14 DAY TRIAL // Version 3.5 of Paint.NET is now finalized and available for download at no charge for users worldwide, marking a consistent evolution since the release of version 3.36. Paint.NET v3.5 went through an Alpha and a Beta release before being wrapped up and offered to users at the end of last week. The latest iteration of Paint.NET is tailored to both Windows 7 and Windows Vista, featuring a revamped graphical user interface. The app’s new visual styling doesn’t stop with the new icons available, but is closely integrated with Windows 7 and Vista, having embraced Windows Aero and glass effects. In addition, Paint.NET is also designed to play nice with Windows 7 under-the-hood. In this regard, the application leveraged Windows 7’s DirectWrite for text rendering instead of GDI.
“DirectWrite is one of the new additions to the DirectX family of APIs in Windows 7 and enables better readability, adds support for a large variety of languages and scripts, and in conjunction with Direct2D provides superior rendering performance for Windows applications,” noted Brandon LeBlanc, Windows communications manager on the Windows Client Communications Team.
Paint.NET 3.5 is already available as a free download, and users of previous iterations of the product can perform upgrades. Testers still running Alpha and Beta development builds of Paint.NET 3.5 will start receiving notifications informing them of the availability of the final version. Designed with support for Windows 7, Windows Vista, and Windows XP, v3.5 will also need .NET framework 3.5 SP1. Users are bound to notice that the app now comes to the table with boosted performance and enhanced memory usage. Both the speed and memory management of Paint.NET have suffered extensive optimizations.
Paint.NET’s Rick Brewster enumerated the new additions to version 3.5:
“•New effect: Blurs -> Surface Blur, by Ed Harvey •New effect: Distort -> Dents, by Ed Harvey •New effect: Distort -> Crystalize, by Ed Harvey •New: Russian translation. •Disk space usage has been reduced by about 12MB by using NTFS compression on installation files related to staging (.MSI) and diagnostics (.PDB). •Compression for .PDN images has been improved. •Effect dialog responsiveness has been improved. •Images open much faster, especially on single CPU systems. •Startup performance on most systems will be better by about 20%. •Memory usage has been reduced when more than one image is open. •Rendering quality has been greatly improved when zoomed in. •The selection outline is no longer animated. Instead of "dancing ants", a context-sensitive "XOR" stipple pattern is drawn. This has allowed for improved performance and lowered CPU consumption (and longer battery life). •The font manager for the Text tool has been completely rewritten, which fixes many problems seen with crashes and missing fonts. •On Windows XP, the Text tool has improved reliability and font selection (it uses GDI instead of GDI+). •On Windows 7, the Text tool will use DirectWrite (instead of GDI) which gives better performance and greatly improved quality. On Windows Vista, you may install DirectX 11 to enable this feature; otherwise GDI will be used. •The toolbar font list has improved usability, rendering quality, and significantly improved performance. •The toolbar font list no longer requires an application restart to recognize newly installed fonts. •When many fonts are installed, both memory usage and startup performance have been greatly improved. •It is now drastically easier to move a very small selection. •All installation prerequisites are now installed automatically, such as .NET and Windows Installer. •Updates are now downloaded in the background, and installed after you exit the application. In previous versions, this was a foreground task and you could not use Paint.NET while the update was downloaded. •Added a "Utilities" menu. Updates, Languages, and Plugin Errors have been moved there. •Added a "Manage Fonts" command to the Utilities menu. This will launch the built-in Windows font control panel. •Clicking the middle mouse button on an image thumbnail will now close the image. •Improved the Unfocus effect. •The DirectDraw Surface (.DDS) file type now allows you to select the resampling algorithm for auto-generated mip-maps. •A processor that supports SSE is now required (almost all CPUs purchased this decade satisfy this). •Fixed an issue with Gaussian Blur and its treatment of alpha values. •Fixed a crash with the "Units" selector in the toolbar. •Fixed a crash due to an overflow that prevented very large images from working (64-bit only). •Fixed many other miscellaneous glitches and crashes. •The Korean translation has been removed. Sadly, we were unable to find the resources to complete this.”
Paint.NET 3.5 is available for download here.