That’s a good question. Office lets you move the toolbars and even the menubar around (it’s just a differently rendered type of toolbar). Visual Studio lets you, and the “toolstrip” controls in .NET 2.0 supposedly have the capability. So why, then, doesn’t Paint.NET allow you to move them around or do other customization?

As Raymond Chen would say, “Because the alternative is worse.”

It becomes a usability problem, or at least an annoyance, for the people who don’t want to customize their toolbar*, and this is something I was reminded of just now when I looked over at RSS Bandit and saw this:

Why is my menu bar below the toolbar? Because I accidentally dragged something around. I don’t know when or what.

It becomes a usability and support nightmare because people would lose the toolbars, or otherwise be unable to find features they already found. Do not underestimate individuals’ ability for this! And it’s not about stupidity or intelligence, it’s just about usability. I recently had a reasonably intelligent friend ask me, “Where is that new ‘Fixed Size’ functionality for the selection tool that you’ve been talking about?”, and it was right in front of his face.

It also hinders productive troubleshooting or communication between two Paint.NET users.

Bob: “Just click on X in the toolbar.”
John: “I don’t see it.”
Bob: “It’s kinda on the far-right side. Do you have the latest version?”
John: “Yes I have 3.20.”
Bob: “Umm … is part of the window off-screen?”
John: “No the whole thing is only taking up half my monitor.”
Bob: “Yargh. Did you hide or move the toolbar or is the toolbar off-screen or under some other stuff?”
John: “I don’t know?”
Bob: “Click the Reset Toolbars menu item in the Window menu.”
John: “Hmm. We have another problem. I have no menus either.”
Bob: “I will start using four-letter words from now on. Plug your ears.”

Here’s the conversation without customized toolbars:

Bob: “Just click on X in the toolbar.”
John: “I don’t see it.”
Bob: “It’s kinda on the far-right side. Do you have the latest version?”
John: “Oh there it is! And yeah I have 3.20.”

So, because I do not want an inbox full of people asking me how to fix their toolbars or how to find their features, and nor do I want to have to add complicated self-healing code or a “Reset Toolbars” menu item (that people would still lack the psychic powers to find, mind you!), I have disallowed this type of functionality. The toolbars will only ever show up in Paint.NET in one way. Oh, and I also want people to be able to use the software and not have a need to consult documentation or a support line. Because if users have to do that, then you have failed.**

* According to conventional insight, most people do not customize anything about the software they use.

** I think this insight comes from a blog I’ve read elsewhere but for the life of me I can’t find it.

I want to start working on Paint.NET v4.0, and the time has finally come. I have some wicked ideas on pervasive parallel programming that I am hoping to thoroughly integrate throughout the application*. However, this will take a lot of time to engineer, and may involve significant refactoring or a “spiritual rewrite”. It will take at least a year to complete, if not more.

In the meantime, however, the v3.xx architecture still has some life left in it (duh). My plan is to have new, minor releases of the v3.xx branch throughout the course of 2008 at 6-week intervals. To start, I plan on releasing v3.22 in mid-January. It will have some bug fixes, a performance tweak, and Tom’s “Reduce Noise” plugin. After that, you can expect something like a v3.24 release by March. Maybe I’ll add 8-bit and 24-bit support to PNG or something. I’m not sure yet. It will depend on what the user base is clamoring for of course.

For a freeware like Paint.NET, you cannot just have a year-long gap between releases. You have to keep interest in the project alive which means staying on the front page of sites like Neowin. The project grows by having short, large spurts of press coverage. When I released version 3.0 in January of this year, the short-term increase in traffic was enormous and the smaller but long-term, sustained increase was crucially important.

Other revenue opportunities might present themselves as well, such as developing and selling a “Paint.NET Plugins Pack” for $10 or something. These could provide fuel for more rapid development of the major version 4.0 release.

* I have a lot of thoughts in this area, but so far have not distilled them into short-enough blog posts. It’s one of those, “where do I start?” and “who’s my audience?” problems.

About 30x the traffic that I had yesterday. Fun stuff. The “Slashdot effect” will always amuse me 🙂

I installed the 90-day trial of Visual Studio 2008 Professional and have just finished getting Paint.NET to work in it. So far, here’s what I’ve run in to, good and bad:

• The new version of the C# compiler (csc.exe) produces slightly smaller binaries in a few cases. This is good.
• It can also understand “Vista icons”. That is, you can embed a 256×256 icon with PNG compression into an EXE. With Visual Studio 2005 you could have a 256×256 icon but not the PNG compression or you’d get a compiler error.
• Apparently the order in which items is returned via reflection has changed. This in itself is fine, but it has exposed a logic bug in my IndirectUI code! It’s a rather subtle bug that is very obvious once you understand it. This was a case where things were accidentally working because “A” had a superset of the properties that “B” had, and my system was always taking the first item’s list of properties and using it for both (which was the bug). Now for some reason, “B” comes before “A”, so “A” is only getting the 2 properties that “B” specifies instead of the 7 that “A” is stating. Oops.
• They fixed the build parallelism bug that was really biting me! In Visual Studio 2005, the part of the build which created MSI’s using the built-in “Setup Wizard” project type would not block the rest of your build which was properly flagged as dependeing on it, from building. This caused a major race condition for building the MSI and then building the self-extracting EXE that bundled it. To work around that I had to set the maximum build tasks to 1. Now it works great!

These are all good for me. Faster build times and smaller files to distribute.

Tom Jackson just published an awesome effect plugin for reducing or removing noise in images. I plan on incorporating this into the next release of Paint.NET. It’s something I’ve been pestering him about for quite some time! 🙂

Before

After

First off, welcome Slashdot readers! 🙂 http://developers.slashdot.org/developers/07/12/15/1332207.shtml

I just got done approving all your comments after waking up from a nice 10 hour sleep (yay weekends). Many are supporting, some are not so kind. I’m approving any comment that is non-spam (“free casino games!”), although if there are cuss words I am redacting those portions with asterisks. I’m not trying to censor discussion that I disagree with, in other words.

Anyway, to clarify: I am not closing Paint.NET’s source code. I am still releasing the source code for Paint.NET v3.20. I have the zip file right here (well, 7z file ;)) and I just have to wake up first (not want decaf!) and do uploadings and e-mails and HTML stuff to publish it. The only thing being removed is the installer, and the translated string resource files. The license has changed to move the resource assets under a Creative Commons license. That’s all. I believe this keeps 99% of what 99% of people are interested in, while closing the doors that enable the 0.0001% jerks out there to easily exploit things (“I have to write my own installer? Wah boohoo, I’ll find another target.”) I’ve kept track of some of the “easy exploit” vectors and have found ways to either legally prevent them, or to make the work required to loophole them enough that lazy people will give up quickly. Also, please remember that this is the Internet and I can change my mind later. This isn’t the ten commandments chiseled in to stone tablets 🙂 I could very well decide it’s too much effort to do this, and find a different way to address the problem. Maybe I’m just blowing off steam.

The goal is not to prevent any open use of the source code. Some have suggested that I should sue the guy, but I’ve already dealt with him so that isn’t necessary. Some have suggested that I should have used the GPL or BSD license, but that wouldn’t be possible because first, I don’t like GPL (let’s please not start a battle about it). Second, it would restrict some of the freedoms that I do want to allow: honest incorporation of portions of Paint.NET’s code into another software without licensing stipulations (for starters). Third, I don’t have complete executive privilege here. Portions of Paint.NET are incorporated from elsewhere (with permission of course), or are even owned by Microsoft from way back in the day, and I cannot change those parts of the licensing without consent (or by doing a full rewrite). Nor do I want to chase everyone down to get this consent when I can achieve my goals easier by doing something else. So I have moved the resource assets to a CC license which means if you really want to rip-off Paint.NET then you have to rewrite all the text and redo all the graphics. At that point you have proven you are either not lazy, or that you have OCD, or something. By which time I’ve released 4.0 and you are way behind again.

There was a comment about the Mono guys and their porting efforts. I don’t believe this will hinder them, nor is it a goal of mine to do so. I’ve e-mailed with Miguel de Icaza on occasion with the specific intent of making sure that it is possible for them to port Paint.NET. They wouldn’t be able to make much use of Paint.NET’s installer code anyway because it is very Windows-specific. And they probably won’t need to edit the resource files and can just use them as-is. If/when we find problems in the licensing that impede this, then we can adjust the license for the next release. Or I can provide them with permission to do what they need to do. This is iterative development folks, isn’t that what everyone likes?

To address why I didn’t publish the guy’s name, website, etc. The reason is that I honestly believe there are some extenuating circumstances that are not fully known. From what I have read, some believe the guy is disabled, or is being purposefully defamed by someone who has a grudge against him. The other possibilities that I have considered is that he is mentally deranged in some way – split personality, schizophrenia, etc. This would be congruent with the weird e-mails I’ve had with him in the past. He has been seen under or claiming different last names. In any case, there would be no benefit other than revenge for publishing this information.

Prior to my previous blog post, I had sent the “author” of the Paint.NET rip-off an e-mail asking and telling him to remove the software, and why. People suggested that I sue him, but I didn’t think it was necessary to start with that. I am happy to report that I have been successful at having the software taken down and discontinued. So as another tip for freeware authors, I am going to document how I dealt with the situation.

NOTE: This does not constitute, and should not be taken as, legal advice. I am merely documenting what I did as an example of what worked for me, and my thoughts on the matter.

1. I fumed for a few hours. Don’t underestimate the power of letting yourself cool off before sending e-mails. On a side note, I also try to avoid sending e-mail at all until I’m at least past my first cup of coffee in the morning. I am not a morning person, and I found myself sending out snappy replies!

2. I sent him the following e-mail. Notice that I did not attack or insult him, and stuck mostly to a strict “just the facts” writing style. I made no threats of legal action, nor any promise that I would not take legal action. That last part is key – you don’t want to promise yourself into a corner by way of a technicality. Maybe they remove the scam software, only to put it up the next week with a new name (“oh hey look it has an exclamation mark at the end, it’s a totally different name!”).

<Name Removed>,

So we meet again. Once again (this is the 3rd time at least) you are blatantly violating the licensing and copyright of Paint.NET, and ripping off plugins from the Paint.NET forum. The software in question is called “<Name Removed>” located here:

<URL Removed>

You have also plagiarized content from the Paint.NET website, and have removed the copyright and permission notice from what you are distributing. Not only that, but your software removes Paint.NET when you install it and also tries to use the same installation directory (C:\Program Files\Paint.NET). It incorrectly claims to be based on “PaintDotNet” which is a program that does not exist (it’s called Paint.NET). Throughout the program itself it also claims to be Paint.NET (“Choose Tool Defaults”, for instance).

I also don’t think the various plugin authors will be happy to hear that you are blatantly ripping off their plugins without their permission, and without giving them any credit. This is a blatant violation of United States copyright law, and is not just a matter of etiquette.

So, this is another cease-and-desist notice. You must remove the “<Name Removed>” software from your website immediately, and also discontinue the product. I will check back on Thursday and if this is done then I will consider the matter settled.

-Rick Brewster

Here’s the response I got the next day (which was Wednesday)

program will be removed sometime today

It actually took until the next day for it to be removed, but whatever.

3. I found various download sites that were hosting it, such as SoftPedia and Foto-Freeware, and sent them a notice about the software. In fact, I used the links on the page for “Report Spyware” and “Send us update information,” anything that I thought would end up being read by a human being and taken seriously. I informed them that it was a rip-off of Paint.NET and was violating copyright laws, etc. and that they should kindly take it down. Remember, these guys want to be on your side and they deal with a LOT of software updates every day, so it makes NO sense to let any of your anger bleed into your conversations with them. Both of the sites I just mentioned were very understanding and accommodating, and removed the software quickly (thanks!).

4. Since the software was still on download.com, I requested members of the forum to submit civil, articulate reviews stating that it was copyright violation, rip-off, etc. etc. (Yes this means that if you go dig on the forum you will indeed find out more about the culprit’s name, etc.) Thankfully, the reviews they have submitted are tasteful and do not attack download.com itself. Here’s an excerpt from one of them:

“CNET- if you do not remove this illegal and distasteful software from your servers, your reputation among the software community will forever be associated with the aid of copyright violators and warez downloads. Don’t allow your name, which has heretofore been known as a great source of software, become a synonym for theft.”

Unfortunately, their policy on copyright violation is heavily weighed down, no doubt by their lawyers. I have to send an infringement notice by regular mail. It’s ridiculous. Please just let me send you an e-mail and let it escalate through your customer support staff. Or, since I have an account on upload.com so I can manage my own freeware listing, give me an e-mail or contact form for this type of stuff.

Update: The offending software has been pulled from download.com.

Since I started with a [mostly] civil tone and was patient about compliance, I probably saved at least $5,000 in legal costs (that’s a very uneducated guess, mind you). I didn’t see the need to start by threatening a lawsuit, especially because only three things can occur then: 1) they comply, or 2) they don’t comply, and successfully call your bluff and their backspaceware is still online, or 3) they don’t comply, and you have to spend lots of money on lawyer stuff and actually sue them.

By not threatening legal action up-front you leave your options open while you consult with friends and real legal advice as to what you should do. Do not assume the person you are dealing with is a mature, intelligent, respectful adult. You have to treat them like a teenager who would like nothing better than to flaunt in your face the fact that they are pissing you off and that there’s nothing you can do about it. Threatening a lawsuit will just make them more excited!