Unstable development version

Aug 17, 2009 10:06 GMT  ·  By

Developed by Spencer Kimball, Peter Mattis and the GIMP Development Team, Gimp is a freely distributed piece of software for tasks like photo retouching, image composition and image authoring. The program is cross-platform and is localized in various languages.

The official Gimp website has been updated with a post revealing that this is an unstable development version of the app, and that version 2.7 is just a snapshot of the development tree. “We are working hard towards GIMP 2.8, the next stable release,” the development team informs. “GIMP 2.7 is in no way 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 2.6,” the team advises fans of the software.

“It is now possible to tag GIMP resources such as brushes and patterns,” the team outlines one of the most prominent changes. “The tagging is performed from the respective dockables e.g. the Brushes dockable, and it is possible to filter resources based on these tags. The tags are saved to an XML file, external to the data files themselves. This feature finally enables grouping of resources and the plan is to add a bigger set of default resources for GIMP 2.8. There are [sic.] still work that needs to be done here, for example providing a set of default brushes. This feature was developed during GSoC 2008,” another post reads. A full list of the UI changes included with Gimp 2.7 is available below.

 - Change the Text Tool to perform text editing on-canvas (GSoC 2008);  - Add support for tagging GIMP resources such as brushes and allow filtering based on these tags (GSoC 2008);  - Separate the activities of saving an image and exporting it, there is now an 'File->Export...' for example;  - Port file plug-ins to new export API which gets rid of many annoying export dialogs;  - Add a simple parser to size entry widgets, images can be scaled to e.g. "50%" or "2 * 37px + 10in;"  - Arrange layer modes into more logical and useful groups;  - Added support for rotation of brushes;  - Make the Pointer dockable show information about selection position and size;  - Get rid of the Tools dockable and move toolbox configuration to Preferences;  - Add status bar feedback for keyboard changes to brush parameters;  - Add diagonal guides to the Crop Tool;  - New docks are created at the pointer position;  - Add support for printing crop marks for images;  - Move 'Text along path' from tool options to text context menu;  - Change default shortcuts for "Shrink Wrap" and "Fit in Window" to Ctrl+R and Ctrl+Shift+R respectively since the previous shortcuts are now used for the save+export feature;  - Make Alt+Click on layers in Layers dockable create a selection from the layer;  - Allow to specify written language in the Text Tool.

Fans should also be aware that Gimp now supports rotating brushes and has had additional enhancements to the brush dynamics engine. Gimp 2.7, available for free download using the link below, is to be compiled from the resulted resources as the download finishes.

Download Gimp (Free)