Wow, it’s been awhile since I posted! Let’s see what’s new …

Brushes

The new brush engine is still in its infancy so I don’t have any good screenshots I’m willing to share at this point. It fully supports “softness” which is a staple of every brush-based drawing programs other than Paint.NET (pre-4.0 ). I’ve found it a bit tricky to get good performance within the new rendering engine, but I’ve mostly solved how to do it right (it’s a classic performance vs. memory usage trade-off) and just need to write the actual code. The initial 4.0 release will not support custom brush shapes (“stamps”), but it should be fairly straightforward to add them afterward.

Once the brush engine is in place for the paintbrush tool, I will be able to quickly rebuild the eraser, clone stamp, and recolor tools so they can all have the same features and rendering quality.

Pressure Sensitivity?

I just got a Surface Pro, and it’s pretty slick. More importantly, at least for Paint.NET, is that it has a good Wacom-based stylus/pen with pressure sensitivity. I originally dropped pressure sensitivity in v3.5 because that part of the code was getting in the way of some very important improvements to the input system for the brush tools. That in itself wasn’t a good reason for dropping it, but I had no hardware to test with so I could be sure that I wasn’t breaking pressure sensitivity (or worse). Now I’ve finally got some good hardware for this, so 4.0 might support it, at least for Windows 8 and up since it has new APIs that provide this as a first-class input mechanism. From what I’ve looked at, it’s promising, but I’m still not sure if it’ll work the way I need it to. Cross your fingers.

Shapes

I haven’t stalked about the new Shapes tool yet, which is a cornerstone of the new toolset. Instead of having one tool for each shape (rectangle, circle, etc), there is 1 shape tool and you choose your shape from the toolbar:

Once you’ve drawn a shape you’re free to move, rotate, and resize it. You can also change the shape type or adjust everything else about it (colors, brush size, etc) until you’ve committed it to the layer (and of course, “fine grained history” is fully supported). You can resize the shape using the 8 corner handles, you can move it with the "compass" handle that appears to the lower right of the shape, and you can rotate by placing the mouse between the bottom-right resize handle and the move handle. When you do that, a two-sided curvy arrow appears underneath the mouse cursor to let you know you can drag there to do some rotation:

(You can also move by dragging elsewhere, but the compass handle makes it very obvious as to where you can always drag to move it.)

The handle in the center, which I guess I call “the screw”, can be moved around and lets you redefine what a rotation will use as its center point.

This UI for the resizing, moving, and rotating is the same one that the new Move tools use. Consistency for the user + reusability for the developer = good.

Custom shapes will not be supported in 4.0, but are planned for a release soon after that (sorry y’all, gotta prioritize!). All of the shapes stuff is based on a programming model that’s nearly identical to the Geometry system in WPF/Siverlight/XAML, so once you can add your own shapes it’ll be easy to find examples online with some XAML or path markup which you can then use in Paint.NET.

Not Abandoned

Lastly, to all the people who’ve sent e-mails or left comments asking if Paint.NET is still alive: yes! I just haven’t updated the blog in awhile. I also haven’t made much progress in the last few months because I haven’t had as much time for it; the amount of time I was putting into it was burning me out a bit. But yes, it’s still alive! 4.0 is still on the way, it’s just a really large project that takes a lot of time.