WhatsNew2

1. What's New in The GIMP 2.2?
   1. Major changes
   2. Smaller changes
      1. Dialogs
      2. Tools and Toolbox
      3. Menus
      4. Image Window
      5. Brushes, Patterns, Gradients, etc.
      6. Plugins
      7. Script-Fu
      8. Integration with other programs
      9. Customizability
      10. Usability
      11. Technical stuff

What's New in The GIMP 2.2?

This is a draft list of new things coming in GIMP 2.2. Please edit as appropriate.

An effort to write this as a kind of press-release is available at HeadlineFeatures. Comments are welcome.

Available in french with shots at http://www.gimp-fr.org/html/mongimpfr/Presentation_GIMP22.html

Major changes

• Previews for transform tools

• Previews for many plugins that didn't have them, and improved previews for many that did.
  Preview now can resize and contain a navigation popup just like the main image window.

• Many user interface changes to improve layout of dialogs, and comply more closely with Human Interface Guidelines.

• Greatly improved drag-and-drop between GIMP and other applications.

• Improved ability to copy and paste between GIMP and other applications, including OpenOffice and Abiword.

• New file open/save dialogs. The open dialog does automatic thumbnailing, using embedded EXIF thumbnails if available.

• Much content covered by the help.

• A new script interpreter, Tiny-fu, which will eventually replace Script-fu. Shipped separately

• A new keyboard shortcut editor, allowing shortcuts to be defined for many more things than before, including many actions that don't have menu entries.

• Interface for controlling various parameters with a variety of devices. Allow keyboard, mouse wheel, MIDI controller, etc to be used as a GIMP controller.

• New plugins: neon, cartoon, photocopy, softglow, dog, retinex, glob.

Smaller changes

Dialogs

• Separate advanced options from basic options in several places.

• Help buttons on many dialogs.

• Reorganized Preferences dialog.

• Show "Comments" in image info dialog.

• New error dialog to consolidate error messages.

• Buffers dialog shows a preview of the global buffer.

• Add "Clear Undo History"

• Reorganized layout of Template Editor.

Tools and Toolbox

• Tools dialog lets you customize which tools are shown in the Toolbox, and their order. (You can add color tools to the Toolbox.)

• Toolbox can show a preview of the current image.

• Crop tool now shades the part of the image that will be cropped away.

• Improved appearance for DB browser and Plugin Details.

• Ability to fix or directly change aspect ratio when scaling an image.

• Visibility changes no longer cancel the active tool.

• Show brush outline while painting.

• Improved interface on Threshold tool.

• Tools can be cancelled with Escape

• Improvements for painting with pressure-sensitive devices.

• Use fancy cursors when supported by the windowing system.

Menus

• Much more easily reconfigurable menus. Better positioning for entries created by plugins.

• Added "Fit Image in Window" command.

• Added "Open Location" command.

Image Window

• Units menu on image window.

• Zoom level menu on image window.

• New button allowing zooming of image when image window size changes.

Brushes, Patterns, Gradients, etc.

• New types of generated brushes, and better control of the ones that existed.

• Load gradients from SVG files.

• Use a variety of file types for patterns, including png, jpeg, gif, tiff.

• Added a mark to distinguish generated brushes in the Brushes dialog.

• Ability to use a controller to alter properties of a generated brush.

• Import palettes from RIFF palette files and from Photoshop (.act) palettes.

• There are now PDB entries for manipulation and maintenance of gradients. (for scripts, etc.)

Plugins

• Improved imagemap plugin

• Allow use of units other than pixels in borderaverage plugin.

• Lighting Effects now supports multiple lights. Can save and load presets for light arrangements. Changed material properties to more intuitive names.

• Usability improvements for Bump Map.

• Consolidate gauss_iir and gauss_rle into a single Gaussian blur plugin.

• Allow plug-ins to have their own embedded progress indicators

• Improve usability of the Compose plugin.

• Gimpressionist can be used non-interactively, by specifying a preset. Also bug fixes and code cleanups.

• Improved interface on Noisify plugin, and renamed it "Scatter RGB".

• Removed plugins: hrz.

• Added support for ico files.

• Blur plugin runs noninteractively.

• Choose arbitrary center for motion blur radial and zoom.

• New GFIG interface.

• bzip2 and gzip plug-ins have been merged to a more versatile plug-in named compressor.

Script-Fu

• Allow multi-line text input in script-fu.

Integration with other programs

• Follow recent-files spec from freedesktop.org (This means that GIMP now updates the ~/.recently-used file which is read by the GNOME and KDE desktop environments).

• Ability to open a file as a new layer within an existing image.

• Ability to drop uri's, colors, and patterns to the layers dialog.

• Drag-and-drop between the paths dialog and vector applications using SVG format.

• Import several types of shapes from SVG files as paths. (Ellipse, rectangle, etc.)

• TWAIN plug-in ported to Mac OS X

Customizability

• Allow user to change the splash image by adding a file called gimp-splash.png to user's personal GIMP directory.

Usability

• Keyboard shortcuts are now common for all windows.

• Make floating selections more obvious.

• Add progress bar for rgb->indexed conversion.

• List unsaved images in Quit dialog.

• Can keep toolbox and dock windows above other windows.

Technical stuff

• GIMP now can be compiled as a console application, with no dependence on Gtk.