code monkey

As people may or may not be aware, even though I work for Novell, Pinta is not sponsored by Novell. It is a project I do purely in my free time. Since it's getting kinda popular, I thought it'd be nice to earn some money with it so I can dedicate more time to it. Unfortunately, society has decided that creative works (software, music, movies, tv) aren't worth paying money for. So far, I think the only successful business model for open source software is to have a browser and sell your homepage to Google or Yahoo. I thought about adding a browser to Pinta, but it was hard to justify as enhancing the user experience. Advertising is the only other legitimate option, but I was reluctant to degrade the GUI by placing ads in it. However I've come up with a brilliant and creative idea that adds advertising in a fun way that I think users will enjoy. I am still working out the deals with advertisers, but the plan is to add sponsored effects. Basically, we've come up...

I am extremely excited to announce the release of Pinta 0.2 ! Pinta 0.2 is a big step towards general feature parity with PDN, by adding great new features like: - 5 new tools (Paint Bucket, Recolor, Line, Zoom, Pan) - 5 new adjustments (Levels, Curves, Brightness/Contrast, Hue/Saturation, Posterize) - 5 new effects (Ink Sketch, Oil Painting, Pencil Sketch, Gaussian Blur, Glow) - Enhanced layer and history pads - Multithreaded adjustments/effects rendering - Basic OS X integration - and more! Full release notes (with pictures!) are available here . Packages are available here , and likely more will be contributed. The most exciting part about this release is that it isn't all my work. Pinta has attracted several great contributors who are helping it quickly move towards maturity. Without their awesome work, Pinta would be releasing today with only about half of these new features! With 0.2 out the door, now I can turn to the merge requests already waiting to make 0.3 an even b...

After Comcast's year-long advertising blitz on how their customers were safe from the analog->digital TV transition, I got a nice letter in the mail today informing me that Comcast is going, *gasp*, all digital. All I need to be ready for the transition is a digital converter box for every television, which they will gladly rent me! Maybe the government will offer vouchers for them. ;)

Dear Internet Media companies, Have I got a deal for you! Looking at my cable bill, I currently pay $88.59 a month for basic cable (no premium channels) and one HD DVR. If everything I watch is in-season, I watch about 50 hours of television a month plus local football (CBS). Obviously, this is ridiculous and needs to stop very soon. So here's a chance for me to pay you cash money, Apple/Microsoft/Google/Hulu/whoever. I would gladly pay, lets say, $30-$40 a month for up to ~60 hours of television. It can be DRM'd, it can be "rented", I don't care, as long as I can play it in HD on my TV. I would also greatly prefer to be able to pre-download it so I can have high quality without network hiccups. Unfortunately, the current internet TV model is ~$3 per HD episode, which makes it remarkably more expensive than cable, even for my limited usage. As it stands, it looks like I'm going to have to cobble together my own solution of Windows Media Center DVR for OTA...

We recently released a beta version of our upcoming Mono Tools for Visual Studio version 1.1, containing a couple of nifty new features. - File copying is smarter, and no longer copies files that haven't changed. - It is now easier to package a pre-compiled copy of a web site: - And, most importantly, a preview of VS2010 support that works with VS2010 RC! Give it a shot and let me know if something is broken so I can fix it before we release! Full release notes and download links can be found here . Enjoy!

I wanted to thank everyone for the tremendous show of support for Pinta in it's first week! A few stats: - The announcement of Pinta was picked up by several large tech news sites. - The Pinta web site received over 29,000 hits. - 23 people sent me emails of encouragement. (And 1 of discouragement.) - People contributed packages for Ubuntu, OS X, and Pardus Linux. I was also contacted by people making packages for Fedora and Windows. - Roughly 10 people sent me email offering to translate Pinta into a variety of languages. (We're not ready for translations yet, but I have a bunch of emails to send when we are!) - 7 people have contributed code which has already been merged into Pinta's master repository . Overall, it was a great week! I also wanted to thank everyone that I didn't personally reply to. I was flooded with emails all week and couldn't respond to them all! Anyways, work has begun on Pinta 0.2. Thanks to many great contributions, my roadmap f...

Over the holiday break, I stumbled upon this article from OSNews stating that there was a need for something like Paint.NET for Gtk. Having some experience with porting Paint.NET to Mono Winforms before, I knew that that was a massive task. But it still got me curious about Cairo and creating a layered canvas, since I had never played with Cairo or Gtk. After playing around for a few hours, I actually had a working paintbrush and canvas. Intrigued by my success, I played around with it for a few more days. By the end of the week I had a nifty little paint program with a few features. Now, a month later, it's time to open my little project up to the world: Pinta . Pinta is a clone of Paint.NET. It already has a small, but hopefully useful, set of features like multiple layers and infinite levels of Undo/Redo. I hope to implement the same feature set as Paint.NET. Currently there are several tools missing, as well as adjustments like brightness/contrast and levels and Pain...