For those who don’t spend their days spamming git fetch in their local clone of the mypaint repo, eagerly waiting for the latest changes, it might seem like nothing much has happened recently. To allay such notions, there is now a new alpha release with the latest and greatest changes (as a matter of fact, all changes) as we make our steady crawl towards the beta phase.

Get yourself over to the release page for a list of changes and a list of files!

Unfortunately we don’t have the ppa or other deb builds up to date, so users on Debian/Ubuntu will have to make do with the AppImage builds for the time being.

A Tale of Alphas Past

Since there were no blog posts about the alpha releases after the first one, here is a quick summary in reverse chronological order.

Alpha 12

These were the new features added in alpha 12:

  • Faster floodfill
  • Offset/Blur options added to floodfill
  • Gap-detecting floodfill
  • Erase/Lock Alpha/Colorize now work with floodfill
  • Click-drag floodfill (fill multiple separate areas in one go)
  • Separate source-selection (you can fill based on a specific layer)
  • Cancellable floodfill (if you made a mistake on a huge canvas or with a slow computer, most people should never see the cancellation dialog)
  • Adjustable opacity and blendmode for floodfill (sometimes useful)
  • Ability to fill with reference to vector layers.
  • Viewport-limited floodfill (useful for erasing and adjusting gap-detection settings)

There may be a pattern in those additions, I’m not sure.

Alpha 11

  • Floating subwindows brought back on Windows
  • Weighted subtractive smudging - using the spectral model for sampling colors

Alpha 10-9

  • Tweaks and fixes to rendering/compositing of the new color representations

Alpha 8

  • Keyboard-controlled drawing inputs for pressure and barrel rotation
  • Improvements to layer merging for the new Pigment layer type

Alpha 7-1

  • Minor changes, preparations for barrel rotation input