Month: February 2011

Paint.NET v3.5.7 is now available

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As usual, you can either use the built-in updater from the Utilities menu, or you can download and install directly from the website: http://www.getpaint.net/. There’s no need to worry about removing the old version; that is all handled automatically.

This update improves reliability of saving, further improves Copy/Paste functionality, and fixes some other miscellaneous bugs.

Here’s the list of changes since v3.5.6:

  • Saving an image is now fault-tolerant. If there is an error or crash while saving, the original file will be left alone.
  • Worked around a bug in some plugins that are incorrectly using the built-in Gaussian Blur effect. For example, Sharpen+. Now they won’t crash.
  • Fixed a bug with Edit->Paste into New Image, where the new image would be 1 pixel too wide or tall, as reported at http://forums.getpaint.net/index.php?/topic/20969-paste-problem/
  • Fixed a bug with the Rectangle Select tool and Fixed Ratio selection, which would be off by 1 pixel, as reported at http://forums.getpaint.net/index.php?/topic/20820-croppig-by-fixed-ratio-is-inexact
  • When pasting an image from Paint.NET into Paint.NET, it will be a little smarter about where it puts the image. Previously, if the location wasn’t within the viewport, it would be placed at the top-left corner of the viewport. Now it will find the nearest point along the edge of the viewport to place the image.
  • The EXIF rotation ("orientation") metadata is now discarded when opening an image, which was causing aggravation with images that could then never be reoriented correctly using Image->Rotate
  • The EXIF tags for JPEG thumbnail data are now correctly discarded.
  • Fixed a handful of memory leaks.
  • Fixed a typo in the Italian translation. In the setup wizard it was referring to "Pain.NET" (woops)

Enjoy!

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Paint.NET v3.5.7 Beta (Build 4058) is now available

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This update improves reliability of saving, further improves Copy/Paste functionality, and fixes some other miscellaneous bugs. I decided to port the “fault-tolerant save” work I did in the v4.0 codebase back to v3.5.x so that this much-needed reliability improvement could be made available now.

As usual, you can get it either by downloading it from the website, or via the built-in updater (Utilities -> Check for Updates). If you use the built-in updater, please make sure that "Also check for pre-release (beta) versions" is enabled.

You can also visit the forum to discuss this: http://forums.getpaint.net/index.php?/topic/21025-paintnet-v357-beta-build-4058/ 

  • Saving an image is now fault-tolerant. If there is an error or crash while saving, the original file will be left alone.
  • Worked around a bug in some plugins that are incorrectly using the built-in Gaussian Blur effect. For example, Sharpen+. Now they won’t crash.
  • Fixed a bug with Edit->Paste into New Image, where the new image would be 1 pixel too wide or tall, as reported at http://forums.getpaint.net/index.php?/topic/20969-paste-problem/
  • Fixed a bug with the Rectangle Select tool and Fixed Ratio selection, which would be off by 1 pixel, as reported at http://forums.getpaint.net/index.php?/topic/20820-croppig-by-fixed-ratio-is-inexact
  • When pasting an image from Paint.NET into Paint.NET, it will be a little smarter about where it puts the image. Previously, if the location wasn’t within the viewport, it would be placed at the top-left corner of the viewport. Now it will find the nearest point along the edge of the viewport to place the image.
  • The EXIF rotation ("orientation") metadata is now discarded when opening an image, which was causing aggravation with images that could then never be reoriented correctly using Image->Rotate
  • The EXIF tags for JPEG thumbnail data are now correctly discarded.
  • Fixed a potential memory leak in the Gaussian Blur effect.
  • Fixed a typo in the Italian translation. In the setup wizard it was referring to "Pain.NET" (woops)

Enjoy!

January 2011 usage statistics – Win7 wins

11 Comments

The last time I posted stats was in September, and Windows XP had finally dropped below the 50% mark. This time around, the identified trends are continuing: XP is down, Vista is down, Win7 is up, 64-bit is up. A new update, v3.5.6, was released in November, which brought some important bug fixes and also a few performance enhancements. The overall usage numbers (“total hits to update manifest”) cannot be directly compared between this month and September because the v3.5.6 update changed the interval for automatic update checking from 5 days to 10 days, giving the appearance of less activity. This was done to spread out the bandwidth use for new updates, and was an easy change to justify. Anyway here we go …

Windows 7 is now up to about 45% of the user base, a gain of almost 17% since last time. XP has fallen further to less than 40%, which is a drop of almost 9%. Vista has also fallen, by about 14% down to 15.5% total. An important sum here brings the total of Win7 + Vista to just over 60%, which is the percentage that will be able to run Paint.NET v4.0 upon its release, which will require Vista SP2 as I’ve stated before. 64-bit adoption has also grown another 16% and is now more than 1/4th of the user base, a trend I’m still very happy to see continue. I highly recommend running 64-bit Windows 7! It really is the best configuration for running Paint.NET, and my personal favorite of the 3 major editions of Windows that Paint.NET v3.5.x supports.

The percentage of Russian users continues to gain steadily as well – by almost 20% since September! Other than that, there isn’t a whole lot of change worth mentioning in the rest of the stats.

Work on Paint.NET v4.0 is progressing steadily. I’ve recently added support for the Windows Animation Manager, and have employed it in the image thumbnail list to very good effect! Scrolling and fading animations seem superfluous on first discussion, but they really add to the polish of the application, and I’ve found they even improve perceived performance. I’ve found that interleaving creative and technical work helps to keep things more interesting. I’ve been doing some additional work to enable better use of Aero Glass, such as rendering the image thumbnails up into the title bar area.

I’m also considering a public release of pre-alpha builds, in order to get early and important testing and validation of the new .NET 4.0 platform and related installation changes. Maybe I’ll be able to do this by March! There won’t be a big chunk of new features (compared to v3.5.x), but from a “scientific” standpoint this is a good thing. Testing one thing at a time can be a very good strategy, and I’m quite sure there’s plenty of appetite for newer versions of Paint.NET even if they are pre-alpha bits (not the cereal!). There are a few more changes that need to go in before I feel comfortable doing this, such as fault-tolerant saving. Right now Paint.NET, when told to save, will write directly to the file you’ve already saved – it needs to save to a temporary file first, and then swap over the original file only once that has completed successfully.

Anyway that’s all for now!


Look ma, pie chart!

  September 2010 January 2011  
Total  hits to update manifest 3,598,716 3,563,906  
Hits per day 116,087 114,965  
       
32-bit 77.53% 73.92%  
64-bit 22.47% 26.08% alt
       
Windows XP 43.42% 39.57%  
Windows 2003 0.18% 0.14%  
Windows Vista / 2008 18.14% 15.55%  
Windows 7 / 2008 R2 38.25% 44.74% alt
       
English 40.33% 37.81%  
non-English 59.67% 62.19%  
German 15.78% 16.01%  
French 7.68% 8.07%  
Portuguese 4.91% 4.67%  
Spanish 5.77% 5.46%  
Japanese 2.46% 2.35%  
Italian 3.77% 3.67%  
Polish 1.39% 1.68%  
Netherlands (Dutch) 1.43% 1.45%  
Russian 10.63% 12.74%  
Chinese (Simplified) 0.66% 0.59%  
Chinese (Traditional) 0.48% 0.46%  
Turkish 0.70% 0.86%  
Korean 0.27% 0.25%  
All other languages 1.02% 1.03%  
       
Have translations 81.62% 78.87%  
Don’t have translations 18.38% 21.13%