Milestone 1 is done

[Rick Brewster]

Build 2450 is the 'final' build of Milestone 1. Thanks for finding all those crazy bugs, even if it did drive me nuts that the Colors window is a minefield for bugs.

I have started work on Milestone 2, which includes such things as ...

- Gradient Tool. I already have a rough draft, but it sucks and needs a lot of work.

- Better MDI strip. It just needs a lot of fit and finish, so I've begun to rewrite the code for this to use my own custom rendering and everything. It will pay off, however, by allowing some really good UI improvements to scenarios like when you quit the program and have multiple images that have unsaved changes. It's kind of obnoxious right now to have to respond to several "Do you want to save?" dialog boxes. (I realize that this conveys absolutely nothing about what I'm doing to fix this, but I'm ok with that )

- Improvement to the toolbar's 2nd row. You may have seen the screenshot I posted of the Color Picker's config item. Well, more things are coming here. The idea is that each tool can have very specific configuration items here that may or may not be non-volatile*. The other thing ...

- ... is that the duplicate "Tools menu" will be going away. Sort of. The idea I have is to mimic Photoshop here. Right now when you click on the "Tool: " button you just get a list of the tools... boring and useless! My idea is that you will get a list of tools with preset options. For example, "Paintbrush with Brush Size of 50" could be a preset. "Text Tool with Segoe font at size 10, Bold" could be another. And of course, much like the palette list, you can add or remove items as you see fit, and to set the startup tool preset. I get a lot of people asking why the paintbrush is the default tool instead of a selection tool. This will have some interesting design challenges, but I think it's worth it. Also, capitalizing on standard Windows UI idioms, you can place an ampersand ("&") in the name of a custom tool preset so that you can very quickly gain access to it. For example, "This t&ool is neat" could be access by pressing Alt+T, then O. THis is because Alt+T pops open the "Tools:" drop down, and you put a & in front of that 'o', which is then the access key for "This tool is neat".

* Volatile = forgotten when you quit Paint.NET. Non-volatile = saved so that it is remembered the next time you start Paint.NET.