Software Update: Paint.NET 4.0.8

Version 4.0.7 of Paint.NET has been released and due to an error it was immediately followed up. As the name suggests, this program needs the .Net framework to do its job. It started as a study assignment for Washington State University to replace the Paint included with Windows, but now contains a lot of functionality that we also see in more extensive, commercial packages. Since version 4.0, the program performs a lot faster, especially on multicore processors, but has at least Windows 7 as a system requirement. This update includes several performance improvements. The complete release notes look like this:

Paint.NET 4.0.7 is now available

Whew! I originally started work on getting Paint.NET’s title bar area to respect the Windows 10 TH2 “accent color” functionality (which is NOT easy for a classic (non-universal / desktop) app … how about some documentation, Microsoft?!). Along the way I found (and rediscovered) many important performance issues that I’ve now fixed. I also finally found some fixes for a handful of rare and vexing startup crashes, including one that’s caused by a silly bug when WPF’s data binding system initializes (it’s a bug in WPF). Oh, and there’s now a Swedish translation. Various things related to the Shapes tool have been improved as well.

Here are all the new fixes and changes:

New:

• Swedish translation

Added:

• Custom Shapes XAML now supports cardinal splines via PolyCurveSegment (a new PathSegment type)

improved:

• Various performance improvements
• Performance of “committing” (finishing) is now up to 10x faster, which greatly improves responsiveness for quick drawing operations
• Shapes tool quality when drawn without antialiasing, with line styles, and at 1 pixel brush width
• Shapes tool rendering performance on CPUs with many cores (8+)
• Installing a “complex” custom Shape no longer causes very long hangs at app startup
• Image->Resize is now much faster
• the ruler’s performance
• Reduced CPU/GPU and battery use when the app is not in the foreground
• Reduced CPU and battery use of the UI for the Move and Shapes tools

Changed:

• .NET Framework 4.6 is now required, and will be installed if necessary

Fixed:

• Title bar now uses the Windows 10 accent color
• Floating windows were not remembering their locations on some non-English systems
• Image->Resize would sometimes cause the main window to flicker or lose focus
• Image->Resize would sometimes do nothing instead of resizing the image to a very large size
• Labels on the vertical ruler were misleading because they were on the wrong side of the tick mark
• Edit->Copy now works if the data copied to the clipboard is larger than 2GB
• Page Up, Page Down, Home, and End keys now work in the main canvas area
• Paint.NET will no longer incorrectly block Windows from restarting
• Rotate/Zoom no longer crashes on very large images
• Several rare or uncommon crashes

Fixed in version 4.0.8:

• The Line/Curve tool was crashing when drawing vertical lines of particular lengths.