Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Microsoft Paint to be killed off after 32 years

theguardian.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

311–320 of 400 posts

Re: Microsoft Paint to be killed off after 32 years

#311

Post by freehunter »

Clubber wrote: post #299
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…

I still use Paint to crop screen shots when I need to send them to people. Quick and gets it done, on any Windows computer.

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.

Re: Microsoft Paint to be killed off after 32 years

#312

Post by vincvinc »

Clubber wrote: post #299
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…

I still use Paint to crop screen shots when I need to send them to people. Quick and gets it done, on any Windows computer.

You can use Window's built-in Snipping Tool to do that more quickly than with paint (still love paint though)

Re: Microsoft Paint to be killed off after 32 years

#313

Post by freehunter »

imaginenore wrote: post #274
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…

> Paint just works That's an exaggeration. It's very limited. There are much more capable free image editors: * Photo Pos Pro * Krita * GIMP or CinePaint There are also many simple Paint-like options: * Pinta * Pixelitor * PaintStar * PhotoScape

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.

Re: Microsoft Paint to be killed off after 32 years

#314

Post by EdSharkey »

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.

Re: Microsoft Paint to be killed off after 32 years

#315

Post by DocG »

tunetine wrote: post #66
DocG wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I did the same until I discovered that windows has built in snippet tool. Try it out.

You can't draw circles and arrows, etc in that tool though. I need to point out the obvious sometimes. Well, actually most times.

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.

Re: Microsoft Paint to be killed off after 32 years

#316

Post by rnet85 »

radiorental wrote: post #268
profpandit wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hxx2KcPWWZg

You know that's a parody right?

Re: Microsoft Paint to be killed off after 32 years

#317

Post by vram22 »

mschaef wrote: post #306
vram22 wrote: post #264

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At the CMD prompt, creating an empty file is as easy as: COPY NUL A 1 file(s) copied. DIR A 07/25/2017 12:12 AM 0 a 1 File(s) 0 bytes

I'm pretty sure that date could be 1982 and your example would work equally well. :-) Checks... Yup: https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20031022-00/?p=...

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 ... :)

Re: Microsoft Paint to be killed off after 32 years

#319

Post by erikrothoff »

shawnbaden wrote: post #148

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. https://vimeo.com/70748579 - The Pixel Painter https://hallasko.com/

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.

Re: Microsoft Paint to be killed off after 32 years

#320

Post by dfox »

cbr wrote: post #239
dfox wrote: post #218

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 b…

I've actually used Windows 3.1.

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).

Post reply on HN