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Microsoft Paint to be killed off after 32 years

theguardian.com

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Re: Microsoft Paint to be killed off after 32 years

#231

Post by dcole2929 »

keithpeter wrote: post #193
mwexler wrote: post #67

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…

"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.

Re: Microsoft Paint to be killed off after 32 years

#232

Post by narrowtux »

Pxtl wrote: post #186
ygra wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Also no drag-and-drop

Re: Microsoft Paint to be killed off after 32 years

#233

Post by mschaef »

tritium wrote: post #200
sjwright wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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.

Re: Microsoft Paint to be killed off after 32 years

#234

Post by pletnes »

smcl wrote: post #139
Karunamon wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

A Metro-ified flat-design-meme store-dependent mess which takes a noticeable delay to load . I've taken to firing up an instance of IDLE instead - which is actually a little nicer in the end

You need to give ipython a go.

Re: Microsoft Paint to be killed off after 32 years

#235

Post by ue_ »

rhencke wrote: post #224
krylon wrote: post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Huh. I thought it was open source. EDIT: Wikipedia says it used to be open source, but it went to closed source. Still free as in beer, though.

Anyone wondering as to why Paint.NET transitioned to closed source may find this insightful: https://blog.getpaint.net/2007/12/04/freeware-authors-beware...

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.

Re: Microsoft Paint to be killed off after 32 years

#236

Post by Pxtl »

narrowtux wrote: post #232
Pxtl wrote: post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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.

Also no drag-and-drop

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.

Re: Microsoft Paint to be killed off after 32 years

#238

Post by irth »

jb55 wrote: post #98
AdmiralAsshat wrote: post #97

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…

> I've gone through multiple image editors on Linux, and none of them have the simplicity of Paint Have you tried mypaint?

I loved MyPaint on the Nokia N900, with the pressure sensitive screen and the built in stylus

Re: Microsoft Paint to be killed off after 32 years

#239

Post by cbr »

dfox wrote: post #218
pjc50 wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I still sometimes miss the old Paint with dither-pattern floodfills. The current Paint still supports lower bit depth bitmaps but not dithering.

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…

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.

To see this, go to https://classicreload.com/windows-31.html and then open Accessories > Paintbrush.

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