Submitted by “In the last few weeks a large number of bugs have been fixed in our Windows.Forms implementation which finally has allowed us to get larger applications running with Mono. As time goes by we are able to run more complicated applications with Mono. In October I imported a version of Paint.Net, a paint application built with .NET into our repository. I made some changes to it to get it working on Linux, this is a screenshot as of this afternoon.”
Holy… that’s pretty sweet.
Something to be noted here is that Paint.Net wasn’t developed with Linux in mind so in thoery if you start a project having portability in mind (Linux,BSD,Solaris) the problems would be minimum.
I use Paint.NET any time I need to do some quick photo manipulation. It handles 8MP photos with ease – cropping/resizing/etc.
I have it set as my default image editor on my Windows box.
Porting it to Mono is a great thing!
Paint.NET– I love it. I don’t know of any equivelants on either Linux or Mac, which is too bad, as I find the GIP too advanced, and, well, Photoshop too expensive AND too advanced.
well, try krita 1.5.x that is an kde application. it even supports cmyk and profiles/color management.
It looks like a Swing app from 1997.
It looks like a Swing app from 1997.
It’s because the fonts are crap. There are much better freetype fonts. Hinting probably isn’t on too.
It’s because the fonts are crap. There are much better freetype fonts. Hinting probably isn’t on too.
I think he was referring more to the fact that it just doesn’t fit in.
Looks like the standard linux fonts to me. Of course hinting is on. No one runs unhinted because it just gets blurry.
Seems to me that the font rendering equals what is known as “best shapes” in Gnome.
Anti-aliazing on, hinting on.
I sometimes run apps without hinting, but only because I use large fonts in Gnome, in 1600*1200 on 17″ inch monitor.
In GNUstep I’m using hinting, due to smaller fontsizes. In lowe resolutions hinting is a must. Without hinting in low resolutions, I’ll get dizzy from all the dark-greyish blops (apparently letters, but that’s hard to see).
The font in use is Arial, and it works quite well with FreeType. It’s just so cold and industrial. I prefer warmer fonts.
This kind of over generalisation is really wrong and what causes useless flamewars.
I don’t run hinted fonts, never have at home.
It all depends on your screen. I have a 22′ CRT in 1600×1200, and never had to use hints, I always use AA and never got any blurry font, even with very small ones. So I guess I always had very good monitors. And I use the standard Bitstream Vera (and now DejaVu) fonts.
So your experience can’t describe the experience of everyone.
Who cares what it looks like…jeez. It gets the job done, in a jiffy – with an intuitive UI, decent image format support, layer capabilities, excellent history features and fairly quick as well!
It looks like a Swing app from 1997.
Well, even though you’re right this is a Mono article, so you’re bound to get modded down.
You do have to ask yourself where they’re heading with this. If they’re pushing Mono as a cross-platform development platform, primarily based around .Net compatibility, then they’re simply going to come up against the same problems that Java, Swing, SWT (SWT uncovers a huge number of issues day by day) and Qt have come up against for the past ten years. It has to fit in with the native environment enough, but be able to reproduce enough common functionality so that things will work cross-platform. That’s a very complex, pretty much impossible, thing to achieve from the way they’re looking at it.
Additionally, if they’re betting on porting Windows.Forms, and other apps dependant on Windows specific interfaces, unmodified (and this was hardly unmodified from a Mono point of view) then they’re constantly dependant on what Microsoft does at their end. Windows.Forms applications are designed to work on Windows – period. For example:
“Instead of planning the port, I kind of brute forced the port on my spare time. About one third of the way in manually replacing the code in my favorite editor, I realized that I should just have implemented the DotNetWidgets interface and be done with it. The result was a 129 line source file that in one hour gave me everything I needed to get Paint.NET building without this dependency.”
That’s just the tip of a somewhat larger iceberg of implementing every nuance that may occur.
We also have great native apps here in the open source world such as the GIMP of course, and also Krita, which has turned into a really fantastic app. I’m not convinced of the value of porting a Microsoft backed application as some sort of showcase at the expense of what’s available.
They should relax the forms implementation, maybe standardize the api and allow for other window/widget systems to be used.
They should relax the forms implementation, maybe standardize the api and allow for other window/widget systems to be used.
Well that’s certainly a possibility, especially if they’re going for Mono as being used for cross-platform development. But you then end up with a lot of the problems that other toolkits have – especially SWT. It’s a hugely complex, and bug ridden, thing to accomplish.
It is better if they focus on one or two toolkits and get them right. So many of the FOSS kits are half backed, in complete or buggy.
In the end, the fact that it was ported should speak for itself. The great news here is that before there was no Paint.NET in Linux and now there is. This is thanks to Mono Framework and to Mono developers that have made it happen.
I think it is a big win for everyone. The GIMP is awesome and now disputes this fact. However, just as there are different kinds of motor vehicles there can be different software tools that serve audiences with diverse technical background and taste, even it these applications could be consider as part of the same genre.
Mono is making a lot of progress in less than 5 years. How long have Qt and Java been around? Both Qt framework and Java’s GUI toolkits are great. Once more variety is good.
Mono simply rocks hard! ^_^
This is definitely good news for SkyOS users. The idea of porting Paint.NET was brought up on the forums a few months ago, but the conclusion was reached that it wouldn’t work with Mono out of the box. With this new news, the possibility of it working on SkyOS improve dramatically.
Anyone got a source repository link for this? I am keen to have a play
In October I imported a version of Paint.Net, a paint application built with .NET into our repository.
The source is supposed to be in the repository. I didn’t see it here:
http://svn.myrealbox.com/ or here:
http://www.mono-project.com/Software
I have not tried subversion directly, but here’s the info:
http://www.mono-project.com/AnonSVN
>It looks like a Swing app from 1997.
Are you sure, it doesn’t look like SWING at all to me?
I wonder if this would also work on the Mac?
Their final goal should be to compile and run unmodified source, or even windows .NET binary (bytecode) of as much as possible .NET applications in Mono (cover some of Wine goals).
Porting paint.net has only so much significance as showcasing that the technology is portable. There are much slicker and more powerful graphics suites in Linux like Gimp, kpaint or imagemagick.