GIMP 2.7.2 Arrives, But Still Far From Belated GIMP 2.8

Blender isn't the only free software graphics application moving along (they just released their first stable 2.5 build), but work towards GIMP 2.8 is also moving along. Though in GIMP's case, the work has been moving along rather slowly. GIMP 2.8 was supposed to come last December and that deadline was clearly missed. At that point it looked like it was perhaps just a few months away, but only now is GIMP 2.7.2 even being released.

GIMP 2.8 is largely being held up by the new user-interface and broken graphic tablets support, or at least that was the explanation back in January. In mid-April we now finally have the release of GIMP 2.7.2.

This new development milestone has the new single window mode user-interface, an all-new brush engine, layer groups, and text-on-canvas support. The cage transform tool developed as part of a previous Google Summer of Code was finally merged, RTL text support is improved, many changes to the input device handling code (some of it being merged from their GTK3-port branch), various memory leak plugs, and many other development changes.

The GIMP 2.7.2 release can be downloaded at GIMP.org. Sadly it looks like it will still be a while before GIMP 2.8 finally surfaces. Once it does, succeeding GIMP 2.8 will be a version that really focuses upon using their GEGL core (the Generic Graphics Library) that has been in-development for years now.

More information on the GIMP 2.7 series can be found on this release notes page.