Hello everybody,

If you were stuck for something to do with your evening (or morning or night, depending on your timezone), you could do worse than download the latest pre-release of the GIMP 2.0 from

ftp://ftp.gimp.org/pub/gimp/v2.0/testing/

or from one of the mirrors listed at http://gimp.org/download.html

The GIMP (for those who don't know) is the GNU Image Manipulation Program. It is a freely distributed piece of software for such tasks as photo retouching, image composition and image authoring.

Since it's been a little while since the last pre-release, quite a few bugs have been fixed, and some small user interface changes have also been made, so it is well worth the upgrade.

Happy GIMPing, Dave.

Bugs fixed in GIMP 2.0pre4 ==========================
- 128825: Improved misleading debug output and hide it in the stable branch (Raphael)
- 133467: Fixed autoshrink selection (Mitch) - 131634: Fixed text-circle script-fu (David Odin) - 133532: Quit the imagemap plug-in when it is finished (Sven) - 133456: Disallow editing of data objects which have no save functionality (Mitch)
- 113142: Don't attempt to render the display out of bounds (Mitch) - 133763: Fix use of EXEEXT in tiff checks (Yosh) - 131044: Attempt to read layer names from TIFF files (Pablo d'Angelo) - 133490: Fixed handling of missing pluginrc file (Sven) - 121074: Suppress some harmless warnings in the stable branch (Sven) - 132351: Fixed harmless iscissors tool warnings (Sven) - 97999: Indicate progress when scaling a drawable (Sven) - 133244: Fixed crash in Curve Bend plug-in (Wolfgang Hofer) - 133818: Added a runtime check for fontconfig >= 2.2.0 (Mitch) - 130636: Fixed undo handling in Add Bevel script (Simon) - 133067: Connect the text tool font with the global font selector (Sven) - 133958: Made color values in color picker selectable (Mariano Suárez-Alvarez) - 125283: Have configure warn when gimp-print is older than 4.2.6 (Sven) - 112012: Use default preview if none can be generated (Mitch) - 124969: Improve text tool logic (Sven) - 121033: Ensure that non-indexed images cannot have a colormap (Mitch) - 132356: Curves tool trapped the mouse (Mitch) - 123321: UTF-8 and zero-size layer bug (Adam Moss, Daniel Rogers, Piotr Krysiuk)
- 134274: Behave correctly for edit and delete functions for data files (Mitch) - 134285: Improve snap behaviour for grid and guides (Simon) - 134274: Fix data file initialisation routine (Mitch) - 134423: Fix GIF plug-in when used without display (Sven) - 134419: Fix undo button behaviour in GFig plug-in (Sven) - 134562: Ensure tile cache cannot write to freed memory (Mitch) - 134512: Exclude undo stack from size of memory in an image when scaling (Sven)
- 134694: Fix bug in Preferences (Mitch) - 134410: Make drawing of straight lines better for fuzzy brushes (Simon) - 125303: Remove per-channel gray point picker from levels dialog (Dave Neary)
- 134752: Improve clipboard buffer detection between different images in the same GIMP instance (Mitch) - 122049: Validate numerical input in pygimp plug-ins, and fix the Sphere plug-in (Dave Neary, Florian Traverse) - 130568: Mostly fix Van Gogh (LIC) plug-in (Simon) - 70673: Let Curves and Levels widgets scale with the dialog (Sven) - 135059: Remember the preview setting for all ImageMap tools (Sven) - 135630: Don't make the resolution calibration dialog modal (Sven, Pedro) - 133266: Saner max. value for the blend tool's supersampling (Sven, Pedro) - 135866: Fix displacement handling in bumpmap plug-in (Pedro, Joao) - 135994: Fix offsets when scaling or resizing vectors (Simon) - 133453: Experiments with global shortcuts (Mitch, Simon)

Other contributions: Manish Singh, Michael Naterrer, Sven Neumann, Henrik Brix Andersen, Jakub Steiner, Simon Budig