ArtPaint Release

The “What About ArtPaint?” thread was getting rather old and long, so I’m starting a new ‘official’ thread to announce new releases - and today I am happy to announce ArtPaint 2.6 is released!

The main focus of this release was improving brushes and painting, so now the current brush shows in the main status bar, and can be used for multiple tools (where it makes sense) - this means you can now use the Eraser tool with a soft-edged brush, for example.

The right-click context menu was replaced with the ability to draw in the background color so it’s easy to switch between the two colors as you are painting.

Brushes now show an outline of the brush shape, so no more guesswork as to how big a brush is or where it’s going to paint.

Many tools have a “Pressure” setting, so you can adjust the opacity without having to mess with a color’s alpha value.

Aside from painting improvements, selection outlines are now able to be translated, rotated, and scaled via the Selection menu. Also, ArtPaint files now have compressed layers so your project files will be much smaller on disk.

The last thing I’ll mention is that gradient drawing has gotten some love; it’s now much more intuitive to draw linear gradients, and three new types of gradients were added: radial, square, and conical. Gradients still only support two colors, however.

Please give the new version a try and feel free to file bugs and feature requests on the GitHub page!

Thanks as always to @humdinger for his tireless work testing my code, and keeping the amazing user guide up to date with all the changes. Also thanks to the army of translators who keep ArtPaint localized and accessible.

Here’s a celebratory screenshot in honor of the updated gradient tools:

Enjoy!
Dale

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Congrats on the new release and thanks for all the work you put into it! :ok_hand:

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Brilliant job! It’s always great to see “native” applications receiving an update.
Thank you!.

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Great work!
There is a user guide? Where?

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I just filed an issue for the documentation link on the GitHub project page. It’s stored in raw HTML in the documentation directory in the source code on GitHub.

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Has anything drastically changed in ArtPaint over the years? I used to maintain the PowerPC port for BeOS and I might have crack at building it again if it is all still similar to the original code. It’ll be “new”/modern C++ that kills it for PowerPC unfortunately.

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It’s included in the package, available from the menu ArtPaint | User manual…

Can’t judge how PPC compatible it still is, it doesn’t build with gcc2.95 on 32bit any more at least.

The link in the ReadMe.md is fixed. Thanks for reporting!

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That is a red flag already :wink: If it is not building under the old BeOS compatible compiler - unlikely to work under PowerPC as the compiler was even more problematic. I probably need to get back to porting the rerto68 to BeOS PowerPC.

@humdinger do you when it stopped building w/ 32-bit gcc 2.95? Just wondering how hard that might be to resolve.

I didn’t find many references to that, just 32bit build fails · Issue #215 · HaikuArchives/ArtPaint · GitHub where I forgot to do a “setarch x86” to switch to gcc11. So it didn’t build with gcc2.95 a good while before that.

I’d say have people interested in a gcc2 build (as a step to PPC support) of ArtPaint investigate and submit patches. :slight_smile:

Doesn’t ArtPaint now use the Layout API and other Haiku-specific additions? Even if it was made to compile with GCC2, that will preclude BeOS usage.

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Yes it does. That makes sense, thanks!

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No problem.@memsom just has to finish the PPC port of Haiku first… :slight_smile:

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So I was using ArtPaint on a workspace while casually looking at Polyglot translations on another, when something caught my eye. My system is configured for ES-419, but ArtPaint seems to load the ES locale instead? Some strings are different between the two, that’s how I noticed. Both are 100% complete…

Just a heads-up :slight_smile:

I assume this means other apps work with the ES-419 locale? if so then maybe the catkeys file is misnamed?

EDIT: how does one choose ES-419? I tried Venezuela, Colombia, Ecuador, and Argentina, and they all seemed to just use the ES strings, not ES-419. I tried with BeMines and it (mis)behaves the same way.

@dsizzle, you need to choose “Español (Latinoamérica)”

Apprently I got it wrong when adding es-419 to Polyglot. It all works when the file is named es_419. en_GB and en_AU should have rang a bell, but didn’t…
Mea culpa, will fix…

I’m happy to announce that ArtPaint 2.7 has been released today!

As always it has a number of bug fixes and new features, including a new Norwegian translation thanks to @johan, and the ES-419 translation should now work as well.

The layer blend modes now have color-based blends Hue, Saturation, Luminosity, and Color, similar to what you see in photoshop, Gimp, Krita, etc.

The Color palette was revamped a bit so you can name color sets and navigate around within the palettes using the arrow keys.

Ellipses can now be rotated, and both Ellipse and Rectangle have width sliders now (though not dynamic width like the straight line tool yet):

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…and one of the cooler features IMO is that selections can have alpha - if you draw an airbrush stroke and choose “Select all non-transparent” the edges of the selection will keep the smooth airbrush edges and so you can do stuff like this easily simply by drawing a gradient over the selection:

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Also thanks to @Vidrep who regularly runs clang static analysis on the code and has helped with ArtPaint stability by identifying potential memory leaks and bad behavior!

There are more fixes and updates that you can see as always in the changelog. Big thanks to @humdinger for testing everything, providing feedback, and pushing out the release!!

But, this is a bittersweet post:

Unfortunately, I will be not be able to continue ArtPaint development at this time. I had big plans for this little tool and I have really loved working on it - and I hope someday to return - but for now I cannot.

If anyone is looking to get involved in ArtPaint development I’d be happy to explain how any of it works (or doesn’t work). I’d encourage anyone to give it a whirl if you want to get into Haiku app development; I didn’t know ANYTHING about it when I decided to see if I could get it working again back in 2022. I just took a look while waiting on code reviews for a Haiku change, and it’s been a fun learning journey ever since.

Anyway I hope you enjoy v2.7 as much as I’ve enjoyed working on it, and I hope I didn’t introduce any nasty bugs that I might not be able to fix! :smiley:

Cheers,
Dale

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Dear Dale,

What a pity you cannot continue longer anytime soon. Thanks for the efforts to make enhancements to a native graphical tool – besides the also usable Wonderbrush.
I just used both of them to edit shortcut evidences, I do not have appropriate input devices actually, and still had not deep dive into artworks until now.
I used bare hands at my first and last time Android Tablet - Adam - so I am not a practicing artist. I just created composed still images for “videos”, as did not want share my voice with a black screen when the app provided rather sharing video than a sound recording.
Although I always anticipated an intuitive simple surface where all selection is the easiest available. I used rarely ArtPaint - unless Wonderbrush cannot provide a tool to edit - e.g draw a rectangle or ellipse around a button or text to highlight it.

As soon as 64 bit version had built - I do an upgrade to v.2.7.1.

Thanks again and God bless you !

:nerd_face:

EDIT :

Upgrade to 2.7.1 was applied meanwhile. :wink:

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Thanks for your work on this application :slight_smile:
I didn’t use it a lot (yet?) but it’s nice to see people put efforts on native applications, and to know it’s there when I’ll need it.

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It has been a privilege watching your steady progress and help with testing etc. where possible. It’s totally amazing if you look what was achieved in less than 2 years. Instead of pasting all the changelogs from v2.2.0 to v2.7 and having people scroll half a mile, read through them at Releases · HaikuArchives/ArtPaint · GitHub
Incredible!

Thank you Dale, hope you find the time to get back to ArtPaint or other Haiku projects eventually!

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