, although it may take another 3-4 years before Paint.NET moves to requiring Vista as a minimum. The numbers you see in these usage statistics will be what drives this type of decision. I didn’t axe support for Windows 2000 until it was clear that it was at 4 – 5% and steadily shrinking.
- WPF (versus WinForms). I’ve finally started learning it, something that I’ve been avoiding for the last 2 years, partly because it was still very much a “version 1” technology. So far I’m really liking it, and the support for custom pixel shaders is a major enabler. It is now possible for the entire Paint.NET rendering pipeline, including all of the layer blending modes, and including all adjustments and effects, to be done completely on the GPU without resorting to Direct3D or CUDA interop muck. Now if only it had Direct3D 10 and Pixel Shader 3/4/5 support (it only supports D3D 9 and PS 2.0 right now).
- Fallout 3. It’s very good, and I highly recommend it.
- Paint.NET v3.5. Don’t worry, it’s not been forgotten about 🙂 I have, however, been taking things “easy”. I was a bit burnt out for awhile, and I just started a new job within Microsoft, so it will not be available in time for the holidays. There are three major work items to complete: a better front-end rendering cache, a rewritten selection outline renderer that does not use GDI+, and final translations.
Here are the numbers:
| Total hits | 2,728,795 |
| Hits per day | 88,025 |
| 32-bit | 97.34% |
| 64-bit | 2.66% |
| Windows XP | 71.65% |
| Windows 2003 | 0.41% |
| Windows Vista / 2008 | 27.94% |
| Windows 7 | 0.01% |
| English | 43.20% |
| German | 15.79% |
| French | 7.98% |
| Portuguese | 5.85% |
| Spanish | 5.39% |
| Japanese | 2.00% |
| Italian | 3.09% |
| Polish | 1.78% |
| Netherlands (Dutch) | 1.53% |
| Russian | 4.16% |
| Chinese (Simplified) | 0.94% |
| Chinese (Traditional) | 0.63% |
| Turkish | 3.00% |
| Korean | 0.47% |
| All other languages | 1.34% |
| Have translations | 84.71% |
| Don’t have translations | 15.29% |
Bold indicates a language that Paint.NET includes a translation for.
Other disclaimers:
- I own stock in AMD, Intel, and Microsoft.
- I am a Microsoft employee. What I say here is my personal opinion, and not necessarily that of my employer.
paint.net blog 
Hey Rick, I love Paint.Net and use it all the time. I would just like to request that you give a little love to the selection tools. Everytime I use Paint.Net I find myself wanting to change selections (move the sides, expand, collapse, etc…) and I haven’t found anything like that. Some mouse grips on the selections would be fantastic 😉 Please?
Rick, I wish I would have known you were at PDC. I would have offered to buy you a beverage of your choice as thanks for your work on Paint.NET.
I plan on picking up a netbook shortly to run Windows 7. It looks like Microsoft has a winner in the making.
Yes, I am missing polygonal lasso tool, can you add it? support of antialiasing and curve smoothing should be nice, an magnetic lasso is also cool, it is in zoner photo studio 11
Eddie — I wasn’t at PDC. I was watching the videos online.
Mladen and Gyrxiur — This is not a feature request forum! Please take those comments to the forum.
Any further comments to this blog with feature requests like this will not be approved. That’s what the forum is for. Comments posted here need to be relevant to the post they are attached to.
What a relief! Obama’s election has been followed all around the world, esp. here in the UK. I’m glad you voted for the first time. I’m only 43 and have voted a mere 22 times in regional and national elections since I was 18.
Anyway on to Paint.NET. A brilliant piece of software, when’s the next version?
I so want a Nehalem processor, especially after seeing all the benchmarks and overclocks that have come out in the last few days.
Can’t wait ’till Win7. I didn’t avoid buying Vista because it isn’t good, but I just don’t want to pay too much to conform to the upgrades (RAM, Hard Drive, Processor, Graphics Card, ect.), especially when I don’t need to, and prices are going to fall significantly before 7 comes out. By the way, loving the new task bar 🙂
Whoops 🙂 Sorry for that – will post it there…
Hello,
I love using Paint.net. It’s a fantastic piece of software and it’s free.
I know this may be asking a lot, but, could you do a Mac version of Paint.net using the Apple SDK?
Paint.net is a vastly upgraded version of MS Paint and like I said it’s fantastic.
Mac users don’t even have a paint application that comes with the operating system.
It would be amazing if you could either release a version for the Mac yourself or get a team together to do it.
Mac users all over the world would be extremely grateful to you.
Iattends, I consider it very unlikely that a dedicated Mac version will exist in the foreseeable future. Paint.NET is, hence the name, a .NET application and there is no officially supported .NET framework for Mac OS. Mono may work some time in the future but afaik as of now it still has some implementation gaps in Windows Forms and System.Drawing which prevents PDN from working fully. http://code.google.com/p/paint-mono/ exists as a try to port PDN to Mono but few details about its progress are available.
Hi Rick,
Thanks for this great application. Probably people from my office constitutes the majority of that %4 share from Turkey. Just kidding.
Paint.net sometimes saves our lives. Especially when we have to edit some images pixel by pixel.
Thanks again!
Will version 3.5 or 4.0 offer an API that can be accessed from other apps written in .NET?
Tim, I have no idea why you’re asking this on a blog post about statistics.