Microsoft ctrl-Zs 'killing' Paint, by which we mean offering naff app through Windows Store Brushes bristled when Microsoft placed Paint on a list of deprecated features for the Windows 10 Fall Creators Update. Now Redmond is promising fans that Paint won't be splashed into the abyss – just moved elsewhere. A Microsoft spokesperson told The Register that "many of the MS Paint features people know and love" such as " …
Indeed, Paint is a very useful application.
Moving it to the App Store and even making it free was really the wrong decidion.
Thousands of 'corporate builds' lock down their systems so much that even getting an MS Application from the App Store would not be allowed for possibly millions of users.
Many places would have to 'certify' the application. Even getting a miracle out of god might be quicker than that process.
I can only hope that MS has learned a useful lesson here.
However, I get the feeling that this is just a temporary reprieve at best.
and then announce a few days later, it's available in their app store, all you have to do is create a Microsoft account.
This is a lame trick to get people to use Microsoft's rubbish app store, and it will backfire, they will go there** to get Paint, and discover how crap the store is....
**the dwindling consumers that care about Windows.
If MS bothered to give a damn about customer feedback, they never would have made the ribbon, the metro UI, or Win10.
This isn't listening to customer feedback, it's merely saying "Fine, you can have your old Paint, but we're putting it behind a software store we can eventually charge you (more) for, remove it ''for compatibility issues'', & generally fek with you over at our whim."
Read that MS reply again. "Many of the features" is not ALL of the features, so already the new has kicked the old into the gutter. "Available for free" is only *now*, it doesn't say if that will stay true in the future, so a bit of software that used to be free & included in the OS itself is now no longer the latter & not necessarily the former.
This may just be my synecism showing but MS has burned its customers so many times in the past that it should include a lifetime supply of aloe vera gell with each copy of Windows.
"Moving it to the App Store and even making it free was really the wrong decision."
I had ALREADY predicted they'd make it a UWP "app" (read: CRAPP).
So this comes as NO surprise, really. Predictable, certainly. And I bet it'll have ADS (at some point in the near future). Just wait.
The ribbon is mostly ok, but only because on Paint, there are almost no controls.
Plusses:
Zooming is better than it ever was on XP (even with the additional hidden zoom level)
Negatives:
Why the fark did they screw up colour selection? Left click for primary, right click for secondary - great right? Aparrently not.
Now you need to make sure that the colour you want to change is selected, then go to the palette, then click it, then go to the other colour selector, click that, then select the colour for that. urgh.
Not hard to find but frustrating to do.
"Both the UK government and M$ seem to operate ... Utterly clueless and totally out of touch with the people" ...
Ever since Billy Gates left control of M$, things have been going downhill. It takes a genius (like the many that M$ hired) to make software work. It takes an even smarter genius to make things work simply. Uncle Billy had that kind of smarter genius. the kind that's sometimes labeled, "Common Sense." Common sense ain't so common, after all.
@AC
Billy Gates - none other than the man himself done on Paint by Pat Hines
They didn't reverse their decision, this is a classic Microsoft PR stunt. The intent was to always make it a store app, but get the press coverage and outcry first, and then the Microsoft account signups to follow.
All this and Microsoft still cant work out why every loathes them, its bullshit like this. They need to sack their entire PR and marketing department and employ humans in their place, perhaps humans that don't treat every costumer like they are some brain-dead cretin.
Both the UK government and M$ seem to operate the same way. Utterly clueless and totally out of touch with the people.
I am pretty sure that Microsith is not the only software company that is guilty.
I am also pretty sure that it is not just the British Government that is out of touch with "the people" - whoever they are.
Any large company that follows, or is influenced by, US business practices and attitudes is primarily interested in the bottom line and screw the customers and actual people who do the work.
I think governmental failings come from that side of the pond too.
..but last build I looked at, it was either missing a huge amount of basic classic paint features, or did a bloody good job of hiding them. I'm reasonable technical, but with all the 3D Controls, doing some of the basic stuff like transparent cutting was either impossible or a ball-ache.
There's a lot to be said for paint Classic's "Keep It Simple, Stupid interface"
I'm not dissing on paint 3D: it's an amazing free built in app for doing rendering and 3D printing, but they're two different programs with two very different usage cases.
It's not that everyone loves paint, its that it is quick, familiar and is already installed. Even having it on the store is going to be a pain. My users aren't able to install from the store, but having a free and quick application that allows them to do basic image manipulation is very useful, I guess then it'll be added to the build...
I was seeing suggestions of Paint3D, GIMP or Paint.net or the 'free' Photoshop CS2 as alternatives. Which is fine but a very rough test had me open paint , resize an image and save it in less time that GIMP took to load. I guess the same would be true for paint.net and PS would be worse. And although I've not used it for more than 30 seconds I'm assuming Paint 3D is wildly more complicated than paint even for the same basic functions.
It's like getting rid of notepad because you've bundled Wordpad, their functions are comparable but notepad is lightening fast and does the minimal function that lots of people need with zero fuss.
like refusing to respect that some files may use '\n' for line endings and not '\r\n'?
like choking on UTF-8 files that don't have a BOM included?
Wordpad does handle the '\n' case, but is terribe in all other respects (but it is still fast).
I use neither and opt for notepad++ for text file editing - fast, and packed with actually useful features,
Yes, ok, I knew some nerds would pull me up on this! I chose to gloss over Notepad's shortcomings for the sake of brevity but I completely agree, however the point is that notepad is quick and easy for a lot of quick operations (much like paint is) but falls short on some areas (much like paint does).
You wouldn't want to have to use wordpad for your basic find/replace you don't want to have to use paint 3d for your basic image crop/resizing.
"It's not that everyone loves paint, its that it is quick, familiar and is already installed."
And while no one has mentioned it, I don't like that idea that MS can just remove whatever app they want with OS updates. You can deprecate it and not support it... just like all of those winXP apps that I still run, but remove it? Yes, we all acknowledge and EULA, but do we now have to start worrying what MS is going to take away with each OS update?
Tux Paint! The noises it makes crack me up every time.
I was in Edinburgh's sick kids hospital a while back and saw they had a (hopefully disconnected) Windows XP desktop running MS Paint to keep the kids amused. The temptation to install Tux Paint via a USB stick was very strong but so was the risk of my wife divorcing me on the spot.
@Smed:"Paint, Solitaire, Minesweeper, etc... from XP all seem to work fine in recent builds of Windows 10."
Cheers, that's what I thought alright. Crisis averted.
@artem:"Legally, only if you own a license for Windows XP, otherwise no dice."
Yeah, of course. It goes without saying... :rolleyes:
"Creative neckbeard types these days prefer the full-on Adobe Creative Suite experience, even if they only use a tiny fraction of its features."
Oh God, O Montreal!
Reminds me of one of them complaining when asked to submit a document in .doc rather than .docx that he would lose the "upgraded" features of his document.
Which turned out to be a one page continuous text blob in 10 point sans.
I honestly don't understand why Apple doesn't include MacPaint with their OS anymore. It used to be the best app in the system.
Unfortunately MacPaint was written in 680x0 assembler and using APIs discontinued after System 7. It was never updated for PPC and System 8 to OS 9, and definitely can't run on OS X on either PPC or Intel.
MacPaint was written back when the boyz (and it was then almost all boyz) at Apple could write compact, documented, easily debugged, fast code which didn't use much RAM or disk. Those days are long gone.
Of all the things that come with Win10 that one might not want (I certainly don't), telemetry is right there at the top. How many people screamed at MS to drop that particular clusterfuck? Did MS listen? And there's your answer to if MS gives SFA about the customer feedback.
Yeah, beacuse they stripped the pbrush.exe executable and turned it into a loader for Paint after they got rid of Paintbrush. Still doesn't make them the same thing - and neither does using an alias link.
Only difference is Paintbrush was allowed to retire without being afflicted with a ribbon.
This is ridiculous.
Come and see C:\Windows\WinSxS which is filled with literally _gigabytes_ of libraries you'll never need (like localized versions of many core libraries even though you don't intend to install and use any language pack) while a lightning fast, super easy to use application which weighs less than 1 megabyte gets removed.
Microsoft has lost touch with reality.
> filled with literally _gigabytes_ of libraries
Wrong.
Many filenames for a few files thanks to hard links. The actual storage usage is much smaller than most tools will show.
Some day tools for getting the space taken up by files will be updated to support multiple directory entries referencing the same file ... maybe given Explorer has yet to handle this.
"Some day tools for getting the space taken up by files will be updated to support multiple directory entries referencing the same file"
yes, I too have built embedded Linux systems that use BUSYBOX...
(Micro-shaft is, once again, late to the party)
warning: technical content
busybox uses a single executable to offer most of the standard command line utilities like cat, ls, etc. as well as the shell itself (if I remember correctly). Symbolic links are used for all of the relevant commands, all of which point to the busybox executable.
Whenever Linux loads an application, the first argument in the list in 'argv' will be the application name. Busybox then checks to see if it was invoked using 'ls' or 'cat' or one of the other things its implementing, and jumps to the appropriate place in the program. This way it can exist in a much smaller form without shared libs and other things that actually slow things down considerably. You'll find busybox (or things like it) on wifi routers dating from the mid "noughties" (or is it 'nowties' ?), made by companies like Linksys and DLink. It may also be part of OpenWRT and other similar open source implementations, where it must smash down into a very tiny FLASH image that's extracted into a memory file system at boot time. So "being very tiny" is extremely important.
The best bitmap paint program for me still has to be Deluxe Paint III on the Amiga. Back when EA used to do software other than games.
I remember using it to edit some IFF's of the Flintstones cartoon I had grabbed from TV using my Vidi frame grabber on my A500+ when I was about 12 year old. Happy days.
This nostalgia is being driven by the fact that Microsoft have made their product infinitely worse.
Given a Toblerone with huge gaps in it, of course people long for a bygone era, but then you realise that actually Windows XP was annoying as hell, and that you don't even like Toblerone, and only bought it for something to do at the duty free.
Oof, the downvotes you've gotten.
But the truth is, the original XP received the same kind of hatred that Win10 does now.
It wasn't until SP3 that XP became something that was rather stable and usable, and a bit secure.
Then along came Vista, and it made XP look like perfection in comparison!
A brief bump up with Win7, then it all keeps going downhill at an ever accelerating pace.
"But the truth is, the original XP received the same kind of hatred that Win10 does now."
among a very small number of people, maybe. The Win-10-nic hate is MUCH bigger. Even 'Vista Hate" pales by comparison. Perhaps 'windows 8 hate' is on the same level, though...
[at least, from what I've seen - YMMV]
I like paint but what I really want brought back is proper size monster munches not this namby pandy rubbish they peddle these days.
Yes, it's off topic and yes Microsoft can't do anything about it but that doesn't not change the fact that I want proper monster munch.
Someone could in fact point out that maybe my hands have got bigger as I grew up but again I don't care, I also don't care if my memory is fuzzy and that maybe they were the same size all along.
This is the perfect solution, I personally don't use paint anymore so I like the option to not have it installed if I don't want. I've already made use of the option to remove Windows Media Player and Internet Explorer from Windows 10. It would be nice to see Microsoft unbundle more of the software that ships with Windows so we can remove it if we want.
I know a lot of people have been talking about Notepad too, which I also don't really use (NotePad++ FTW). But I think a basic text editor should be bundled with the OS because you occasionally need it to get yourself out of situations with corrupted config files. I suppose I'd be ok if it was a store package, as long as it was installed by default. Microsoft also needs to work on the store, I never have issues installing anything from Google Play on my phone, but the Windows Store is always having install issues and I barely ever use it.
P.S. I noticed a lot of people haven't noticed that Microsoft has already removed calc.exe, the current one is just a launcher for the WinRT calculator app. As such it doesn't work if you corrupt your WinRT subsystem, as are parts of the start menu.
It also wont work if your father has a MS acount on two machines, and has only updated his settings (for Creators Update) on one of them.
Other things that won't work incude, but are not limited to:
calendar
news
maps
skype
weather
...
So when he came home from an extended holiday, I had some fixing to do.
Annoyingly, with the calendar broken on one machine, it then also required a password reset before it would begin working again, and even then it is refusing to sync the updated calendar...
These things should be simple.
A Microsoft spokesperson told The Register that "many of of the MS Paint features people know and love" such as "photo editing and 2D creation" are in the free Paint3D, Paint's replacement.
What's Paint 3D? I mean, sure i can work out exactly what it is, but before now I hadn't heard of it at all...
The best thing about Paint and notepad is that they have been around since windows 1.x and they are available on every Windows computer.
When someone asks to support their windows computer in person or remotely you have two tools that work consistently. That most users can use or start these two apps.
Now Microsoft want to bury it in their itunes wannabee store.
Microsoft will finally have a must-have app in their app store,
*The best thing about Paint and Notepad is that Paint has been around since 1995, and Notepad has been around since Windows 1.
Fixed.
Paint != Paintbrush. And no, the executable/alias doesn't make them one and the same - it just launches Paint.
Neither do I wish to partake in any of Microsoft's products and services which require a Microsoft account e.g. Cortana, OneDrive, Outlook (Hotmail), Skype, Office 365.
And I sure do not want to download or purchase anything on the Windows Store. We still haven't forgotten how you had 'nickel-and-dime'd' the 'new and improved' Solitaire game when Windows 10 was released.
http://time.com/3977862/windows-10-solitaire/
All I need from Windows is:
1) The ability to run win32 applications (productivity, games, legacy) well.
2) The ability to get on the Internet, and browse the web with the non-Microsoft browser of my choice.
3) Compatibility with hardware old and new, with their drivers running well.
Anything other than the above three points is irrelevant.
Nice try but no thanks, Microsoft.
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