MyPaint Hits 0.9 and is Looking Good

MyPaint is an easy to use paint program. It supports several popular image formats, comes with a load of brushes, and is available for Windows, Mac, and Linux. After 5 years of development, version 0.9.0 was released on November 2 with some nice new features.

New Features

* Users can now import and export brushes
* Users can now show/hide the sub-windows from menu or keystroke
* Users can now set default zoom level/resolution, and the save format
* Thumbnails for OpenRaster files are now saved
* Open dialog now shows file previews of supported files
* Start-up and file saving has seen performance boost

In Use

MyPaint is a stable fast and maturing application that can be found in many distribution's repositories such as Ubuntu, Debian, Arch, Fedora, openSUSE, Mandriva, and Gentoo. It's similar to GIMP in appearance in that it opens in several small windows instead of the all-in-one, but it lacks most of functionality of GIMP. It is as the name implies a paint tool and not much else. But there's an old saying that goes, "do one thing and do it really well," and that what MyPaint does.

 The project is fully formed as well with tutorials and a wiki available for the program as well as development documentation. They maintain a Brainstorm forum for ideas and a Bugtracker for bug reporting. They openly accept patches from interested participants and they even have a user support forum and IRC Channel. Besides the nice little application, MyPaint looks like a complete and friendly project.