About an hour ago the developers have released a long-awaited new development release which is another step towards GIMP 2.8. GIMP 2.7.2 comes with all the changes that were made after GIMP 2.7.1 was released in June 2010. There’s really a LOT of new stuff. The new release comprises layer groups (which were introduced after 2.7.1), an almost done text-on-canvas feature, the all-new brush engine and of course the new single window mode.

We’ve included the 2.7.2 tarball already in our downloads section.

How to compile GIMP 2.7.2 for Ubuntu 11.04

A build for Windows users should follow soon, we will keep you up-to-date about that.

Changes in GIMP 2.7.2

UI:

• A lot of undeprecations due to GTK+ 2.22 and 2.24
• Lots and lots of cairo porting, calls to gdk_draw_* are gone
• Merge the cage transform tool from GSoC
• Remove the old bitmap cursors completely and always use RGBA cursors
  also for compat cursors for old X servers
• Add new GimpCanvasItem infrastructure with subclasses for everything
  that needs to be drawn on the canvas and port all tools to canvas items,
  this is a huge change that touches all tools and almost all display
  code, and which finally gets rid of XOR drawing altogether
• Switch from purely idle-rendering the display to something that ensures
  a minimum framerate, so we don’t fail to update under heavy load
• Make the text tool handle RTL mode better
• Change GimpColorMapEditor to use the newly added proxy GimpPalette
• Replace the brush scale control in tool options by a brush size
  one that works in pixels, and does the right thing when the brush
  changes
• Add new widget GimpSpinScale which is a scale with number entry,
  and use it in all tool options
• Make the brush, pattern etc. selectors in tool options more
  compact and allow to directly jump to the editor dialogs
• Make handle sizes in tools consistent
• Add an on-canvas progress and use it for tool progress instead of
  the statusbar
• Add a new GimpToolPalette class with lots of code that was
  in GimpToolBox
• Allow to properly drop into and after a layer group
• Refactor and clean up the dynamics editor widget, and add colors
  for the curves
• Add support for F2 to rename items in lists
• Clean up GimpDeviceStatus internally and visually
• Allow to set GimpToolPreset’s icon using the new GimpIconPicker widget
• Make the text tool’s style overlay show default values from the
  text object if there is no style active at the cursor position/selection
• Show the the text size’s unit in the text style overlay
• Make tool dialogs transient to the image window again
• Consistently add a “gimp-” prefix to all window roles
• Make the preset buttons in tool options work on the global tool
  presets instead of the removed per-tool preset lists
• Add GimpControllerMouse, which allows to bind extra mouse buttons to
  arbitrary actions

Core:

• Add uniform API to turn any GimpItem’s outline into a selection
• Add support for color tags in text layers
• Remove the selection_control() stuff from GimpImage and with it
  maybe last piece of UI code still not properly separated
• Add more validation code for XCF loading
• Add accessors to GimpPalette and use them globally
• Keep a proxy GimpPalette around for the image’s colormap
• Don’t scale SVGs when pasting or importing them
• A lot of changes to the input device handling code, partly
  merged from the gtk3-port branch, add GimpDeviceManager class
• Add smoothing of paint strokes
• Fix display filters to work on a cairo surface
• Fix and enhance GimpImage’s URI/filename handling API
• Unset “removed” flag on items when they get added back to
  the image from the undo stack
• Change item creation to properly use GObject properties and
  remove item_configure() and drawable_configure()
• Refactor tool event handling and move lots of stuff into
  utility functions
• Clean up GimpViewRenderer API
• Implement transforms on group layers
• Clean up the transform tool a lot, and refactor away old junk
• Tool and tool event cleanup: enforce tool activate/halt invariants,
  consistently shutdown all tools in control(HALT), and many other
  tool fixes
• Remove GimpToolPresets object, this functionality got merged into
  the new GimpToolPreset system
• Rename GimpFilteredContainer to GimpTaggedContainer and add a new
  GimpFilteredContainer parent class which is a generic filter
• Remove the concept of an “offset” from TileManager and instead
  pass around the offsets explicitly when needed, like when
  transforming
• Move GimpBezier desc from vectors/ to core/ and add API to create
  one from sorted BoundSegs
• Change GimpBrush boundary API to return a GimpBezierDesc
• Add GimpBrushCache object and use it to cache a brush’s transformed
  pixels and its outline, remove the caching code from GimpBrushCore
• Add GimpBezierDesc based API to GimpScanConvert and use it

GEGL:

• Add operations and gegl infrastructure for the cage tool

Libgimp:

• Introduce an “item” type in the PDB and libgimp and deprecate
  lots of old API in favor of item API
• Add procedures to create, traverse and manipulate layer trees
• Add more state to the context API, and deprecate functions with
  too many parameters in favor of simpler ones that use context states,
  particularly the entire transform and selection API
• Move GimpUnitStore and GimpUnitComboBox to libgimpwidgets, and
  use them in GimpSizeEntry, deprecate GimpUnitMenu.
• Deprecate gimp_min_colors() and gimp_install_cmap()
• Add API that enables GimpRuler to track motion events by itself
• Add new selection API and deprecate all old selection functions
• Move around and rename all parasite functions, deprecate the old ones
• Add a generated PDB file in the “gimp” namespace and get rid
  of “gimpmisc”
• Add unit conversion functions to libgimpbase
• Add function to reset a plug-in’s context to default values

Plug-ins:

• Make script-fu server IPv6 aware
• Follow libgimp deprecations in plug-ins and scripts
• Add PDF export plugin
• Lots of cairo porting here too
• UTF-8 fixes in script-fu
• Set the progress to 1.0 when done
• Merge a lot of upstream fixes into script-fu’s Tinyscheme
• Add “New Layer” option to MapObject
• Support loading of 16-bit raw PPM files
• Add web-page, a new plug-in which renders images of web pages
• Fix some more plug-ins to not warn if applied on an empty region

Data:

• Remove “Untitled” from palette names entries

Developer documentation:

• Move libgimp documentation from templates to inline comments
• Generate standard deprecated sections

Source and build system:

• Add more code documentation
• Add more unit tests and refactor existing ones to use global
  test utility functions
• Add a manifest to executables (app and plug-ins, Win32)
• Depend on GLib 2.28, GTK+ 2.24, Cairo 1.10
• Make WebKit available to all plug-ins, not just the help browser
• Run UI tests on Xvfb if available
• Check for GdkPixbuf separately because it’s now a separate library
• Allow tests to use uninstalled plug-ins from the build dir
• Remove, comment out, or build for GIMP_UNSTABLE some stuff that
  should not be in a stable release

General:

• Improve safety on Win32 by calling SetDllDirectory() and
  SetProcessDEPPolicy()
• Switch from GtkObject::destroy() to GObject::dispose() all over
  the place
• Various changes that make maintaining the gtk3-port branch easier,
  such as s/GtkAnchorType/GimpHandleAnchor/ and s/GtkObject/GtkAdjustment/
• Don’t use gtk_container_add() for adding to GtkBoxes
• Inherit from GtkBox directly, not from GtkHBox/GtkVBox
• Add namespace to the ink blob types and functions
• Remove all useless calls to gtk_range_set_update_policy()
• Use GObject::constructed() instead of GObject::constructor() all
  over the place
• Move more members to private and add accessors for them
• Stop using GdkNativeWindow, use guint32 instead
• Plug memory leaks
• Remove ps-menurc, we are not a PS clone
• Use the new g_[s]list_free_full() instead of foreach() and free()
• Don’t use newly deprecated GTK+ API
• Use the new GDK_KEY_foo key names
• Lots of bug fixes and cleanup
• Lots of translation updates