Last night, Cameron White and Johnathan Morlock finished up all the packaging, uploads and release notes for Pinta 1.2, so now it’s officially released! New releases are always great, and this one has a bunch of bug fixes and general improvements. Head over to http://pinta-project.com/ to download the newest packaged awesomeness. I almost said “the latest and greatest”, but that’s not strictly true because new improvements for Pinta 1.3 have already started landing in our git master branch!

Pinta Statistics

Pinta 1.1 was released about a half a year ago, and I’ve had a look at the download statistics we have on hand from our Github page:

• The Windows installer has had 12 483 downloads.
• The source Zip file has had 3,436 downloads.
• The source tarball has had 4,470 downloads.

In addition to that comes all the downloads through the package managers of various distros that we have no statistics for. But lets assume the number is a lot! I think that’s a reasonable assumption because when you have eight thousand people willing to compile it themselves there are probably a whole lot more who are willing to let someone else compile it for them.

An interesting point is the strong Windows download numbers, despite the fact that Windows is the platform that carries Paint.Net, Pinta’s ancestor and role model. It’s no problem for me to admit that Paint.Net is still ahead of Pinta on Windows, but obviously the fact that Pinta presents a consistent user interface over several platforms  in addition to being open source (which Paint.Net no longer is) means we have carved out a good niche for ourselves.

Sadly, in this release we have had to postpone a Mac version once again because we don’t have hardware to test it on. This pains us quite a lot, and it’s also the reason 1.2 has taken a while to come out because we’ve been hoping to get it fixed before releasing. In the end, we had to prioritise getting new features out to those users we could reach. But read on, because potential good news is coming!

The Gnome/Mono Festival of Love 2012

Fingers crossed, if all the star signs align correctly and so on, I will be attending this years Boston hackfest for Gnome/Mono products! (Which will also be my first time visiting the land of tea parties, star spangled banners, and McDonalds.) The plan is for me to work with Jared Jennings on a new core library for Tomboy, and to hack away on miscellaneous improvements for Pinta. I know that there will be several participants there owning the vaunted hardware from Cupertino with a half-eaten apple on it, and I plan to pester them into helping me solve Pinta’s most major Mac issues. With luck, we can again have a working version of Pinta for Mac by midsummer. Then we can make at least a interim Mac release, but personally I hope to have enough done by then that we can justify releasing Pinta 1.3. (At any rate, I plan to lobby my co-developers to do just that…) Here’s hoping for the future!  Update: Like masters of magic, Cameron White and Jonathan  Pobst have managed to come up with a working Mac edition (As yet known to be working under at least one configuration of Mac+Mono) within 24 hours of me writing this! So it looks like I’ll be able to put more time into other aspects of Pinta at the hackfest, although hammering out any Mac-specific issues that may appear is still a possibility.  Looking forward to it!