Paint.NET crosses 2 million downloads, and other news

[Rick Brewster]

Originally posted here: http://blogs.msdn.com/rickbrew/archive/ ... 92633.aspx

Like the title says, Paint.NET has been downloaded over 2 million times now. Thanks to everyone! This nerdy little application that was originally just a senior design project has really grown way past anybody's expectations. In March our website did just a hair under 1 terabyte of traffic, and that was with BetaNews handling almost all of our actual downloads.

In other news, there will be a v2.62 release shortly. Like all v2.6x releases, this is a bugfix release. There will be no new features, and no documentation changes. Just to define things, our v2.6 release is in what's called maintenance mode. We're still working on v3.0, but since it's going to take awhile, we are also fixing bugs in v2.6 as appropriate. This way important bugs get fixed within a few weeks instead of, well ... read the next paragraph.

And as for the next major release ... ok, I'll talk about it a little. It will be version 3.0 (hardly a surprise), with its major features being MDI, layer masks, layer adjustments (and adjustment layers, the difference of which is interesting but important), and whatever other stuff I can't remember right now. It will take advantage of Vista, but will not require it. As always, the goal is to add functionality and features without increasing the UI's complexity. It's practically a rewrite of Paint.NET, so I don't expect to see it be available for quite some time. Maybe for Christmas? We will see.

Anyway, thanks again to everyone who uses, recommends, mirrors, distributes, blogs about, and laughs at Paint.NET. And thanks to everyone who's been sending in those pdncrash.log files -- we really are using them to find and squash bugs! There is one bug in particular that is interesting enough that I may just blog about it soon. So if you see the pdncrash file on your desktop, please e-mail it to us.