In a much older post, I talked about how I did a small experiment with glass. And, just the other day I talked about the latest visual refresh for Paint.NET. Since then, I’ve decided that the free icons available from http://www.pinvoke.com, by Yusuke Kamiyamane, are a much better fit than those from the Oxygen or Crystal sets.

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.

Paint.NET v3.5 has added support for DirectWrite, a new component in Windows 7. It improves performance, text rendering quality, and reliability when compared to GDI+ or GDI.

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?).

I’ve been chipping away at the last changes and fixes for Paint.NET before I stamp it as beta and release it to the larger, hungrier “Beta crowd.” This update will be published to users of previous stable versions who’ve opted into public beta updates, and made available via the built-in updater. Hopefully I can finalize and push the stable version out the door to all users by the time Windows 7 hits retail shelves (October 22nd).

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.