The new major release of MyPaint, version 0.9.0 is here! It has been 9 months since the last major release now, so it was about time. Hopefully the next cycle will be a bit shorter.

Download and Sources

Here are some of the highlights in MyPaint 0.9.0.

New features

Users can import and export brushes. This feature was developed mainly by Ilya Portnov. Ilya also added tilt support to the brush engine.

One can now shows/hide all sub-windows with a key shortcut and there is a key for showing the menu at the cursor. This work was done by Andrew Chadwick. Andrew also tweaked window behavior and fixed a number of issues in input handling and in the color sampler.

New preferences have been added; you can now set the default zoom level/resolution, and the default save format. The color history popup bound to the secondary stylus button can also be disabled.

We now save thumbnails for OpenRaster files according to the freedesktop.org specification thanks to Till Hartmann.

User Interface

Open dialog now shows a preview supported files, also by Till Hartmann.

Saving and editing of brushes has moved together with the brush settings dialog, which has been renamed to “Brush Editor” to reflect it’s intended use. The brush selector has instead got the most commonly used brush settings in an expander, for quick access during painting. The save dialog and exception dialog have gotten small updates to improve usability.

There are no new translations but 10 languages have been updated.

Performance

Performance has been greatly improved in two areas: startup and file saving. File-saving optimization was done by Martin Renold, and should make MyPaint the fastest OpenRaster implementation out there! The changes in how we save PNGs also make us require much less memory when saving, which makes out-of-memory conditions less likely.

Brushes

The default set of brushes has been changed slightly. There are now a maximum of 35 brushes in each group so that it is easier to view the entire group. There are now three artists brush sets; “Deevad” by David Revoy (of Sintel fame), “Ramón” by Ramón Miranda and “Tanda” by Marcelo Cerviño and two non-artist brush groups; “classic” and “experimental”. The last two groups has gotten new icons by David. In addition, pixel and tilt brushes have been added. The wiki has more Brush Packages for download.

There was also many other contributions, minor improvements and bugfixes that did not make it into this post. Thanks to everyone who has contributed to this release. Enjoy!