• Rewritten and improved tablet support (including Monoprice tablets)

• Running under UAC (Windows User Account Control) with limited rights

• New gradient grabbing tool

• New cosmetic options

• Several areas of speed improvements

• Fixed black icon bug that showed up on certain systems

• Error console helps when submitting bug reports

• New ruler feature

Rewritten and improved tablet support

Our tablet code is rewritten from the ground up to be more robust and easier to use. If a device is plugged in, you can now enable pressure while the program is still running. We also found that there was a problem with Monoprice drivers when the program was running at a different elevation level than the drivers. This has been addressed, and the program now defaults to running without administrator elevation. In the past, turning off the UAC would solve the problem, but we found that UAC cannot be fully disabled under Windows 8, and for security reasons it is not a good practice to require users to disable an OS component. That's fully up to them.

Note: if you use a Monoprice tabet made by UC-Logic, grab their newest driver. They have released a new driver for Windows in March 2013 that supports dual screens and Windows 8, and also appears to work better overall. See www.uc-logic.com for the drivers, which can be found in the "Support" section of their website.

Running under UAC with limited rights

Formerly, we ran with administrator rights elevation, but this has been changed so that we no longer require running as administrator. It is still optional as part of our installer. This should open up the program to more users, such as schools and organizations that don't allow users administrator rights. (Administration is required for install only)

New gradient grabbing tool

There is a new tool under the FX tools to pick up the colors in a line on screen to make a new gradient. See a sneak peek video preview on Youtube. Note that in that video, it was still under development. The final version has further evolved, the interface was further improved.

New cosmetic options

There is a new “flat look” option that makes sidebar tabs appear with a flat style. Icons have received a moderate makeover, fixing minor pixel level problems and making them sharper and more consistent.

Several areas of speed improvement

We found that the shift function was very sluggish with large images, and that has been spead up by several orders of magnitude. There may be some other areas of speed improvement as well.

Fixed black icon bug that showed up on certain systems

A bug that has haunted us for a long time has been addressed. A blitting error that occasionally manifested as black icons on certain machines has been fixed.

Error console helps when submitting bug reports

We now feature an error console under the Window/other menu that displays information that can be useful when diagnosing problems or submitting bug reports.

New ruler feature

The ruler now displays tick marks that are useful to line up the pointer with the ruler. The ruler is now formatted for various zoom levels. This is an addition to changes made to the ruler in version 8.2.

 

Other Improvements

Changing color schemes is more intelligent and causes less visual glitches.  Restarting is still required to get the full effect, but it's more thorough than before.

Render/Plasma noise is much faster.