Hi,

It took a few days longer than what had been planned but last night I finally got around to make another pre-release of GIMP 2.2. You can download it from ftp.gimp.org and it's mirrors:

http://gimp.org/downloads/#mirrors

There have been a couple of problems in the 2.2-pre1 release (most notably the misbehaving Image->Scale dialog) that made it difficult to use 2.2-pre1 for daily work. We have however eliminated all reported problems and I hope that we didn't introduce any serious new ones. So this release should be good enough to use it on a regular basis.

Unless major problems show up, the final GIMP 2.2.0 release is supposed to follow later this month. We will be waiting for the GTK+ team to release an update for GTK+-2.4 that has some performance problems fixed which are seriously affecting The GIMP 2.2. I am speaking about the long delay you get when opening a new image window...

Please do not install this pre-releae of GIMP 2.2 into the same prefix as GIMP 2.0. It would overwrite most of the GIMP 2.0 installation. To install in parallel to 2.0, please use a different prefix which is not in your default library search path. If you wish to replace GIMP 2.0 with this pre-release, then please remove the GIMP 2.0 installation before installing this software. For detailed installation instructions, see the file INSTALL.

The GIMP 2.2 plug-in API is fully backward compatible to GIMP 2.0. Plug-ins for GIMP 2.0 should continue to work and don't need to be recompiled. We do however hope that plug-in authors will update their plug-ins for GIMP 2.2 and adapt the GUI and API changes we did with this version.

It might turn out that we have to do some late changes to the newly added API before the final 2.2.0 release, so don't consider the API strictly frozen yet. The API is however guaranteed to be backward compatible (source and binary) with the GIMP 2.0 API. If you find that your 2.0 plug-in breaks when used with the GIMP 2.2 libraries, or if you cannot compile a GIMP 2.0 plug-in against the GIMP 2.2 header files, please report that as a bug.

Of course we couldn't resist to add some new features since 2.2-pre1 So here's the list of the latest changes:

- More work on GFig (still more to come here).

- Improvements and fixes to the migration of user settings.

- Final touches to the new PDB APIs.

- Ported some more item factories to GtkUIManager.

- Added new PDB function gimp_layer_from_mask().

- User interface cleanup in IFS Fractal plug-in (former IfsCompose).

- Allow file plug-ins to provide a way to access an image thumbnail if the file format provides one or can be rendered at small sizes.

- Load and save EXIF thumbnails in JPEG files.

- Render in small resolution when creating a thumbnail for a Postscript or PDF document or from an SVG or WMF image file.

- Allow to import Photoshop (.act) palette files.

- Added a Print Size dialog to bring back missing functionality from 2.0.

- Several improvements to the GIMP Python bindins.

- Guard the core better against misbehaving scripts and plug-ins.

- Changed the way that Script-Fu scripts register their menus (in a backward compatible way).

- Added ALSA support for the MIDI controller module.

- Resurrected the glob plug-in.

- Lots of bug fixes and some optimizations.

Contributors:

Michael Natterer, Sven Neumann, David Odin, Manish Singh, Kevin Cozens, Joao S. O. Bueno, Geert Jordaens, Yeti, Karine Proot, Øyvind Kolås, Simon Budig

Sven