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.
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'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.
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.
"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 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.
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.
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...
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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:
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.
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!
Readit News
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.
Quickly taking a look at the most used products where I work...
MS Office Installer https://appdb.winehq.org/objectManager.php?sClass=version&iI...
MS Word (I stopped here) https://appdb.winehq.org/objectManager.php?sClass=version&iI...
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.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hxx2KcPWWZg
No telemetry.
Agree. I bought an iPhone 7 and now I never listen to music or podcasts with it, a very unexpected side effect of not having a headphone jack.
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.
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.
Microsoft's ineptitude at UX is mind-boggling.
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.
Not sure what you mean by this, it is the best selling iphone.
I'm very curious -- anything thoughts on what will be your next phone? Iphone again, or branching out to new 1/8" jack pastures?
If Microsoft is listening 'PLEASE, do not remove Paint. I use it every day for doing very simple tasks, and it JUST WORKS!'
(Yes, that's a terrible feedback/issue, but it's the closest one I've found).
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?
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.
https://mix.office.com/snip
It's replaced most of my need for ms-paint
Paint isn't going anywhere.
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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
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.
http://getgreenshot.org/https://github.com/greenshot/greenshot/
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:
https://i.imgur.com/tcpZjG0.png
Yes, it runs on Windows, but so does Paint. They have a Mac version (never tried it, apparently it was a near-complete rewrite), but not a Linux version: http://getgreenshot.org/faq/will-there-ever-be-a-greenshot-v...
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.
You can download it from the package manager, and use it on Windows or Wine too. (Maybe WineHQ ships it as well)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GrafX2
> 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.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XPaint
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).
Have you tried mypaint?
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).
Dead Comment
[“Deprecated” Apps] ...are not in active development and might be removed in future releases [1]
Its clearly not being actively developed, but there's no indication its going anywhere just yet.
[1] https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/help/4034825/features-th...
> 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.
Deleted Comment
https://vimeo.com/70748579 - The Pixel Painter
https://hallasko.com/
This is a super useful tool, but most often I paste into mspaint and mark up from there.
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.
But if you do have One Note, this is much easier than using Paint.
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.
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."
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.
Try Greenshot:
http://getgreenshot.org/
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:
https://i.imgur.com/tcpZjG0.png
Yeah, it was a bit of a mind-bender editing a screenshot of the screenshot editor with the screenshot editor...
that allows you to screenshot, draw, highlight, email, copy to clipboard, and you can snip a snip to crop.
if you have one note, one note has a snipping tool win+S to either copy to clipboard or copy to onenote.
> 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
I had zero problems manually switching my default browser in Windows 10 to Chrome.
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.)