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To all you Paint Tool SAI users out there, you may be interested to know that SAI 2 is a thing. I took a crack at it, and it's safe to say that it trumps over alot of things the original SAI has. Although things I may mention in this journal may turn you off for making this switch right now, and to be honest, it isn't exactly finished yet... But it's at least worth giving it a try. Imma give you a breif rundown of what's there.

What's new?

- Ruler Tools that allows you to draw Straight Lines and Perfect Circles. These rulers can also be rotated, and the Circle Ruler can be deformed to draw circles in perspective.
- Perspective Layers which allow you to draw perspective guides or draw certain objects in perspective. Can only draw straight lines while they are turned on, so you'll have to either turn them off, or hit "Disable Rulers" when not drawing a straight line. Just recently, they also added grids that give you an imaginary grid for you to deform and draw on.
- Text Layers that allow you to type text onto your canvas. No longer would you have to draw your text (unless you want to) or use another program for such purpose!
- Deeper Tool Editing. While not much, there were some tool settings I found that wasn't in the Original SAI. Such as the pressure sensitivity for the Size, Density and Blending... individually! You can even set the Tool Stabilizer from the settings instead of Double Clicking on the tool. Some tools also support tilt. However, using a tablet that does support such feature, I can't test this myself.
- Background Transparency Settings have 4 settings to show you a transparent Background. In the original SAI, it's usually white, but you also get the option of Black, as well as lighter and Darker Checkered Patterns, much like Photoshop. This setting is what determines if your PNGs will have a Transparent Background or not, so be sure to use this before you start drawing!
- Specific Layer Locking allows you to not only Lock the Transparency, but also allows you to lock you from accidentally moving Layers, or accidentally drawing on layers, or all 3.
- More Blending Modes to choose from! You now have about every Blending Mode that Photoshop has, to add on to what the Original SAI initially had!
- Shape Tools that allow you to drag in pre-drawn shapes (circle, square and triangle), and allows you to edit them like Lineart Layers.
- More Layers are available for use! Can now have up to 8190 Layers as opposed to the 256 the original one offered.
- Bigger Brushes and Canvases can make for higher res work! Brushes can be as big as 5000px with canvases as big as 100000x100000px.
- Gradient Tool allows you to draw a line, and creates a gradient between your First and Second Color. Also Available is First Color to Opacity, as well as Circle Gradients.
- More Lineart Layer Options which include different methods of drawing strokes. You can draw lines the old way in the original SAI, or you can draw pressure sensitive bezier curves much like how it works in Adobe Illustrator, or ToonBoom.
- Gaussian Blur Filter which can be used to intentionally blur objects in your composition to add more focus and depth to your art.
- Crash Recovery which saves backups of your files in the event SAI2 crashes.

Those are basically most of the things I found while messing around with it. There might be more, but I pretty much said most of the important ones. It is worth mentioning that this is still in Beta, so this isn't even the programs true form! Since this is only a Beta, there may be some bugs present, which while stable for the most part, may cause a bit of complications. But as this program is keeping up to date, most issues have been resolved.

If you do find any bugs, issues with the software, or you're wanting new features or improvements, you can actually e-mail the dev about said topics. He'll usually respond within 24 Hours (If not, a bit after. Based on 2 e-mails I sent): support@systemax.jp

There is one more thing I wanna mention. SAI 2 is available for everyone on a PC to use! However, there is something that's worth noting. The ability to save and open Canvases is locked behind a paywall. To those of you who have a License for the Original SAI can use the same one for SAI 2. By doing that, you'll be able to save and open files. Do note that SAI2 will give you a different System ID than what the Original SAI will give you, so you must re-download a License using the System ID SAI2 gives you. To those of you who don't, well, good luck screencapping your images.

If you do however, want to invest in the original SAI, save your work on SAI2, and support the one man team that is Koji Komatsu, you can order a license here: www.systemax.jp/en/sai/
The price for a SAI License is ¥5400, which translates to around $47 USD. But you can go here to check for your certain currency: finance.yahoo.com/currency-con…

That's it from me. If you wanna try it out, click here: www.systemax.jp/en/sai/devdept…

Please Check the Changelog once in a while to see what's new: www.systemax.jp/en/sai/history…