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.

Last Thursday I release a new alpha of Paint.NET v3.5, build 3450. I have rewritten the way that fonts are handled for and by the Text tool. Even if you don’t use the Text tool much, you will still notice some improvements! (see the bulleted list below)

In previous versions of Paint.NET, there are two forms of text rendering supported. The first and the default is called “Smooth”, which utilizes GDI+* to render text. The second is called “Sharp”, and uses GDI. For both, GDI+ is used for font enumeration through the classes in the System.Drawing namespace. Over time, GDI+ has proven to be a poor system for font handling. It has been the cause of many crashes, as GDI+ has a tendency to crash or trample on memory when it encounters fonts that are “bad” (although bad is relative – the font itself may be perfectly fine!). This has led to some people being completely unable to use Paint.NET through no fault of their own.

As a result, I have banished GDI+ from the Text tool. The new builds of Paint.NET are using GDI exclusively for font discovery and text rendering, a change that was substantial in the amount of code that was required and the amount of research that had to be done to make sense of it all. If you’d like to get an appreciation of the depth of the subject, you should check out chapters 14, “Fonts”, and 15, “Text”, of the book, Windows Graphics Programming: Win32 GDI and DirectDraw (Hewlett-Packard Professional Books).

The new typography system in Paint.NET has been designed so that I can plug new text rendering technologies into it. Right now it only supports GDI. For the meantime this means that the choice between “Sharp” and “Smooth” is not available. My next step is to add support for two more text rendering systems, FreeType and DirectWrite (for Windows 7 users**). The former will step in to provide the “Smooth” renderer, and the latter will be added under the name “Enhanced” (or some appropriate name).

In the meantime, you’ll still realize the following benefits in the latest alpha:

• No more “missing” fonts. GDI+ doesn’t support some fonts, notably bitmap, vector, and certain OpenType fonts. I don’t know why. You’ll notice that the new versions of Paint.NET now has a “complete” font list.
• Improved startup performance. It’s ironic that I was telling my manager at work the other day, “Paint.NET v1.0 had poor startup performance – in fact, it was enumerating all the system fonts at system startup, but it no longer does.” Well, because of a bug in my layout code for the toolbar, Paint.NET v3.36 was still doing this! I fixed the bug, and Paint.NET v3.5 now properly defers this to later. I’ve measured the improvement in startup performance at about 15%*** on my systems, and if you have a “lot” of fonts you will no doubt see an even bigger improvement. This is in addition to the already improved startup performance of v3.5 versus v3.36!
• Improved stability. Like I mentioned earlier, GDI+ often crashes when it runs into “bad” fonts (subject to GDI+’s definition of “bad”). Or, it has bugs that lead it to trample on memory it does not own, resulting in crashes which get attributed to the wrong code. GDI does not have this problem. Or, at the very least, if it runs into “bad” fonts, I now control the code that deals with this. I can then make it do something other than crash.
• Installing new fonts. Previously, Paint.NET needed to be restarted for it to recognize any new (or deleted) fonts. I now place a FileSystemWatcher object on the system fonts directory and refresh the toolbar’s font list when changes are detected. There is also a shortcut in the Utilities menu to open the Fonts directory, which will be very useful for helping answer the question that is asked with surprising frequency on the forum: “How do I add fonts?”

* The Wikipedia article states that in the Windows XP timeframe, GDI was deprecated in favor of GDI+. This is not true, although it may have been the altruistic intent at the time.

** This will eventually be supported on Windows Vista as well. 

*** On my personal system, the difference is 0.577 seconds versus 0.405 seconds, as reported by Process Explorer. This is not a formal or exhaustive performance analysis. The precision and accuracy of Process Explorer is not at the millisecond level, hence me rounding all the way down to 15%. The system is an Intel Core i7 920 overclocked to 3.6GHz running Windows 7 RC build 7100. Another system, a Core 2 Quad Q6600 2.4GHz system running Windows 7, reported values of 1.0 second versus about 0.8 seconds, respectively.

Here’s where you can check it out: http://paintdotnet.forumer.com/viewtopic.php?f=46&t=30113

This will not be made available on the website. I don’t even recommend that any download websites host it yet. We’ll wait for the beta for that!

In the meantime, please download, install, and post your comments on the forum.

It’s April and we finally have some sun in Seattle and I haven’t posted in awhile.

Paint.NET runs pretty well with Parallels on my MacBook Pro, although there’s a few quirks to squash. Hmm … they have an affiliate program. I smell a revision to the System Requirements coming soon. Do you know how many requests I get for a Mac version of Paint.NET? 🙂

“Should Competent Programms be “Mathematically Inclined”?” — Absolutely, Jeff. I can’t believe anyone would question this. “Math is hard, let’s go shopping!” *faceplant*

Paint.NET v3.5 is coming along, but slowly. I haven’t had as much time or motivation, and it’s difficult when you don’t have a build that works because of ancillary code you broke in areas that you don’t really like (the Recolor tool comes to mind).

Blackjack is fun, especially when you’re winning.