All the comments that "you can just use X to do Y" is missing the point that Paint just works, for almost every value of Y. No argument, Paint.net is great, snipping tool solves the grab and crop, but for most anything else you need to do in a hurry, you need a quick paint program. It's like removing Notepad: we all know hundreds of editors we would replace it with, from Notepad++ to vim/emacs... but isn't nice that when you aren't on your box, you know the core set of tools that are always there? (In other news, Fedora announces dropping grep, lc, and ls from the distro, in favor of python: "most users are devs, let them write their own tools" they stated in a press release).
Paint3D takes longer to load, and has made the simple... much less simple. While we can all say "Yes, that's the way of tech", it's just not necessary.
And yes, I still miss my 1/8" jack on my iphone. Every single day. And stay off my lawn, you whippersnappers.
Absolutely.
Paint is by a long shot, Microsoft's best product.
It's easy to build since it's codebase is pretty small
and they haven't changed it much since it was introduced.
So it's rock solid.
IDK why they're fixing what ain't broke.
Darn, it would be nice if MS was forced to break up in to different product divisions so that their Office product would be released on various platforms.
Except... it is released on various platforms. That 'Linux desktop' isn't part of it doesn't mean that Office isn't on pretty much every other relevant platform (Windows desktop, macOS, Android, iOS, web, ...).
They clearly nailed it, this video from the dev team shows how the understood their users and stuck to the requirements instead of the typical MS feature creep product
I have feeling that dithered fills have nothing to do with Paint itself but were feature of GDI, even one pixel wide lines and such things were dithered when drawn with dithered color.
It probably got removed in Windows 2000, when GDI gained alpha channel support, as the dithering mode was specified in upper byte of 32b COLORREF, which probably got at least internally repurposed as alpha (also, alphablending dithered surfaces is not exactly sane thing to do).
I remember dithered fills being in Paintbrush itself, using Windows 3.1. My memory is you had 16 colors to work with, and to get more than that it supported dithered colors. You could have, say, a red/yellow checkerboard. The UI let you treat these like other colors: you could save them, and draw with them. When you did that, each pixel in your BMP would be set to of the 16 allowed, but the overall impression would be of more than 16 colors.
In Paintbrush you had palette of 20-ish colors, which were or were not dithered depending on whether they were displayable by your graphics adapter. (The default palette consisted of 16 default EGA/VGA colors and few dithered ones, with particularly notable burgundy-ish color that almost didn't look dithered). In the control panel you could set arbitrary 24b RGB colors for user interface elements which were dithered in exactly the same way.
Interesting thing related to this is that Windows 3.1 had significantly different default color scheme depending on what graphics driver you selected during installation. The really default color scheme was similar to OS/2 2.x (pastel colors, active window title with black text on light blue background, different background color for MDI master and slave windows) and significantly different one was used for graphics drivers with 16 or less colors (ie. the one that everybody remembers, with white text on dark blue or black background for active window title bar). Obviously the reason for this was to eliminate dithering in default color scheme.
On the other hand, this was not applied consistently. Windows 3.1 post installation tutorial essentially introduced the pastel yellow (also used in the default color scheme for MDI window background) as the "help popup color", even thought this color was dithered on VGA. Another inconsistency was that Windows 3.1 shipped with CTRL3D.DLL and some (2 or so) applications that used it. (Until Windows 10's consistent Metro-ish style I regarded CTRL3D as the most consistent UI that Windows ever had, because most applications consistently used this same UI style. The Windows 95 HIG mandated style is also nice, but it was never used consistently used by anyone, not even Microsoft itself).
I learned programming in Qbasic. My parent's computer had some "menu" launcher, which let you choose between Win 3.1 and DOS. Most games (Doom / Lemmings / Commander Keen) were DOS based. So yeah, do I need to feel old now?
They did the same thing with the calculator, turning what is probably the simplest app on the entire computer into a Metro-ified flat-design-meme store-dependent mess for absolutely no benefit.
I went to open my calculator this morning and it told me it was in the middle of an update and to try again later. 5 minutes, 10 minutes, and 15 minutes later it still wasn't done. I ended up using Google to calculate some basic math! How does Microsoft screw up such a simple application?
I've opened up the calculator a couple of times and gotten a prompt to rate/review it on the Windows Store... What is the purpose of doing that with built-in apps? It's just annoying.
cmd.exe and calc.exe from ReactOS can be used since ReactOS aims to be fully binary compatible. They look a bit bad though.
Or this is a good opportunity to use tools not built into the OS or write own replacements. It's a bit silly to have calc program dictated by the OS version.
I wonder if you could get into legal trouble if you start to re-distribute calc.exe from older Windows version, as a free download. Probably yes, but it would look so ridiculous if MS lawyers would go after a random person doing that.
The thing is that your Windows 8/7/Vista/XP versions of calc don't even run on Windows 10. The only thing you can run is the Calculator Plus that was released for XP. Of course Microsoft did remove the download for that one.
Not him, but I would have stayed on 8.1 too if it weren't for processor support. The only annoying thing about it is the start menu, which i only use for maybe 10sec/month. It's faster than win7 and has a bunch of features I would miss, and compared to 10 it's not as bloated with non-win32 apps with less functionality for everything, tracking that you can turn off, and all the other win10 stuff you've heard already.
It really I've was already using Launchy instead of Cortana. So, when I saw what a mess Calculator had become in 10, Launcy ended up replacing that too for simple calculations.
It's sad, because by themselves programs like Paint and Calculator are simple. But, when done well, they come together to improve the quality of life while using Windows.
Some time ago someone recommended SpeedCrunch to me for calculator stuff and I use it all the time now. It's a little bit less intuitive since it takes a syntax instead of presenting buttons, but it does a ton more.
I sometimes use a python REPL instead of a calculator. Python has `bin()` for binary representations. Plus imaginary numbers are built in. For more complicated stuff I reach for Wolfram alpha.
I'm curious about this - why do you no longer listen to music or podcasts? The phone comes with headphones that plug directly into the lightning port, and an 1/8" adapter so you can still use your old headphones.
Personally I just keep the adapter permanently attached to my 1/8" headphones. Only downside for me is the inability to charge at the same time, but then the iPhone 7's battery life is pretty great, so that's not a huge deal.
Probably because this person like many has multiple headphones. I have nicer "cans" I use at work. I have the crappy included ones that I use in the gym or when commuting. Noise cancelling buds for travel. And that's not even counting the times I might want to use the aux cord in my car. Having to carry around an adapter is dumb. I have a 6s and will not be upgrading to any phone without a headphone jack
The aux cord in the car was actually a major concern for me too when I was considering upgrading to the 7. And then I found this $15 bluetooth FM transmitter: https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B01KJJP1TG/
The sound quality is fantastic and it's easily way more convenient than using an aux cable: No cord, and it has play/pause and track skip buttons on it!
Also has a microphone for Siri/phone calls though I've never used it to speak to its quality.
There are a bunch of similar ones on Amazon with slightly varying features.
I do understand it would be frustrating to swap the dongle around if you have multiple headphones though. Worth noting that the "crappy included ones" that come with the phone are already lightning though so they don't need an adapter.
"just" by a dongle for each set of headphones you regularly use. For me, that means one dongle, but if I had 'work headphones' I would instantly buy a second dongle so I would never have to worry about this.
Obviously that is objectionable on a $$$ apple tax $$$ level, but pragmatically it's not much of an issue.
I do still miss the mini RCA jack, however, because on occasion I do forget my headphones & adapter and can't use any other normal headphones. (And I hate charging headphones and wearing batteries on my ears)
I completely forgot it was 'missing' one until I had the phone for a week or two.
Thankfully all my listening is in the car, over the speaker, via Sonos, via AirPlay or Spotify Connect, or on my Bose QC35 or Jaybirds X3 bluetooth headphones.
It was a mistake. I sometimes think about "upgrading" (downgrading) to a two year old iPhone 6s to get a headphone jack again but it is not available in 256gb.
I just used Paint3D for the first time last night and was astounded by how terrible it is.
Confirming to scale an image by manually entering a % value requires you to click outside of the value field BUT inside the scale dialog. That's right - there's no Apply or Confirm button, you just have to figure out to click there. Pressing Return or Enter doesn't do it either.
On the second open, there was a "rate this app in the app store if you like it" popup.
"And yes, I still miss my 1/8" jack on my iphone. Every single day. And stay off my lawn, you whippersnappers."
Interestingly, my teenage sons use the phrase "pass the aux", meaning let me drive the music we are currently listening to over the party speakers with my phone.
So yes, Apple's attempt to kill the aux jack was definitely premature, even among young tech savvy people.
your tone suggests one's preferences should be dictated by a corporation's interests; it's perfectly reasonable that the 1/8" jack solves problems for the user that the lightning jack does not solve. Even if they don't even include a 1/8" jack on future products, it could still have been preferable from the individual point of view.
Either you replied to the wrong person or you are majorly projecting your own displeasure. They just asked if the other person was planning on sticking with the iPhone in the future or moving to something that still includes the headphone jack. There was no negative tone to be inferred from that post.
"And yes, I still miss my 1/8" jack on my iphone. Every single day. And stay off my lawn, you whippersnappers."
In my case so that I can use, with appropriate adapters in some cases, reasonably nice over-ear headphones (Beyerdynamic, Grado and Seinheiser). Do I really need several stages of modulation, propogation, reception and demodulation between me and my signal?
Exactly this. It's nice that lightning theoretically gives you more throughput but it's completely pointless if the signal has to get transformed a half dozen times between device and ear.
And all the nicer phones aren't going to lightning cables either because the Pro Audio community (the people primarily buying $3-400 non Beats headphones) would revolt.
I dunno. Decent cans don't generally drive well from phones anyway - so you're stuck with an external amp. Many amps have integrated DACs... why not just feed digital audio to the amp/dac via lightning?
I still haven't found anything similar on Mac. It's the biggest thing I miss after making the switch. Preview is close, but still not the same. And Gimp, the usual recommendation, is far, far far far too heavyweight to be a valid comparison to Paint.
You can take a look at Pinta[0] I don't recall if it's a clone or a port of Paint.Net, but works for me as a quick tool... the OS integration (open with) needs some work though. It uses Mono as a portable runtime and is decent enough, again for most work. IMHO easier to use than Gimp, though not as feature rich.
You don't need it on a mac. You can take a screenshot of a part of the screen only, and it saves it to an image on your desktop, you can send to anyone.
Checkout ShareX, I was a long time Greenshot user (and it even integrates the nice annotation stuff from Greenshot) but I switched because it has an even nicer UI and a host of additional features while remaining simple to use (still free though.)
But ShareX does not have an image editor, like Greenshot. Which is the whole reason we are discussing alternatives to paint. Or am I wrong and someone implemented one?
I don't understand the love for Paint. It's terrible at almost every single thing it does. Cropping is complicated. Resizing is complicated. Text and drawing result in a blocky mess. It's just unfortunate Paint 3D is a slug.
Despite what happened to his software, which is clearly unfortunate, it's a shame to see it turn closed source. I would have thought that projects would be hopefully moving toward more free licenses.
In this case, "more capable" is an anti-feature. Paint "just works" because it's so damn simple and easy. And with the added benefit that it comes pre-installed, so you don't need to comparison shop between four other tools to see if you like them or not.
GIMP is the only one I'm familiar with, and it doesn't "just work". There is a definite and steep learning curve, including why you can't 'just save an image' like you save any other document.
Woh, why would a distribution drop something as common as grep? Saying you can build it yourself sounds crazy when it always exists and cross-platform...
I don't see many Windows users hanging out in the CLI for extended periods of time, either. Even though OP wasn't serious about fedora nixing grep, surely you see the lack of equivalence in that argument.
I would argue that they used cygwin, and now they have the option of using WSL- which I have been using for the last two months, and thus far has met my CLI needs.
Pity that they don't open source it. I've gone through multiple image editors on Linux, and none of them have the simplicity of Paint. The layout and functionality is incredibly intuitive. You drop someone into Paint, and even if they've never seen it before, they can start doing stuff within a minute or so. You drop the same person into GIMP, and five minutes later they're still trying to figure out how the hell to select a paintbrush.
I understand that every image editor is trying to compete with Photoshop, but sometimes I don't need Photoshop. I just need to paste my clipboard so that I can crop, circle something, or annotate with some text and a crudely drawn arrow. There really is nothing else comparable that can do that as quickly or as easily as Paint.
It's open-source. The built-in image editor is optimized for the things that you need to do with screenshots - it is comparable, but almost in the wrong direction: Things are easier and quicker with Greenshot than Paint! Here's a quick guide I threw together:
I'd like to also chime in on how great Greenshot is. I started using Greenshot after Skitch got EOL'ed, and while it's not perfect, I find it indispensable for sharing screenshots with coworkers.
I think a few people (some non-KDE users) have an aversion to KDE/Qt tools and avoid them where possible. Certainly it was enough of a pain for me to get consistent look-and-feel across all my applications that I gave up and decided not to use Qt if I could avoid it.
well people do complain, but i think the point is that windows has one UI framework (win32/user32) and (most) everyone uses that. It provides all of the primitives and norms that people expect
Do you actually use windows? That's not my experience at all. The difference between even just the stuff windows ships with is staggering. Just compare control panel to settings app, they look like they belong to different OS's, and you have to use both to access all configuration.
IME real users don't care about the app being aesthetically different, but they do care if the common idioms have changed(e.g. position of OK/Cancel). That shouldn't depend on your toolkit, though.
I exagerate, but: win32 GDI, windows.forms, MFCs, ATL and that is just from microsoft off the top of my head. There are way more when you start looking at all the solutions that a typical user might actually have running on their machine.
MFC, ATL, and the .NET stuff with the exception of XAML all use win32 controls under the hood. XAML still uses user32 albeit not the control toolkit. Because everything shares the same common core things work together better than on Linux.
> MFC, ATL, and the .NET stuff with the exception of XAML all use win32 controls under the hood.
Oh, I wish that were true. I have twice been a test automation engineer and stopped exactly that not being true for all widgets. Some are, but many of them, including some styles of buttons are not. A simple heuristic to tell is that when a UI widget does something the win32 can't, its probably not a win32 widget.
Even using UI inspection tools like Spy++ panels with .Net buttons that aren't backed by win32 buttons just show don't show up as an item is the tree of UI elements. There are also applications that just do silly things like use GDI, DirectX or OpenGL to draw a thing that looks like a button and isn't controlable of adjustable via external calls at all.
> I think a few people (some non-KDE users) have an aversion to KDE/Qt tools and avoid them where possible.
Why would you have an aversion to Kolourpaint but not to a Linux port of MS Paint? That does not make sense in the context of this thread - unless your comment was a non-sequitur.
Edit: After rereading, I have realized the root of the thread can be interpreted in other ways than what I got - I felt AdmiralAsshat's main thrust was they'd have wanted a Linux port of MS Paint.
I'm a little hesitant about grabbing a KDE app on my Cinnamon desktop, as it will inevitably result in pulling down like 50 KDE libraries. But we'll see.
I was about to suggest XPaint as being equally simple, but it might be more complex than I thought:
> Recent versions have support for advanced image manipulations (image zooming and resizing, filters, color modifications, separation of RGB channels), scripting, layers, edition of alpha channel and of transparent images, vector formats import, truetype fonts and anti-aliasing, geometric transformations of such fonts, etc. …
> The scripting capabilities include programmable filters, batch processing, creation of 2D and 3D images, etc. XPaint also recently acquired a built-in editor which can be used to produce posters containing text and images.
XPaint used to be decent, but at some point it got really buggy. You have to save after every operation in case it crashes. Someone ought to go to town on it with valgrind or whatever.
> I just need to paste my clipboard so that I can crop, circle something, or annotate with some text and a crudely drawn arrow. There really is nothing else comparable that can do that as quickly or as easily as Paint.
I use Greenshot for this use case. It's faster than Paint at everything you mentioned, better at screenshots, has some nice tools like highlight and obfuscate, and one-click export/upload for a bunch of services (eg to Imgur).
If you've gone through so many image editors on Linux, why would you choose GIMP to compare it to? That's the prime example of an image editor that aims to be like Photoshop. Just about any other image editor on Linux is easier to use.
I just wanted to add that Pinta 1.6 (which is the current stable version in the official Arch repos, for example) has awfully slow rectangle/selection tools on larger images. In my case, selecting something in a 2000x2000 image would freeze the whole program for a couple of seconds. Same with resizing or dragging a selection. It was pretty much useless.
But 1.7 fixes this issue. It's a development version and not considered "stable" yet (though I haven't experienced any issues so far).
It doesn't though, it takes a screengrab of your current window and let's you annotate, but only if it's a win32 app or UWP not the win8 apps. I just ran into this issue last night (to be fair snipping also doesn't work).
Perhaps similar to Notepad, which has been more or less feature-complete since Windows 2000 or so. I guess it is also internally "deprecated", but will continue to be shipped for quite a while. Microsoft doesn't tend to break such things. In Paint's case, I'd guess the most that will happen is that it will vanish from the Start menu, but the executable will still be there.
"Find" in Notepad does not wrap around to the start of the document, and has no option to do so, so in order to search the whole document you have to put the cursor at the start. That's bone-headed behavior and should've been fixed a decade ago.
Hmmm... I had no idea. I think I've run into that bug many times without knowing. I would still rather they don't touch it than start adding features, because we know the first thing they'd add is the ribbon which has no business being on a text editor with 4 options.
"in order to search the whole document you have to put the cursor at the start"
Yep, but we all know to do this. Better to keep it with this quirk, than remove this indispensable software. Notepad and Paint are so simple and work fine, long may they remain.
Feature, not a bug, imho. I don't know about other folks, but I've used drag-and-drop accidentally and had to undo it many many more times than I've used it deliberately.
if we're going to pick on a standard UI thing that it fails at, I'd say multiple undo.
> This update should not require you to have to reboot unless you happen to have Notepad.exe open. This update only revs the version of the OS and includes a updated binary version of Notepad.exe and nothing else.
This is a click-bait title. They are adding a new Paint product called Paint3D. Which is probably there to accompany the Surface products which they are trying to sell as designer and drawing products. Either way this headline is very misleading.
I’m surprised no one has mentioned Hal Lasko (The Pixel Painter). Hal started using Microsoft Paint when he got a computer on his 85th birthday until his death at 99 in 2014. He made some great looking art bit by bit.
Ooo I'm so happy that you mentioned this! I own two Hal Lasko's :) That story is amazing. It really shows the value that tech can add to anyone's life.
This is silliness. I Win+R, mspaint at least 10 times a day. I paste in screenshots and quickly cut out just a portion of them. Or leave the screenshot there for later review. Why don't they just remove the file browser? Or how about mouse support?
Win + Print screen saves a screenshot to Pictures/screenshots.
Printscreen copies the screen to the clipboard, and is then pasteable. (I just tried the Twitter example and it worked.)
Select a window and Alt + Print Screen captures just that window.
It's not capturing the screen that people are going to miss. It's making changes to those that people are going to miss. Paint just works, and is really quick.
They had an issue with abusing monopoly power, once upon a time. It's only recently that people stopped coming at them with torches and pitchforks every time they added a feature found in third-party apps.
The cynic would say their Windows 10 behavior is a continuing abuse - including the unwarranted setting of Edge and other Microsoft apps as defaults (overriding the user's settings) after an update, the forced upgrades, and so on.
Except now they have a "but it's about keeping the users safe" pretext, so they don't catch as much hate for it.
> Except now they have a "but it's about keeping the users safe" pretext, so they don't catch as much hate for it.
They're not catching much flack for it, because they're no longer feared as they were in the late 1990s, due to the devaluation of the desktop PC. It's no longer regarded as the center of the tech universe, nor is it regarded as the future economic gateway through which everything will flow (as was commonly believed 20 years ago). Back then, Microsoft stood practically alone as the gorilla of the technology industry, today that's not even remotely the case.
They could have implemented something like that since they first saw shift-command-4 in action and they'd have a couple years before the first investigations.
You're being completely disingenuous, that's absolutely terrible.
My use case for Paint is highlighting one off screenshots for clients and the like. Nobody is going to send your sort of screenshot in a professional environment, it looks like it was marked up by a kindergartner.
My workflow: I open up snipping tool, take a screenshot, copy it, paste it in Paint, mark it up quickly (arrow tool or circle/rounded corners tool usually), and either save it or (usually) copy it and paste it into an email or Word Doc. Super easy and quick, I can do this in the time it takes GIMP to load or another program to download, its also always there. I do this on a monthly basis at least.
Why though? Paint is already perfect. It's ubiquitous, doesn't require a download and install (there's locked down machines), loads instantly, and the UI is incredibly simple and intuitive.
Though if I ever need "advanced" screenshotting I'll keep this in mind.
Snipping tool doesn't have shapes or text input, all the tools are freehand. I don't want to email a client with chicken scratch that looks like a child's doodle, that's unprofessional.
The top 'arrow' looks like a sideways J, I assume it's an arrow based on context, but it's not that clear. Which is why it's nice to have a good tool for the job.
PS: If you actually do the same thing in paint they have a lot of useful shapes and you get a preview of how they look. Which is nice if you don't want the chicken scratch look.
You can rotate them 90 degrees which is good enough for what I need.
Workflow is generally Screenshot, crop, highlight with text / arrow / circle past into email. Paint.net is useful, but not on every windows box and often not worth the download when I 90% of the time I just want to send something to a coworker who might email it to a customer.
It's too sloppy even if I could draw that well with my mouse or highlight in a somewhat straight line. Nevermind the regular employee, sometimes I'm sending it to Directors and C-levels, etc.
That is true. Personally the thing I miss the most is simple text insert. Writing with mouse is horrendous, but the ease of use beats functionality for me.
It's not paint but Preview.app can crop, edit and annotate screenshots.
A handy tip is to include control in the Mac screenshot keyboard command (e.g. ⌘⇧⌃3) to have the output piped to the clipboard instead of a file. Then in Preview.app, File > New opens the contents of the clipboard in a new window.
While I'm at it, ⌘⇧4 (and ⌘⇧⌃4) lets you interactively select an arbitrary region.
Also ⌘⇧4–Space (and ⌘⇧⌃4–Space) let you grab a single window directly from the compositor. Which means you always get the full window, including its alpha channel. Even if the window is obstructed or partially off-screen, you still get the whole thing including its transparent drop-shadow.
Preview.app fucking sucks. There are a handful of truly obnoxious sins that OS X commits, and not providing a graphics editing application with full access to the pixel raster is one of them.
Other sins include no trivial click path to instantiating an empty file on the desktop. One must open an application and either issue a command (touch or similar) or save an empty file with the application used (TextEdit.app for example). This is inconsistent with the fact that you can create folders in the context menu, but not files.
OS X discourages thinking in terms of the file system in general, by dumbing down the interface with "shortcuts" like All My Files, and buries the root hard disk partition many layers deep, in the default interface, forcing users to surface the usual affordances through several settings in multiple preferences menus. This creates a natural bias against proper command of one's data, among novice users, and promotes sloppy, confused organizational skills and inefficient usage patterns that eat the fuck out of hard drive space, leading inexperienced users to purchase unnecessary upgrades, in order to solve behavioral problems in hardware.
OS X also pushes users away from non-binary file formats, defaulting most formats to favor non-plain-text and targets closed formats that leave the user unable to look at file contents in a common universal manner. This leaves non-technical and less-technical users in a world where only "apps" can inform you of mere parts of your data. Again, users are not thinking in terms of files on disk, or discrete packets of information. Data lives in indescribale places at locations they often can only describe by "way finding" through pointing and clicking or tapping. There is no path, or tree, or name, or directory, or disk to these people, and thus no file or disk space to think of. Text resides is fields, images in albums or galleries, on and on.
Have you met or spoken with younger non-technical people lately. They are lost and beyond clueless about a lot of important things. This is in many ways due to Android and iOS (which in turn influences OS X). Linux is hardly a presence in the desktop world. And now Windows is going the same way. Dark days ahead.
What you describe as the "dumbing down" of the file system is the inherent consequence of multi-user operating systems, i.e. a bias towards the user's home folders; clearly done to help users better organise their documents.
Meanwhile, power users are not even momentarily impeded, with key locations (such as the file system root) readily accessible from the Go menu. Or keyboard shortcuts. Or the terminal. Or from the dock, the sidebar, the desktop, the toolbar or anywhere else you wish, just by dragging it there. You only have to set this shit up once and it's there forever.
Pixel editing graphic applications are free and plentiful on all major desktop operating systems. MacOS doesn't ship with one that suits your needs, but consider that Windows doesn't ship with one that suits my needs. Q.E.D.
Your complaint that many end-users don't use computers the way you use computers is pure get off my lawn. Those young whippersnappers don't understand the motion of electrons or the byte endianness of various processor architectures? Back in my day, we had to punch holes into cards...
Power users not being impeded is precisely my point, and you've made it for me. That these features are considered "advanced" and thus buried is my argument.
These kinds of features are not surfaced readily (existing many interactions deep, and not single gesture or action operations) or they are completely absent from the bundled operating system distribution, despite comprising essential utilities.
> That these features are considered "advanced" and thus buried is my argument.
You're making the assumption that people, general users, even care about these features. What evidence do you have that this is the case?
Everything I've seen indicates most people have other things that are much more important to them than open text-based file formats or hierarchical directory structures for locally storing files.
Okay a very simple way to add context to my claims, to prove that these are intrisic features of any operating environment that must function without network access, as a standalone system, is to look at how internet-based entities replicate similar bahaviors to enable web based collaboration.
Proving my point is the existence of URL shorteners (as analagous to file names and paths on a local machine) and plain text snippet sharing sites such as pastebin (as analogous to users passing plain text snippets on a shared standalone system).
So too with pixel editing. This is a fundamental aspect of an operating environment, and one that Preview.app performs inadequately at, and the likes of which OS X does not otherwise support natively.
Personally, I agree or understand with a lot of what you're saying. Where I differ is your statement that there is or should be lots of interest in these things by the 'mass market'.
That makes about as much sense to me in 2017 as it would be to go back to 1983 and suggest people really need to toggle switch in a boot loader to understand how a personal computer works.
Asserting that pixel editing is "fundamental aspect of an operating environment" is not just flimsy, it's highly subjective at best and entirely without substance.
Windows doesn't have a bash shell, an NFS client, a PDF annotation tool, or instant file previews; I'd consider these far more serious omissions.
Asserting that full access to the file system is 'buried' in MacOS is flat-out wrong, and borderline insulting. It's all there in the Go menu which is visible on screen.
If MacOS doesn't ship with your obscure checklist of "essential utilities" then go cry in the corner quietly. Meanwhile Windows 10 doesn't even ship with a real bash shell, which I consider essential.
Go buy a new mac and unbox it fresh, and try out the experience which speaks for itself. I'm not talking out my ass. You sound pretty mad. Watch your emotional tenor, lest you slip into personal attacks, or has that already happened?
I disagree that this is a "good" thing. Cloud being parlance for someone else's computer.
This is not pure "get off my lawn" garbage. Try communicating how to save and transfer a protected zip file with sensitive data to pretty much any non-developer. These are essential tasks, and if you only socialize with technical folks, sure, everybody will be on the same page, but that leaves 90% (or more) of the rest of the world nearly clueless and left out in the cold. Whoops!
EDIT: To elaborate, consider the palpable difference in technical confidence between Ed Snowden and Laura Poitras. Technical people often gasp at the things Snowden had to carefully explain. Realities that are painfully obvious to power users.
This sort of skill differential is extremely common, and the amount of babying and hand-holding ordinary users often require is painful to behold. My claim is that the obscurity of essential activities is the root of this sort of thing. Editing raw pixels with precision, taken as a simple example.
> Have you met or spoken with younger non-technical people lately. They are lost and beyond clueless about a lot of important things.
They just have different ideas about what's important. Back in the early 1990's, I volunteered in the medical education office of a Houston area hospital. This is the office that ran the residency program responsible for training doctors. Important and life saving stuff.
Anyway, one of the admins there was a DOS Wordperfect user with something like 10,000 files in a single directory on her hard disk. It wasn't the most efficient way of organizing files, but it worked for her and let her focus on the business of getting doctors trained.
Research on the 'ecology' of end user computing would be quite interesting and might inform future products.
Personal anecdote: I put the date in yyyymmdd format in many of my file names for teaching documents so I can order by time easily. Gnome Shell when it first came out had an 'activity journal' feature (like Win XP I recollect) based on the zeitgeist functionality[1] which I found really handy. You could view your history, click a bar (like on wayback machine) and get the docs. A versioning system based on that would be wicked. Alas, this initiative seems to have died.
Ha ha, good one. Yes, it wasn't meant to show anything new, just put it because I've seen many people don't know this sort of stuff - basic command line usage.
Edit: Actually, I had originally meant to write "At the DOS/CMD prompt", but left out the DOS part because who knows how many people even know what DOS is these days ... :)
I don't quite understand why you'd ever want to create a new file in this way, and I remember being baffled by it as a child when Win95 came out.
Isn't it always going to be faster to open whatever application you want to create your file in (bonus: win+r on Windows, cmd-space on Mac) and just save the new file there? Creating the file first and then invoking the program by opening it with the GUI seems like a pathological workflow.
I think it's to not have to relocate a folder in a Save As dialog. Sometimes I already have a folder open, and just want to create a new file then drag it into my editor because I know the Save As dialog is pointed elsewhere.
Aha. That makes a bit more sense. For what it's worth, you can just drag the folder into the location bar and get roughly the same effect. If the window's already open, the small folder icon on the top works as well.
Windows has had a mechanism for creating empty documents via the shell since Windows 95. I don't think I've ever found it useful. (Much like the ability to drag and drop text from WordPad to the desktop to make a clipping file.)
Coming from Windows all my life to OS X was a bit bumpy. I will say not being able to create a quick text document is so very mildly annoying. But I've learned to use Notes.app in place of my usual purposes for *.txt files unless I'm wanting to move some chunk of text data somewhere quickly outside of the walled garden of my Apple ecosystem.
Is there a Preview.app equivalent for Windows these days? It was one of my favorite new tools when I switched to Mac back in the day, because for windows I had to download special 'see all types of files + basic editing' programs.
For simply displaying PDF (and a few other formats), I like SumatraPDF. It is pretty lightweight (compared to the crawling horror that is Adobe Reader), and when you re-open a PDF, opens it at the position you were last time(!!!). The latter feature makes it perfect for viewing reference manuals etc.
EDIT²: IrfanView can display many graphic formats and quite a few that are not strictly speaking graphics. Plus, it has some basic image editing capabilities (resize, rotate, ...).
SumatraPDF is fairly minimalistic, it is a single executable file that runs without installation. Foxit has far more features than SumatraPDF, it is more like the slim sibling of Acrobat (no insult intended!). (SumtraPDF.exe is something like 3.5 MB, Foxit's msi package is something like 70 MB, IIRC)
But Foxit never has given me any reason to complain. I have across a few tricky PDF files that took forever to open in Acrobat, and Foxit (and SumatraPDF) handled those without trouble. Plus, it installs a PDF printer, which is convenient on pre-Windows 10 machines.
As dumb as it may sound, the lack of a real spiritual successor to MacPaint is something that differentiates Windows from OSX in a small way for me.
It's not the end of the world, but it's annoying. Like copying a transparent PNG in Windows only to paste something with a black background and no alpha.
OSX's lack of a Paint equivalent makes me think, "Windows does it better."
Hopefully not for same purpose as OP, since you can just do cmd+shift+4 and draw the region you want. Maybe Microsoft should implement something like this, so maybe shift+screen shot or something like that would let the user just draw rectangle over what they want captured.
I use Alt-PrtSc to just capture the current window, which is a good start. Specific regions would be even better though (although the Snipping Tool can do this).
No... cmd+shift+4 mostly covers that base for me. It's also a nice way to take quick measurements of screen dimensions. (Once the drag is started, <esc> will stop it without capturing an image.
But for cropping images in general, zooming in, adding quick bits of emphasis, etc. - Paint is pretty useful. (It also has the benefit of working more or less the same way since pre-Windows 3.0, so the consistency is a nice thing.)
You might be interested in switching to Greenshot. The workflows that you described will go much quicker since it pops up a menu of quick actions to take after you press Print Scrn.
For screenshots that you want to review later, you just tell Greenshot to save directly to a file that it automatically names with a timestamp. To do quick edits, you can open your screenshot in the built-in editor. Or, you can open them in Paint.NET or any other editor.
It's open-source, no-nonsense, free software. It takes your 9 keystrokes plus multiple clicks to crop down to one key: PrtScn. The built-in image editor is optimized for the things that you need to do with screenshots. Here's a quick guide I threw together:
Before that, I'd always used just Alt-PrintScreen to take a screenshot of only a specific window, not the whole screen.
So, to try it, I arranged a few app windows in cascaded style (including Paint itself), then did PrintScreen, then pasted the screenshot of Paint (plus other apps) into Paint ...
Me too, use Win7 snipping tool and or Paint all the time. Notepad, Paint, Wordpad are all useful. Even though I wished MS would give them some love like add UTF-8 as default save option, or a better search function, etc. The new Win8/10 metro/UWP apps and the Store are crap.
I know it's nice to have built in tools that just work, but if you are looking for a good third-party tool for that functionality, Greenshot is pretty good. It has it's own simple little editor for annotating the image if you want.
There is a whole subculture of artists who use MS paint as a means to make a specific form of art. Also this actually saddens me that sure there could be other low budget tools but without one baked into the OS think about the kid bored in school who can no longer stumble into mspaint and start doodling in class.
To add to this, pixel-precise drawing is still available in Paint 3D, so "the specific art style" mentioned by the GP is still possible there. Heck, some things that cater to this style are even easier in Paint 3D than in Paint.
Off topic, but what caught my eye in the article was this:
> Now Microsoft has announced that, alongside Outlook Express, Reader app and Reading list, Microsoft Paint
For those who don't know Reader was introduced in Windows 8 as a PDF reader with annotation support (worked with Stylus in just black colour).
I always hoped it would get more features and could become comparable to Preview on Mac. But sadly it was never updated for Windows 10. I still use it as I don't like using Edge for PDFs and Ebooks. Nothing wrong with it, but I hoard a lot of tabs and every time I open a PDF several tabs will open up. Would really like my browser and ebook / PDF viewer to be separate apps.
/rant
also RIP Paint. Gave me great joy as a kid and the constraints challenged me in fun ways to create 'interesting' art
Got to get people to use Edge somehow. Also try banning installers from adding pinned icons so users don't use Chrome, banning installers from setting defaults so users don't use Chrome, When you do open Chrome adding adverts for Edge to the screen (it's totally faster guys, come on). Banning browsers from the Windows Store, and thus Windows 10S.
"...banning installers from setting defaults..." goes way, way further than "... so users don't use Chrome". Installers silently replacing my default app is user-hostile and I encourage any steps my OS vendor takes to reduce the ability to do that.
I had zero problems manually switching my default browser in Windows 10 to Chrome.
It's more the way they did it, and continue to try to reset Edge to be default.
I'm talking about my users who can't work the shift key, they just click whatever is pinned to the task bar. Same with how Mail is now pinned by default, even though everyone uses web mail.
Any individual one of these wouldn't be too much of a concern, but together it seems suspicious.
On the flip side, I don't have as much trouble remembering if I left something open in Reader or IE11 as I did in Windows 8.1 with everything merged in Edge. It's an interesting trade-off, and while it does add more tabs to a place where I already keep too many tabs it is somewhat nice to be able to scroll through all of it in one place.
Maybe some of the new tab management tools in Edge since the Creators Update help? (I'll be honest, I'm not yet using them as much as I thought I would.)
Weird, in the comments i almost don't see paint dot net ( https://www.getpaint.net/ ) get mentioned? Awesome free tool, between paint and photoshop. Support for layers, ...
Wow, I haven't heard mention of paint.net in sooo long! I used that years ago, and it was awesome...then numerous migrations, and different types of jobs (where needed less use for ms paint or paint.net)...lately just use whatever is on the OS - sometimes it is GIMP, sometimes its ms paint. Yeah, if no one else vouches for paint.net, i'll definitely vouch for it!
Paint has always been a handy tool for me for making annotated screenshots as well as lightweight image manipulation. I use it on a fairly regular basis at work.
I forsee the result of this being lots of people Googling 'download ms paint' in the future and ending up with malware on their system. Seems kind of shortsighted if you ask me.
It's probably the Microsoft product I use the most outside of windows, visual studio and outlook. If it could save pictures without a background I probably wouldn't need any other image editor.
I probably use it around 10 times a week professionally, much more than I use Word (I do most of my writing and notetaking in standard text editors and only use Word when it's time to style it or save to PDF).
Thank you. Unfortunately I'm on an enterprise controlled software stack. I'm not sure my needs warrant adding new software and thus more maintenance work for the IT department when our stack also includes photoshop.
I wanted to hate on this decision but honestly Paint 3D is a much better version of MS Paint.
For instance in MS Paint if you write some text in a textbox and then de-select the textbox it's extremely hard to select it again so that you can edit the text. And if you make a square selection and then use the edges of the square to expand your selection, you'll actually stretch the image under it, which I found unintuitive and odd.
I think the biggest mistake here was creating a new application called Paint 3D and discontinuing the original one. That's bound to create bad PR. Instead they should have "updated" the original Paint to become Paint 3D, just like they "updated" calc.exe.
Krita is an alternative to MS Paint in the same way that operating a railway network is an alternative to driving a bicycle: it does much more with far greater hardware, software, user effort and user experience requirements.
Additionally, the specific focus on high-end painting using a tablet means that emulating MS Paint with pixel-perfect drawing, crisp shapes and palettes has halfhearted support or needs clever workarounds.
> Krita is an alternative to MS Paint in the same way that operating a railway network is an alternative to driving a bicycle
I think that is too harsh. Although Krita can do more than Paint the user-experience is pretty well done and it also works for basic tasks providing useful defaults.
Yes, Krita is well polished, but it deliberately offers advanced tools: some proudly beyond the competition (e.g. layers and brush engines), some quirky, some plain and dependable, some state of the art, all meant for expert users and optimized for serious work (including basic tasks), not for ease of learning.
So their big shift of making Windows an OS more focused on creation than consumption starts by... nixing Paint.
Why? It's a dickish enough move on it's own, but I can't understand the reason behind it. This will surely generate a huge PR backlash wgen actually implemented, with even more people trying to block the update... for what exactly? The article doesn't even talk about a planned replacement.
Time to go find the executable and save it somewhere.
I use mspaint for one thing, but it does that one thing beautifully. When I'm designing large complicated structures to eventually build in Minecraft, there's nothing quite like zooming all the way in to a blank canvas, turning on the grid, and drawing the floorplan pixel by pixel.
mspaint does this so well because of its simplicity. 20 basic colors, single-pixel drawing (with the ability to do lines and boxes if necessary), and not much else. It's fast, it's simple, and since it's just an image file, it's no problem to transfer the design to another computer (where you can open it right up again in mspaint and have all the same tools).
I've played around with the "new" paint, Paint 3D, and as far as I've seen, there isn't even the ability to put down a 1x1 grid. Basically, they removed a bunch of the "paint" features in order to add the "3D" features.
What alternatives does Windows have built-in? I use mspaint a fair amount to black out sensitive areas of screenshots or for cropping images to a specific size (scale then shave x pixels off the sides to get a specific aspect ratio), but not often enough that I feel like setting up an alternative on all my machines.
Not worth it for Paint alone, but you might want to consider using something like Ninite (if you want the least possible hassle) to install most of your favourite apps on all your machines with one click.
I never used the new MS Paint after the ribbon-redesign for Windows 7. The XP version was so intuitive, precise and clean. Actually it's possible to use the XP version in newer Windows editions, but it involves some tinkering.
I recently had to use Paint again and noticed the newer versions got rid of the "right click on this color to set the background color" mechanic. Sure it's not very discoverable, but that was a great power feature that I didn't even appreciate until it was gone.
This is cited as one of the reasons for its removal. It had no real practical use for the user at this point and was basically just a handy ransoming tool.
My tool for cracking syskey locks doesn't work on UEFI systems so I'm glad they're just gonna break he functionality.
Notepad is "weak" for a reason: it aims for absolutely minimal dependencies so that it can still be used for system recovery when everything else has gone to hell in a handbasket.
Hard to make that argument for Paint though, I'll grant you.
Consider the OS X equivalent, TextEdit. In contrast to Notepad, it remains fairly minimal while being upgraded to always use and showcase the latest OS X APIs and design standards.
That is why Paint is now deprecated: a successor named Paint 3D has replaced it in the Creators Update in May. Whether or not you think the 3D features are all that interesting, it's definitely interesting seeing Microsoft invest in new ideas for the built-in apps.
For me, the program lost its charm when they introduced the antialiased shapes, soft brushes etc (Win7?). The MSPaint aesthetic was all about rough and ready aliased drawing.
If they were going to replace it with something good enough to challenge Adobe (pls do, they need some competition) then sure. Paint can't need that many maintainers?
On the other hand, this basically means just one line to the script to be run on each fresh install of Windows.
It's not like we lost the license to use Paint, did we?
You mean in order to place it back on the machines? Sure, just one line.
But there seems to be a rather big difference between basic software that is guaranteed to be available and software that requires any amount of scripting/preparation to install, even if it is just one line.
Yeah, but that executable file is like 335 kilobytes, or at least it was in Windows XP. * checks Win10 * My goodness it's 6,520 kilobytes now. At that rate of growth... * back of napkin math * KILL IT!!
Paint is the one program I miss the most from Windows other than the Windows file explorer and window management. Paint clones don't seem to cut it. Preview doesn't cut it for me either. Everything else seems to offer a subset of Paint in a more complicated manner. I don't quite know how to explain it.
Is it possible to DL an executable of Paint and run it in Wine?
Ok so it's another screenshot tool. Capture all, a window, a selection, etc. Bind global hotkeys.
But where it really shines is the easily configurable "after capture" and "after upload" toggles. In the screenshot you can see I have: copy to clipboard, save, and perform actions turned on. The first is nice because I can easily paste into Slack. The middle is nice because it goes to a particular directory and I have history. But the latter is something I just turned on to show you how it can easily open the screenshot into mspaint.exe for you.
I always find it fascinating that they can redesign the whole OS with almost every release but thinks like cmd, notepad, Wordpad or paint stay unchanged for decades (?) despite having huge feature gaps. They surely should be able to find one or two devs that can put some ongoing effort into these.
The main issue I have with this is that, like you could guarantee vi/vim being present on any Unix/Linux installation, mspaint.exe would always be present on any Windows installation for easily taking screenshots. When working with locked-down systems, such as we do at work, that was a really useful feature.
Windows ships with snipping tool for screenshots. You can also press Win+PrintSCrn to save a screenshot image in Pictures\Screenshots. Microsoft also have their Snip program available for download: https://mix.office.com/snip
I'm surprised Microsoft CAN kill off Paint, given how much they cater to big corporate interests and keeping things backwards compatible.
For example, I've heard stories that Notepad can never be upgraded nor removed from Windows because there are big corporate users that have binary monkey-patched Notepad in order to achieve some business goals. They literally have to keep Notepad unchanged from Windows 3.x days or else some big corporate entity won't upgrade Windows when the upgrade comes out.
I think that's one reason that Windows desktop and its apps are such a hodge-podge representation of Windows UX over the years.
I can't believe Paint isn't absolutely mission critical to some big company somewhere, maybe its design wasn't conducive to monkey-patching.
I remember when I first started using OSX (forgetting OS9 and prior for now) and being shocked that there is no built-in paint program. There still is not one. Paint works amazing well for very quick edits, which is all I really ever need to do.
Preview actually lets you do a lot of things you might have wanted to use paint for. Unfortunately, nobody in their right mind would expect something called 'preview' to do image editing, so I never noticed until someone told me.
There's an implicit fallacy that MS Paint did a lot of good and the world would be a sad place without it. No, something else would fill that niche. The same nostalgia argument has been used for MS Windows, Internet Explorer, etc.
As a 3rd-party developer I could almost understand retiring apps (too many dependencies on deprecated stuff, ancient code base is too hard to maintain, etc.).
Yet built-in apps are much more special. For one, many people consider built-in apps to be "the OS" as much as the OS itself. And two, if there is any development team that can continue supporting an ancient code base, it's the OS vendor: if they really have to, they can do things other companies can't (like privately continue to ship functions that are now publicly unavailable). It should always be more in their interest to evolve rather than redo.
Every time GIMP crashes on my Mac (been meaning to figure out why but for some reason its when I copy and paste) I think of Microsoft Paint and I would love it if Apple had an analog.
Its sad because other than MS Excel, MS Paint is one of the few MS apps I know how to use. I am so bad with word and powerpoint. Even my knowledge of Excel is pretty bad. I have been known to even load up simple datasets in Postgres,Pandas, or even R because of my sheer incompetence and inability to navigate menus.
Minesweeper is also pretty cool and underrated albeit boring after a few... errr 100s of plays.
I'm embarrassed to say it took me a full year of mac use (I came from linux originally) to learn that preview app could edit as well you can insert your own signature!
I have not used MS Paint in many, many years, but I have some fond memories of playing with it on my first PC.
I can understand, though, how this upsets people that have made it part of their workflow. For simple tasks, Paint is nice because it starts really fast compared to e.g. GIMP. And it's on every ____ing Windows machine, you can rely on that. Same as notepad or calc. These programs, after all, are there for a reason.
(I am not on Windows 10, my work laptop runs Windows 7, and at home I don't use Windows, so this does not affect me directly.)
I'm amazed just how few people in the comments here actually read past the clickbait headline. Paint is deprecated. It isn't being removed for the time being. Beyond adding a ribbon menu and some brushes Paint hasn't received meaningful updates since XP so it should really come as no surprise that it would be deprecated.
If Microsoft's history is any indication Paint will be around for another decade, and continue to work if you just download it from some MS Paint nostalgia fansite for decades later.
I wonder if they check the usage statistics before getting rid of it? Because surely there are millions of people using it every day. Don't they care about the users?
Does anyone else here remember the little booklet that came with Windows 95 where they showed you how to produce little projects with Notepad, Wordpad and Paint?
The idea being that even with the bare OS, you had a few tools to work with and some tutorials that exposed features of the OS in a systematic way.
Anecdote: I'm still to this day showing colleagues at work the wonder of the Windows button and the power of Ctrl-Z, Ctrl-Y and within a document window Ctrl-F.
OS X/MacOS doesn't have a "paint" analogue. So users have to run around and install a bunch of things or buy things to replace it. It's a PIA on new systems, and I still am not quite sure what a good new user replacement is.
Years ago when I first learned GUI programming, a simple paint application was the 2nd or 3rd example given.
I hope they replace it with something, I consider such a tool an essential part of any modern GUI OS.
Deprecation is not the same thing as removal.
They're not removing Paint. They are just not developing it any more. They may still leave it in the OS for years to come; maybe even indefinitely. There are a lot of deprecated programs that still ship with Windows.
They say it might be "removed in future releases." But isn't Windows 10 supposed to be the "last" version of Windows, just perpetually updated? It would be really strange if a system update removed Paint.
The best use of MS Paint I have seen is by Sal Khan for his initial versions of Khan Academy videos. He used pretty much all features of MS Paint effectively.
Let's get rid of the handful of useful features left in Windows. Next time around we'll take care of that pesky calculator, and then we're coming for notepad.
If they ever do that, Metapad will still be there to help. Though I'm mainly a vi/vim/gvim user, I use metapad sometimes for quick edits. It's very lightweight, but still supports some more features than notepad. It has some neat features. The developer has stopped working on it, but I think a) he released the source code (C or C++ using the Win32 API) and b) the download is still there on his site.
Note: if using Metapad, might want to tweak the default options a bit before using it for anything important. E.g. I seem to remember that ESC exits the file you are editing, maybe without warning. Other than a minor thing or two like that, it's a neat tiny text editor, though - IMO.
Not even 30 minutes ago, I saw a MS sponsored add for Paint on Facebook.
But then again, unlike this article, I don't consider a rewrite with new functionality as killing off an app, even if the rewrite has "3D" attached to the title.
Makes sense. Microsoft is missing out on recurring revenue. They purged the other image tool (the MS Office one that let you view TIFFs), and now they're killing paint.
I'm sure there will be a Windows 10 Creators Pack for Creation for Personal Users (not to be confused with a creators update) available on 4 different channels for $6.99/mo. The stable branch will not have the ability to open JPEGs or save to a format other than clip art, but a new revisions will be delivered daily.
We jest, but bullshit like that is entirely possible.
Windows is a product in decline in many ways, and a public company still needs to grow revenue. Users can (and are) migrating to modern platforms, but many of the organizations using it are doing so because they have to, will continue to have that need for a decade or more.
My colleagues at work who run apps on the IBM Mainframe and POWER server platforms plan their operational cadences around peak periods where they lease access to CPU cores and memory on their servers. They only get to access about 25% of the hardware without a meter running. Microsoft can and probably will do the same conceptual thing to extract more dollars.
Paint3D takes longer to load, and has made the simple... much less simple. While we can all say "Yes, that's the way of tech", it's just not necessary.
And yes, I still miss my 1/8" jack on my iphone. Every single day. And stay off my lawn, you whippersnappers.