Today I have built and released the fifth milestone of PICEDIT 1.3.

http://picedit.googlecode.com/files/picedit-1.3M5.jar

The new features include:

* New windows style toolbar that can be dragged out to be floating or docked in either the left, right or top borders of the desktop.

* The current docked position of the tool panel is saved as a preference when the application is closed.

* Status bar moved to bottom of screen and changed to look more like the modern status bars found in web browsers, IDEs, graphics editors, etc.

* Zooming in and out with the mouse wheel.

* Mouse wheel click will now pop up the visual colour chooser.

* Fixed usability issue where zooming in was not automatically resizing the window.

* Split the brush tool out into separate brush and airbrush tools.

* Brush size and shape is now selected visually by clicking on the appropriate image.

* Changed the look and feel to use the system look and feel across all components. This means that on Windows the internal frames will look like normal Windows frames rather than the Java look and feel that was present in milestone 4. On Mac OSX they will look like Mac OSX windows.

   

This latest release sure feels fresh, like a completely new software, ditching remnants of DOS-look was a good decision. Zooming works nice, and colour changing by clicking on the wheel itself feels ok. However, when a new colour is selected, the current tool is disselected, which can be disturbing sometimes, could this behaviour be optional?

Somehow, PICEDIT tends to have permanent 'always on the top', I admit it can be useful sometimes but could you please add an option to toggle it?

   

Thanks for the feedback. Neither of those observations were intentional. You are correct, the mouse wheel button shouldn't deselect the tool. I'll fix that for the next milestone.

Regarding the "always on top", are you referring to the whole application? Does it stay on top of other applications? I'll have to give that a go on a Windows PC. I can't recall seeing it myself. It seems to be behaving itself on a Mac, which is what I'm on at the moment. But I did spend a lot of time for this Milestone working on a PC to make sure it looked a bit more Windows friendly this time around. I'm aware that I didn't test it much on Windows for Milestone 4.

   

D'oh. I am unable to reproduce always on the top-effect. But that's what originally happened. Maybe it would be best ignored as one-time anomaly.

   

You may have noticed that the color chooser and brush chooser pop ups are modal. They stay on top and won't go away until something is selected. It is possible to exit out of them by pressing ESC or right clicking. Another thing that stays on top is the floating toolbar, but that should only stay on top while PICEDIT itself is the active application. It is possible that there is some weird state that it can get in to around these areas that might explain what you saw. I'll keep an eye on it.