Over the last year, Paint.Net became my default app for quick photo edits. It's an excellent Photoshop alternative for beginners and non-professional users.

Now, thanks to Jonathan Pobst, Linux users have a similar app they can enjoy. Pobst began working on the project in response to a call last year from Thomas Holwerda from OS News, who lamented the lack of a decent Paint.Net-like app for Linux.

The result is Pinta, Pobst's clone of Paint.Net utilizing the Cairo and GTK libraries. Though currently only at v0.1, Pinta already includes all the basic drawing tools you'd expect plus important advanced features like an undo history and multiple layers. While it looks somewhat similar, the only code borrowed from Paint.Net are the adjustments and effects functions.

Pinta could nicely fill a void on Linux. As a bonus, you don't even need to be a Linux user to try it out: Windows users need only have the GTK runtimes installed and Mac users will need Mono for Mac. Check the instructions at the Pinta FAQ!

Mozilla finally released version 3 of their Thunderbird desktop email client last December, and they now have their attention focused on a minor bump to 3.1. Last night the first alpha build was made available, and it sports the usual handful of changes and improvements.

Among the tweaks are enhancements to stability and memory usage, better IMAP access, fixes for smart folders, filters, and attachment handling. The Thunderbird interface is also being re-tooled -- so far the changes are fairly subtle.

Thunderbird 3.1 is also dropping support for Windows ME and older as well as Mac OsX prior to 10.4 Tiger. But hey, if you're still running an OS that old you're probably not too concerned with running up-to-date apps either...

Ready to take it for a spin? Testers can download alpha builds for Windows, Mac, and Linux from the Thunderbird early release page.

On a recent Google Chrome post one of our commenters -- MoneyMike -- lamented the apparent passing of one of Chrome's popular UI features in recent nightly builds: pinned tabs.

I, too, noticed the change recently and wondered what was going on. There's been plenty of discussion amongst Chrome developers, and it boils down to an evolutionary step for Chrome and the introduction of app tabs. The arrival of phantom tabs recently is also part of the change.

To clear the air, I pinged Google's Eitan Bencuya to see if he could shed any light on the situation. Here's his response:

"As you know, all of these features are still pretty experimental (they're not even in the dev channel yet) and we're trying out different approaches to see what works. In this case this is part of a larger set of tweaks we are making related to extensions but we haven't yet fleshed out all the details of app tabs specifically."

Right now, changes to the tab strip are a moving target. Developers are also working hard at tweaks for the almost-certainly-coming tablet version of Google Chrome, and the extension API is still evolving as well.

Ultimately, while this kind of change might be frustrating to us it's all part of the thrill of using experimental software. Yes, it comes at the expense of perhaps watching a feature you like fall by the wayside, but you still get to play around with all functionality users of the stable version may never see.