One request I get on occasion is if I have a way for Paint.NET to receive donations without having to use PayPal. Not wanting to give out my home address, I have always had to apologetically say “no.” But, finally there was a PO box that was available at the local post office, and now the Paint.NET Donate page has been updated with the mailing address:

It will also be interesting to see what affect this has on donation revenue, if any.

I was recently talking to my friend Jake online, when he mentioned this:

So my 62-year-old aunt calls me up about two hours ago: “Hey, Jake, have you ever heard of paint dot net [sic]? Is that a good program? I’ve got a bunch of pictures from polo and I need something to work with them with.”

Apparently his aunt loves Paint.NET 🙂

I recently created an LLC for Paint.NET. I named it “dotPDN”, which is what you get if you say out loud the file extension for Paint.NET’s native file format, “.PDN”. After some quick iterating with a friend and some people on the forum, I even have a nice logo made completely in Paint.NET:

The “corporate website” (if you can call it that J) is at http://www.dotpdn.com. The text on the site, “our current projects include…” may seem to imply that I have other projects in the works. This isn’t the case, although I may resuscitate ListXP in order to have more than 1 project in that list J Which might be painful seeing as how the code sort of fell apart the last time I tried to compile it in Visual Studio 2005 … dang, I could really use that utility again in x64 land. Right click, List!

Some people might see this “dotPDN LLC” addition and think, “Oh my gosh! Did Paint.NET get bought out!? What’s going to happen?! Is it going to cost money now! Onoz!” Well, Paint.NET was not “bought out”, and I did not “sell out” to anyone. dotPDN LLC is my own Limited Liability Company and there will be no changes to how Paint.NET is distributed or developed. I’m still the one doing the coding, and I’m still the one calling the shots. The purpose of the LLC is mostly to serve as a legal shield for me: if someone wants to “sue Paint.NET” then they have to target the LLC and they can’t go after my personal assets (like my liquor!). I think it also has some tax benefits, but I’m going to let QuickBooks help me figure that part out.

Next up I need to set up various e-mail accounts, get a PO Box, and a new code signing certificate. Hopefully the next Paint.NET update you install will say that it’s digitally signed by “dotPDN LLC” instead of “Eric Brewster” J Total cost to set up the LLC was less than $1,000 USD, which includes going to http://www.mycorporation.com and checking the boxes to have them basically do all of the grunt work for filing and paperwork. I also had to buy a bunch of domain names for “dotpdn” and “dotpdnllc”.

Ever since before the Paint.NET software project began in early 2004, the paint.net domain was redirecting to http://www.warrenpaint.com. This is the website for Warren Paint & Color Co., a paint manufacturer in Tennessee. That’s a pretty good domain to own for that type of business, eh? It’d be like owning “bikes.com” for a bicycle shop or something.

Fast forward to yesterday, and a lot of people are still typing in “paint.net” into their address bar in hopes of finding the Paint.NET software. Unfortunately for them, they have always been getting redirected to the Warren Paint & Color Co. website. This has brought some extra traffic to the Warrant Paint & Color Co. website, but the problem is that they’re also getting daily e-mails from people either asking where the Paint.NET software is, or saying mean things and accusing them of cybersquatting or search hijacking. It’s been a bit frustrating for them.

Next, fast forward to today. In order to reduce confusion around the domain and to cut the guys at Warren Paint & Color Co. a break from answering e-mails that should be sent to me, we’ve worked together to set up a simple redirect page. If you go to http://www.paint.net/ right now, you’ll see this in place now. It basically just presents the logos for both websites and says, “Why don’t you just tell me where you want me to go!” *

So from now on, when people ask you where to get Paint.NET, just tell them to type it into their browsers! No matter which box they type into (URL, search), they’ll find it.

Thanks to Jeff for setting up the redirect over to the disambiguation page. Also, thanks to Graham Laing for facilitating the matter.

* Seinfield reference.

I just noticed that the price has fallen to $299 for the Intel Core 2 Quad Q6600 (2.4 GHz) processor at newegg. If you’re looking for the best system to run Paint.NET on right now, this is a great place to start! I’ve personally been using the Intel Core 2 Extreme QX6700 for my development system since December, and it’s awesome for those of us who are writing and optimizing multithreaded code. If you’re a developer then I highly recommend getting one.

P.S. I just finished up the integration of the DDS plugin for Paint.NET v3.10. And then I used OpenMP to optimize it for multiple threads: it is much faster on a dual- or quad-core system now! I’m still shooting to have a beta out by the end of the month.

Disclaimer: This is not a paid endorsement or advertisement or anything. I’m not receiving any money from newegg, Intel, or anyone for that matter, for this post.

Even though it doesn’t work in 64-bit Windows and I have to use another computer to sync it, I honestly really like the iPhone. Having just upgraded from a staple RAZR, this thing is incredible. The first few days I had it I couldn’t take it out of my pocket without people asking me about it. Whether I was at work, on the beach, or at the bar, everyone wanted to look at it, touch it, and play with it. It’s easy to use, it’s sexy, and everyone wants one. Even the people I hang out at the bars with, most of whom don’t use a computer for anything other than MySpace, know about and desperately want an iPhone.

I was going to compile a top 5 list of the questions that people ask me about the phone, but really there are just two questions people ask when confronted with My Amazing iPhone:

1. Can I play with it? / Can I touch it? Sure, go ahead J Everyone wants to play with it! And not just my coworkers or other tech aficionados, either. I’m talking about another market that is much harder to appeal to: 20-something, bar-hopping women (I hang out at the bars around here, I tend to run in to them). They all know what it is, they all want one, and none of them can afford it. I predict a huge Christmas market for Apple with this device. (Yes Cassandra, I can load up the beat-boxing flute player video from YouTube on this thing. Yes, it’s awesome. No, you can’t have it! Yes, I agree, it’s time for another round of rum ‘n cokes.)
   
2. How long did you stand in line for it? I didn’t. I went in around 3pm last Saturday, walked right up to the counter and said, “Give me an iPhone.” The gentleman at the counter said, “Ok, how would you like to pay for that?” There were a ton of people in the store, most of the playing with iPhones, but only a few up at the counter actually buying stuff. I probably just got in at a lucky time.

After having used this thing for over a week, I do have my top list of feature requests:

1. Flash. Dang it, I want to play Desktop Tower Defense on this thing. And all those embedded YouTube clips on celebrity gossip websites are completely inaccessible!
2. Auto-Login / Password Saving for Safari. I wish I could load up my “web apps” without having to type in my login and password every time. It’s extremely tedious to load up sites like Facebook, Google AdSense, MySpace, Hotmail, PayPal, etc. on the iPhone because you have to type in your user name and password every time. The passwords that I use aren’t in the dictionary, with randomized casing, numbers, and special symbols. I usually type them from muscle memory and it’s very difficult to touch-type them on this thing. So please, Apple, let me just add a bookmark with a login so that I can just push Bookmarks, and then push Facebook, and then have it log in for me. Maybe force me to type in a 4-digit PIN first to get access to the password repository, similar to what Firefox allows you to do.
3. GPS. How cool would it be if the built-in Google Maps was tied to a GPS chip in the device? It would also be nice to have for when you’re walking to a destination (“where the **** is EMP?!”), something that car navigation systems just can’t do. Why pay $5000 for car navigation on a $60,000 BMW when you can just rest your iPhone near the dashboard? Goodbye iDrive, hello iPhone. (2008 E92 M3, I’m also talking to you.)
4. Make all apps rotate-aware. Sometimes I want to access the Maps app in widescreen. Or I want to lay the phone at the sideways angle while I’m in my car so that it won’t be as likely to fall over. Right now only Safari is rotate-aware, and it’s just inconsistent. Also, the YouTube app forces you to switch between landscape and portrait depending on whether you’re browsing or watching, and it’s clumsy.
5. 64-bit Windows compatibility. Duh. Although, in Apple’s defense, this has been a major failing of the entire industry. I can’t believe how many people have told me, “Why should I install 64-bit? There’s no advantage, and my printers won’t work!” Argh! Heck, Microsoft doesn’t even ship 64-bit DVD’s with most editions of Windows Vista. The latest Photoshop CS3 isn’t 64-bit native, albeit because of sound engineering and scheduling tradeoffs (I have even written in their defense). But hey, that’s another blog post (question: anyone interested in some 64-bit ranting? J)

This is a version 1 product and it shows. However, unlike other v1 products, the features that are there do truly rock. Instead of 100 features that suck, we have 10 features that are rock solid. It’s like they took the Paint.NET philosophy and applied it to a phone. (Actually, it’s more like I took the Apple philosophy and applied it to Paint.NET. Shh, don’t tell anyone.)

Anyway it’s Sunday. Time for some weekend stuff, like … not doing any work. Where is the beer.

There I was, hoping to get my new iPhone set up and to replace my RAZR which can’t even keep up with my typing, and then …

I’m using the x64 version of Windows Vista Ultimate. A small amount of digging online highlights the fact that the iPhone doesn’t work on 64-bit Windows. This fact is not listed on the box, nor on their website (oh woops, apparently it’s hidden deep within some random support document).

Way to go Apple! How hard could 64-bit support possibly be for a launch as big as this? Especially when Mac OS X Leopard has 64-bit trumpeted as one of its big new features, you’d think their engineers would spend the time to add support for it on the Windows side.

The effects system in Paint.NET is generally a well thought-out system and great for someone like myself to develop against (hey I wrote it, so I know all the rules!). It was designed to give all effects the same support and workflow for selection clipping, user cancellation, multiprocessor/multicore scaling, and preview rendering.

However, when extended for plugins, it has not held up to the test of time.

“But just wait a second!” you might yell. “There are tons of plugins on the forum, and some of them are really good!” You’re probably referring to things like the EdHarvey Effects pack, or the DirectX Surface (.DDS) plugin by Dean Ashton. These are the types of plugins that really extend Paint.NET’s usefulness and cause developer envy in myself … but I digress! J

This effects system is definitely a case of something that was written by one developer (me), for two developers (myself and Tom Jackson). However, for a very long time, it didn’t matter because there were no plugins! Paint.NET wasn’t popular enough for anyone to have really written any of them, and the community was small – maybe 1 or 2 posts to the forum on any given day. In fact, between version 2.5 and 2.6, I made changes to the system that completely broke all plugins written for 2.5 and before. This was back in February 2006, and I didn’t get any grief e-mails about it. Nowadays if I make the slightest change, such as moving a class between DLL’s, I get e-mails from many users whose plugins are now causing crashes! (Which brings to light another problem, that of robustness, but that’s another topic.)

Some people have so many plugins installed that they are crying out for a way to organize them in to sub-menus of their choosing. Their Effects menu gets so big that they have to scroll around to find their effects!

As a developer and publisher of software, this is the absolute best kind of problem you can have. Think about it: people wouldn’t be asking for an “organize effects” feature unless there were lots of effect plugins!

Wow, what a difference one year makes! So right now there are a number of problems that I’m hoping to solve in the next release:

1. Make it easier for casual plugin developers. Not all plugin developers have a computer science degree and a day job as a software engineer. Nor would they want to! (Heck, most professional software engineers would rather be doing something else, to be brutally honest.) A lot of people right now are making plugins by using CodeLab which was originally only intended to provide a rapid prototyping environment – turns out people are perfectly happy using the DLL’s it spits out!

   On the forums, BoltBait has even extended CodeLab so that it will automatically generate a user interface by adding a small amount of metadata to your script file. However, it is limited to the very basic UI dialogs that are built in to Paint.NET. BoltBait doesn’t exactly have time to pour in to CodeLab to turn it into Visual-Studio-inside-Paint.NET, complete with syntax highlighting and a UI designer. I think he’d rather spend time with his family, for instance, and I don’t blame him.

   I’d like to make it so that you can tell Paint.NET to automatically generate a user interface based on some schema that defines the properties for your effect. Maybe you can throw some XML at the effect system, like <Property Name=”Blurriness” Minimum=”1″ Maximum=”100″ Type=”Int32″ /> and it will figure it out.

2. Make it easier for plugin users. Right now you have to download the DLL … or the ZIP … and then figure out that you need to extract it to C:\Program Files\Paint.NET\Effects. Oh, and don’t forget to close Paint.NET and restart it. Also, if you downloaded a DLL then Internet Explorer will tag the file as “blocked” so you have to right click it, hit Properties, and unblock it. Etc., etc., argh! It’s no problem for myself, or other developers. File system acrobatics are second nature. But if I were to tell my mom how to do this, she’d be lost.

   I like to call this the “I have a dll, now what?” problem:

   
   (image from: http://icanhascheezburger.com/2007/05/30/i-has-a-money/)

   This is not to disparage the many users who have asked about this. It simply highlights that, to most users, a DLL is a weird foreign object much like the quarter is for the kitten.

   So, like I mentioned in an earlier blog post, I want to make this a lot easier! Right now the idea is to have a container format, maybe using the extension “.pdnmod” (Paint.NET Mod) that would basically be a renamed ZIP file. Once that extension is associated with Paint.NET, installing a plugin will be as simple as linking to a .pdnmod on a web page and then clicking the appropriate approval dialogs.

   This container format will also simplify, standardize, and/or facilitate things like attribution (“copyright so-and-so”), localization, and automatic generation of UI based on a schema for property values (as mentioned above).

3. Extend what the Effect system is useful for. Right now there is some confusion about the effect system and how it works. “Why is my Render method called hundreds of times!?” Some people are trying to use it for image analysis (“analyze pixels, write data to text file”), which it is just not intended for. There is also the really big problem that implementing multi-pass rendering algorithms isn’t really feasible right now. Some people are, to be honest, horribly abusing the effect system and going outside the rules just to get it to do what they want. To that end, I’d like to make the workflow a little more customizable so that they don’t have to do these terrible things.
4. Provide documentation. This is where the title of this post comes in to play. People are writing effects even in the absence of any real documentation! So … I think I will write some, finally.

Anyway, that’s about all I have to say right now. I’m taking this week off from my day job, so I’ve got plenty of time to catch up on things and go enjoy the sunshine here in downtown Kirkland.

I received this e-mail earlier in the week. I liked it so I asked if I could publish it to my blog, and Matthew gave me the okay:

Mr. Brewster,

I first contacted you in January asking if I could install Paint.NET* on the computers in my classroom. I teach at 7th and 8th graders at San Gorgonio Middle School in Beaumont, CA. You gave me the go-ahead and I immediately started using the program in all three of my computers classes. The results have been awesome. My students absolutely love using this program, and I am very happy because they got experience with a photo editing software other than Microsoft Paint.

Keeping in mind that these students range from 11 to 13 years old, the skills they have been able to display are phenomenal. You made it possible for about 100 students to get invaluable experience with this software, not to mention fostering their creativity and critical thinking skills. I can’t thank you and your team enough for giving myself and my classes this opportunity.

I’ve attached a .jpg “thank you” card from my students (sorry about the large file size).

Matthew Centofranchi
San Gorgonio Middle School
Math & Computers Teacher

Here’s a small preview of the card they attached. You can click it for a larger version. I’m not going to share the full version because it’s 6MB and I don’t want to shred my bandwidth quota for the month J

So, you’re welcome Matthew! I’m glad you and your students had fun and learned a lot with Paint.NET. It’s very rewarding to get an e-mail like this! Now if only the cute girl down at the coffee shop knew what “Paint.NET” was, then I’d be set …

If you have any other “success stories,” feel free to e-mail me (the address is at on the Contact page), or just post a comment to this blog!

* Yes, most people know that Paint.NET is free so it may seem puzzling why Matthew asked permission for his use. But it’s not always clear that this license extends to things like widespread network deployment, business use, or to use at a school with many users (in other words, that Paint.NET is free and not just for personal use). Many employers are skeptical when told that software is “free” and reasonably require some kind of proof, such as an e-mail confirmation from the software publisher (me!). I blame this “not always clear” aspect on the fact that we have to use scary looking software licenses that are written “by lawyers, for lawyers.” Oh and the license is often IN ALL SCARY CAPITALS WITH NO WARRANTIES J

So version 3.08 is fresh out the door, which means it’s time to start on the next release! The last few releases since v3.0 have mostly been servicing releases (aka “bugfix releases”), with a few features and refinements thrown in for good measure. Service releases are important in order to fix top pain points for users, but it’s also great when some new features are introduced too (even if just a trickle). Not everyone is affected by every bug, so why force everyone to download the fix for it? If I add a trickle of new features or refinements, then everyone is able to benefit from even a +0.01 update. And then I get to go drink beer! It’s a win-win-win scenario.

Anyway, I’m currently planning out the next two major releases: “3.Next” and 4.0.

“3.Next” might end up being named 3.20, and that’s how it’s described on the Roadmap page. The big area I want to focus on in this release is the experience around plugins, for both the user and the developer. I will be creating a new, richer plug-in API (and adapters for old plugins, don’t worry!). The user interface will allow you to install these plugins right from within the application, and to enable / disable them individually without having to muck around in the file system. Users have also been crying out for a way to organize their effects into submenus, and I’m hoping to provide that as well. You’ll also be able to install a plugin just for yourself, or for all users on the system. Maybe I can also provide a way for plugins to be able to check for their own updates and to then invite the user to install them (like Firefox does). I also want to make it much much easier to write UI for Effect plugins. Right now it is a very clumsy experience.

Along with the plugin management, I think it’ll also be very useful for Paint.NET to allow you to configure the file types that it is registered to handle. Right now you essentially have to re-install Paint.NET to get to these options. Granted, these aren’t options that you really need to touch very often, but when you add file type plugins it’s another ballgame: if you install the DDS plugin, how great would it be for Paint.NET to be able to register itself to handle *.DDS? Right now these file type plugins are on their own, and it sucks for the user.

As you may be guessing, this means that “3.Next” will have a Configuration dialog (aka Options, Settings, Preferences, etc.). I have always been fiercely against providing a dialog like this in Paint.NET because they can easily degrade into a buffet of confusing checkboxes, radio buttons, and all sorts of propeller-head idiocy. Sometimes you end up needing a large supplementary manual just for this portion of the user interface. I recommend that you read Jeff Atwood’s Coding Horror blog post from last November, “This Is What Happens When You Let Developers Create UI“. It’s a good read J

The Configuration dialog in “3.Next” will only provide options that really matter. There will not, for example, be a “Tile Cache Size” option, or anything else that requires 3 pages of text to explain. Those are things that the application should be able to optimize itself, and that the user shouldn’t need to give a damn about. The Tool->Choose Defaults and the updater options will also be consolidated here.

Version 4.00 is going to be a whole new ballgame, and is also discussed briefly on the Roadmap page. There are certain areas of Paint.NET that, quite honestly, only work because they have been thoroughly debugged. I have identified three areas that are in need of major overhauls: the data model, the application model, and the image rendering engine. So basically the entire program (oops).

The data model needs to be more resilient to nested actions. Right now the application is given direct access to the data and expected to “do the right thing.” That sort of trust never scales over time, not even on a relatively small project like Paint.NET. I want to move to a more transaction-oriented system, with support for nested and ambient transactions.

The rendering engine right now is pretty simple in Paint.NET, consisting of methods called Render() that are given a target and a region of interest. This works great for linear composition, but nested composition is out of the picture. What if I want to attach a mask or an adjustment to a layer? I can’t do that right now because I don’t have a 3^rd rendering buffer, nor do I want to require the memory it takes to do that. So this means the rendering engine must move to working with tiles instead of whole bitmaps (yes, just like every other non-Paint editor out there J). Tiles are generally light weight and can be cached, copied, paged out to disk, paged in to memory, etc.

The application model needs to be refactored so that it separates front-end (user interface) from back-end (logic). This and the data model changes are tightly intertwined, and will provide the foundation for such features as scripting and automation.

That’s enough writing for now. Hopefully this gives some good insight into the direction that Paint.NET is going, both short-term and long-term.