Software Update: The GIMP 2.3.0

The image editing program The GIMP stands as an abbreviation for The GNU Image Manipulation Program and is considered by many to be the open source counterpart of Adobe Photoshop. The development team is continuing to develop this handy program and has started the development tree that should lead to 2.4 stable. Version 2.3.0 has been released with the following announcement:

The GIMP developers are proud to announce GIMP 2.3.0, the first snapshot of the development that will lead to GIMP 2.4. This release is provided for developers and interested users.

This is an unstable development version of the GNU Image Manipulation Program. Please realize that this is just a snapshot of the development tree. We are about halfway up the hill to GIMP 2.4, the next stable release. GIMP 2.3 is by no means a final product. A lot of new features are incomplete and some things may even be completely broken. If you need to get work done, please use the stable version, GIMP 2.2.

Changes in GIMP 2.3:

• added Recompose plugin
• added rectangle tool in GFig plugin
• improved palette editor color DND
• improved EXIF ​​handling in JPEG plugin
• smoother autoscrolling in image display
• added Snap to Canvas Border and Snap to Path (yet unimplemented)
• added previews to Mosaic, Pixelize and Sparkle plug-ins
• added Lanczos interpolation method
• added Open as Image menu entries to brushes and patterns dialogs
• improved drag-n-drop of drawables within GIMP
• added a prototype of a new rectangular select tool
• moved a bunch of enums from core into libgimpbase
• moved GimpConfig functionality from core into libgimpconfig
• moved GimpEnumStore and GimpEnumComboBox to libgimpwidgets
• moved convenience constructors for property views to libgimpwidgets
• ported ImageMap plug-in to action based menus.
• first steps towards color management
• use GOptionContext for command-line parsing
• added a gnome-vfs backend for the uri plug-in (former url plug-in)
• prepared code for accessing remote files in the file-chooser
• let all dialogs obey the gtk-alternative-button-order setting
• extended GimpProgress PDB API
• improved file type handling in file save dialog
• resurrected threaded pixel processor and enable it by default
• parallelized a few more internal functions
• speed up gradient dithering
• improved PSD save plugin
• improved Python bindings
• allow to resize layers with the image
• allow to control letter spacing in the text tool
• added path-on-path functionality, use it to implement Text on Path
• improved gradient editor
• allow to import paths from a string
• ported all code to gstdio wrappers
• added infrastructure for color sample points
• added first draft of a metadata editor plugin
• speed up burn compositing function
• added Altivec versions of some compositing functions
• added PDB API to control the number of columns in a palette
• allow to control hue overlap in Hue-Saturation tool
• added a PDB API to register menu branches
• added missing mnemonics
• improved Screenshot plugin
• allow to drag brushes/patterns/gradients… to the selectors in Script-Fu
• allow to save images by dragging them to a filemanager that supports the XDS protocol
• optimizations in the Color Deficiency display filter
• transfer the clipboard content to a clipboard manager on exit
• moved cursor info out of the Info window into a dockable
• moved remaining bits of the Info Window to a new Image Properties dialog
• build and install gimp console by default
• allow to drag and drop image data into GIMP
• use the statusbar more to display hints and info about the tool state
• resurrected –no-data functionality
• zoom to the cursor position instead of the display center
• some improvements to the Helpbrowser plug-in
• load PS brushes in the .abr format
• allow to choose between different algorithms for Desaturate
• added thumbnail loader to Winicon plug-in
• improved configuration of input controllers
• added an option to make the dock windows transient to the active image display
• lots of code cleanup and bug fixes