With the release of version 1.4 of Pinta, its developers have added new modes, reduced memory usage and improved the rendering performance of their open source drawing and editing application. The latest update to the simple painting application modelled after Paint.NET adds new modes for blending layers and four new Magic Wand tool selection modes (Union, Exclude, Xor and Intersect).

The text tool in Pinta 1.4 now supports copy and paste and has better support for alternative input methods and special characters. The developers note that memory consumption in the Open Images Pad has been significantly reduced, by more than 100MB in some cases, and the history requires less memory as only the difference between two image states is now stored. Other changes include the addition of a drop shadow to the canvas, better extensions support and a new Copy Merged command for copying a flattened selection to the clipboard. A number of bugs that caused Pinta to crash when, for example, disabling the "Default Tools" extension or using copy and paste have also been fixed.

Further information about the update, including a full list of new features and changes, can be found in the release notes and in the commit history. Source code and binaries for Ubuntu, Windows and Mac OS X are available to download from the project's site. On Windows, Pinta requires .NET 4 and Gtk# while on Mac OS X and Linux, it requires Mono. Hosted on GitHub, Pinta is made available under the MIT X11 licence.

(crve)