Download Paint.NET 3.0 alpha 1

The developers behind Paint.NET released the first alpha release of version 3.0 yesterday. This photo editing program owes its name to the fact that it is developed in C#, and version 2.0 of the .NET Framework is therefore required to run the program. It once started as a graduation assignment at Washington State University under the supervision of Microsoft, but is now a standalone product. Version 3.0 brings a large number of changes, but unfortunately that also means that Windows 2000 and Itanium are no longer supported. New is, among other things, the so-called ‘Multiple Document Interface’ that shows all open images by means of thumbnails. The complete changelog of version 3.0.2477.19867, which only works until November 12, looks like this:

Since version 2.72, the following changes have been made:

• 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 256×256 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 drop down loads much quicker
• .PDN file thumbnails upgraded to 256×256 (used to max out at 96×96), 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

[break] Click for a larger version.