It’s been a long time since last year’s hackfest, but I finally have an add-in server for Pinta up and running at server.robpvn.net! Obviously it’s still a bit of a beta test, the most obvious immaturity being that I haven’t procured a proper Pinta-project subdomain for it yet. Apart from that, there’s trouble serving add-ins to Windows because the Windows GTK# installer doesn’t bundle a .NET 4 version of Mono.Posix like everyone in Linux-land has now. But I’m sure we’ll sort something out in that department!

In the meantime, I’ve been picking some low hanging fruit when it comes to making Pinta add-ins. I tried looking at Paint.Net plugins to see if there was anything nice to be ported, but I couldn’t find anything that had both source and an open source licence. There might be something out there, but since their system for administrating plugins is a forum where people post zip files, it’s kind of hard to get an overview. I’m proud to say that Pinta already has a smoother delivery system!

So what I ended up doing was looking at names of add-ins and picking one that seemed easy to re-implement. Easiest of them all: a Night Vision effect. This very simple add-in takes an image and changes the colour values so it looks like it was taken with a night vision camera. If you then do a pass with the Noise filter and maybe some of the other effects, it can look quite good!

There’s still a lot missing here, like any way of adjusting parameters and a GUI. Also, hooking in to the other effects for more advanced filters would be nice. But my plan is to spread the new add-ins thin, and give them the minimum possible to work so that we can build up a nice array of add-ins before going back to make them more advanced. Or even better, if someone else finds it interesting they can work on improving it. (As usual, it’s all on Github.)