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Here's What 2019 Holds For Paint.NET (betanews.com)
The developer of the popular image editing tool Paint.NET, Rick Brewster, has shared his vision of what the coming year holds for his software. The 2019 roadmap for Paint.NET is an exciting one, promising migration to .NET Core, support for brushes and pressure sensitivity, and an expanded plugin system.
BetaNews: Changes are on the cards for app icons and improved high-DPI support -- something that may be seen as mere aesthetic by some, but important changes by others. Switching to .NET Core could have big implications for the software, as Brewter explains: "It's clear that, in the long-term, Paint.NET needs to migrate over to .NET Core. That's where all of the improvements and bug fixes are being made, and it's obvious that the .NET Framework is now in maintenance mode. On the engineering side this is mostly a packaging and deployment puzzle of balancing download size amongst several other variables. My initial estimations shows that the download size for Paint.NET could balloon from ~7.5MB (today) to north of 40MB if .NET Core is packaged 'locally'. That's a big sticker shock... but it may just be necessary."
And, for those who're interested: the move to .NET Core will finally enable a truly portable version of Paint.NET since. Proposals for better DDS support and brushes and pressure sensitivity will be welcomed by digital artists, and there can be few users who are not excited at the prospect of an expanded plugin system.
And, for those who're interested: the move to .NET Core will finally enable a truly portable version of Paint.NET since. Proposals for better DDS support and brushes and pressure sensitivity will be welcomed by digital artists, and there can be few users who are not excited at the prospect of an expanded plugin system.
I have used Paint.NET for picture editing for over 10 years now, starting when it was a WSU project when Rick Brewster was a Microsoft mentored student there. I support a number of websites, and have a family photo archive. Paint.NET is awesome and I can do pretty much anything I need to do with it. The simple stuff of course, rotating, cropping, adding text or lines or fill, fixing minor photo errors, getting a bit creative. And now and again a few more advanced things like "photoshopping" someone into a photo is fairly straightforward. I am deeply grateful for Rick Brewster and all his work on this. And I am thrilled he has plans far into the future for Paint.NET.
Microsoft have rewritten the .NET Framework and made it cross-platform. Do you think that's a bad thing? Should they carry on putting loads of effort into the slower Windows-only version?
I don't get the Core hype. It's supposed to be more cross-platform, such as running on Linux and Android, but for typical business apps, what does it give one besides migration headaches from pre-core?
The industry is sorely missing a desktop-friendly GUI standard for productivity/CRUD applications. HTML/JS/CSS has sucked for that. You can get HTML+ to act like a real desktop with lots of blood, sweat, and tears, but why does it have to be that way? Billions are wasted using UI rocket science on what should be bicycle science.
Java applets tried to solve that, but Java tried to be an entire OS, making it bloated and full of security holes. A standard should focus on GUI's and only GUI's, offloading as much work to the server as possible to keep the client & standard simple.
Make it coordinate-based on the client-side with any "auto-flow" being calculated on the server. Client-side layout auto-flow is probably THE biggest mistake of the HTML stack (except maybe missing common GUI widgets). The client can send its dimensions or size preferences to the server, and the server can then auto-flow placement as needed, and send simple x,y,z coordinates to the client ("z" being the panel overlay level.). People would also have a choice of layout engines, since they are on the server, not the browser.
Controlling the layout is why PDF is still common. People can't stand it when HTML browsers butcher their layout plans and intent. "Autoflow this, Tim Burner Lee!"
Table-ized A.I.
A couple options. For C++ folks there's Qt. You can build UIs from 99% the same code base for every platform.
.NET core. When I try to do something simple like file I/O and there's no google-able easy path ready it just seems worthless.
It's been a while since I checked out Java GUIs, but you can make them.
Most developers are inclined to more broadly used technologies, e.g. like a web UI. React is the hot tamale at the moment. If you need a true think client app you can do electron.
There are some mold and oldy options too like Tcl/Tk that have cross-platform GUI options.
I'm not the biggest fan of
The most interesting part of this is the statements about the .NET Framework. I need to look at the links he posted and really digest them. I suspect Paint.NET is pretty heavily tied to Windows right now, and he mentions COM and GDI+ which seems to confirm it. But I've been under the assumption that if you are targeting Windows, you build against the .NET Framework it is already preinstalled and optimized for that machine. If you are targeting cross-platform, then target .NET Standard and compile against the full framework for Windows machines, and the Core framework for non-Windows machines that won't already have the full framework installed. The idea that .NET Core is "superior" to the .NET Framework is new to me. I suppose just compiling against the .NET Core framework only is more consistent than using .NET Framework on Windows and .NET Core on everything else?