Software update: Paint.NET 3.5 build 3529 alpha

The developers behind Paint.NET released a new alpha release of version 3.5 on Monday. This photo editing program is being developed in C# and the .NET Framework will therefore have to be present on the computer. In terms of functionality, the program is somewhere between the Paint supplied with Windows as standard and professional commercial programs such as Paint Shop Pro and Photoshop. Version 3.5 runs on Windows XP or higher and requires at least version 3.5 SP1 of the .NET Framework. The release notes for this version can be found below:

Changes since the last alpha:

• When zoomed in, the selection outline is again “pixelated”, like it was in v3.36. This allows it to correctly outline the selected area. Compared to the old version, performance is much improved; this is because the amount of computation is proportional to the complexity of the selection instead of proportional to the area of ​​the bounding rectangle surrounding it.
• The magic wand is no longer broken (oops).
• Fixed an important internal algorithm for correctness and improved its performance. The algorithm was the polygon scan-converter (GeometryList class), and its incorrectness may have been causing many other problems.
• Fixed some issues with the Text tool related to font fallback. This was preventing certain characters from showing up and was breaking international text.
• Reduced CPU usage from the font dropdown list.
• Fixed the “This program may not have installed correctly” warning sometimes showing up after installation on Windows 7.

Because of the third bullet above, I have not attempted to address many of the crashes that have been reported. The nature of the scan-converter problems may have been widespread. It had a tendency of reporting pixels slightly outside of any clipping bounds that I was giving it, after any error checking had already been performed. So, please be sure to report all crashes even if you know that I’ve already filed bugs for them.