De ontwikkelaars achter Paint.NET hebben gisteren de eerste alpha-release van versie 3.0 uitgebracht. Dit fotobewerkingsprogramma dankt zijn naam aan het feit dat het in C# ontwikkeld wordt, en versie 2.0 van het .NET Framework is dan ook nodig om het programma te kunnen draaien. Het is ooit begonnen als een afstudeeropdracht op de Washington State University onder supervisie van Microsoft, maar is tegenwoordig een zelfstandig product. Versie 3.0 brengt een groot aantal veranderingen met zich mee, maar dat heeft helaas ook tot gevolg dat Windows 2000 en de Itanium niet langer meer ondersteund worden. Nieuw is onder andere de zogenaamde 'Multiple Document Interface' die door middel van tumbnails alle geopende afbeeldingen laat zien. Het volledige changelog van versie 3.0.2477.19867, die overigens slechts tot en met 12 november werkt, ziet er als volgt uit:
Since version 2.72, the following changes have been made:[break]
- Brand new Multiple Document Interface (MDI) with tabs that show thumbnails for all the opened images.
- Colors window now supports a color palette, along with the ability to manage multiple named custom palettes
- Colors window now uses value sliders that more clearly show how the color is being manipulated
- Floating windows now better support docking and snapping, and remember their positions across sessions
- Brand new icon and logo, including full 256x256 icon so that it looks great on Vista
- Toolbar is context dependent: only the toolbar items relevant to the current tool are shown
- Tolerance control moved to the toolbar
- Ability to choose default values for toolbar items, as well as the tool that is selected at startup
- Ability to draw with "smooth" or "sharp" text. Smooth text is good most of the time, and sharp text is good for when 'smooth' doesn't look good (sometimes for small text), or for doing GUI mockups
- UI for update checking, downloading, and installing is better
- "Edit -> Paste in to New Image" replaces "File->Acquire from Clipboard", and is accessible with Ctrl + Alt + V
- Updates and Language commands moved to Help menu
- History window now uses much less memory and significantly fewer User/GDI handles
- Session temporary data is now compressed if the file system is NTFS. This results in less disk I/O and thus higher performance
- Font list dropdown loads much quicker
- .PDN file thumbnails upgraded to 256x256 (used to max out at 96x96), which looks great in Vista
- Color Picker gives you the ability to choose what happens when you click: it can be set to switch to the Pencil tool
- Move Selected Pixels tool allows you to choose between bilinear and nearest neighbor resampling
- For expired pre-release builds (alphas and betas), you are now given the ability to check for and install the latest version from within the UI instead of having to go to the website
- Various misc. UI tweaks and refinements
- Eraser tool now takes into account the alpha value of the primary color
- Selected area is no longer removed after flattening the image
- Gutted and refactored large amounts of the code
- Dropped Windows 2000 support
- Dropped Itanium support
Klik voor een grotere versie.