It's an Easter Jesus miracle: MS Paint back from the dead (ish) and in Windows 10 'for now' For anyone upset about the fate of doomed art application Microsoft Paint, bundled with Windows for as long as we can remember, here's something to set your mind at easel. The software has been given a reprieve, and will be included in the upcoming Windows 10 1903 release, aka the May 2019 upgrade due to officially roll out …
Paint 3D
When I fist saw it I was thinking "what the hell is this cr*p". I dont have a 3D monitor, or glasses, so why would Paint need to do anything in 3D?
I started thinking that this was some early 2000's idea that finally made its way out of limbo. Some "advanced" painting app that cant shake a stick at The Gimp but bigs itself up like all that software from Ulead that we used to morph photos with but ended up being ultimately useless.
Likewise it's certainly not nostalgia - resizing, converting to a different format, tidying up things (removing scan speckling, watermarks and other stuff if you just want to include part of an image or screenshot into something).
For those kind of quick and simple tweaking jobs Paint is the perfect tool. Use it on an almost daily basis along with the snapshot tool and screen grabbing and it's served superbly.
But then I guess in this day and age just actually being useful isn't enough if it's not whizzy and fancy, offering all sorts of showy crap on top that gets in the way and no-one actually wants or has a practical use for. But then I'm an engineer and I try not to fix stuff that isn't broken anyway...
On the button.
User: "I can't see any explanatory text on this screen!"
Me: Pull up screen, Alt-Prnt Scrn, paste into paint, draw big red circle round text user cannot see, save and mail.
User: "You never said result X would occur from action Y in the documentation."
Me; Pull up documentation, zoom to clause in debate, Alt-Prnt Scrn, paste into paint, draw big red circle around black and white "if you do Y then X will happen" paragraph, save and mail.
Job done.
simple and quick for doing some things
The screen capture tool we standardized on, Greenshot, allows users to capture the screen directly to MS Paint, allowing them to quickly highlight issues on a busy screen before passing them on to developers to debug.
Sure, other programs can do the same, but I'd rather not spend 45 seconds waiting for PhotoShop to load, just to draw a red circle on the icon/dialog I wanted highlighted when I can do the same in Paint in under a second.
Paint is far more useful than Paint 3D. No-one actually uses Paint to paint anything, it's a simple program that loads very quickly (Paint 3D does NOT) for basic tasks like cropping an image or changing file format. If I want an actual art program I'll use something like Gimp or Krita, not Paint 3D.
Deprecating Paint in favour of Paint 3D only creates problems where none existed.
Same here, although I do like the layering capabilities of Paint.net. I had to use that quite a bit last year to generate "clean" floorplans for a WiFi survey, but only had very noisy CAD drawings to work with. For that, Paint.net did a passable job. But for my normal graphics manipulation, I always fall back to MSPaint or Irfanview (it makes better JPGs than MSPaint does)
"No-one actually uses Paint to paint anything, it's a simple program that loads very quickly (Paint 3D does NOT)"
Totally agree.
It suggests that MS really have no clue as to how users use windows. Hey MS, we are NOT launching paint to make jerky mouse drawn doodles. We did that as kids, and kids may do that with Paint 3D to entertain themselves. As adults we use paint for different use cases and we chose it because it is small and light and loads the moment you need it.
Paint has been flat, sorry, 2D FLATTY McFLATFACE FLATSO, for longer than it's been skeuomorphic, eg, here's version 1. Looks flat to me bob.
You could almost say (although, perhaps not with an entirely straight face), that the Windows 10 UI is actually going back to it's 1.0 roots.
Windows 10 UI is actually going back to it's 1.0 roots
It crashes a whole lot less than Windows 1.0 did. Or Windows 3.1..
(Yes, I am old enough to remember both of those. And the problem of getting Windows to load while you had your netbeui, network card *and* token-ring drivers loaded..)
"We haven't tinkered with this for a while...let's "improve" it"
God that mentality is everywhere! The code works, everything works, it looks good and consistent between the past major versions. But we need to sell it more, to make more money. We cant easily add planned obsolescence to it all the time so lets just revamp the UI! Remove the long used functions, especially the really useful ones that only a small % of users actually use. Add support for Javascript in the file format, we'll worry about a sandbox later, much later.
Lets do it because we can. We can test it when we roll it out to the real users, bye bye in house testers (this happened to me). Its never finished, just like when Lucas had Star Wars. IT CAN NEVER FINISH, IT CAN NEVER BE STABLE AND MAINTAINED.
I remember a scifi story (I think it was a series of books) that were set on some huge starship. The crew were a generational one and maintained/improved the ship over many generations as needed. They had code going back hundreds of years, maintained and running. Unfortunately I cant remember whet the series or author was.
It's fine... except for right clicking on colours for the secondary colour.
Now you need to click on the secondary colour button, then the colour, then the primary again so do you don't forget later and change your secondary by accident...
IF the code that runs on W10 has ANY resemblance to the original code from "way back when". It might be a textbook case of how "backward compatibility" works in W10.
Personally, I suspect that some code might be from a galaxy far far away, I suspect not much. Of course, we will never know (*SIGH*)
It probably has been re-implemented several times. I mean The Windows 9x-Paint was already a lot different from normal Paint which was essentially identical to the Paint on MacOS. There has to be a reason why Windows 10 Paint is now over 6 Megabytes in size, larger than a small installation of Windows 3.1
As far as I know that option still needs testing, but if you want to kill a spider with a blowtorch, that's already been tested and documented.
https://www.theregister.co.uk/2018/10/26/california_home_fire_spiders_blowtorch/
I still use Paint and Notepad when I want to perform simple tasks.
For fancier imaging I'm happy with the free Paint.NET - dotPDN LLC.
For fancier text I'm happy with EmEditor.
For music, I'm happiest with Windows Media Player after having tries the others.
For copying/moving file I use the Microsoft RichCopy. It's old and could benefit from some improvements but behaves sensibly.
For the Windows 7 Games such as Freecell, they're available as Win7Games4Win10_8_81_v2.zip
All of this working well on the latest Windows 10.
half full 10 year old packet of pasta at the back of the kitchen cupboard
.. which is still probably quite edible (if it was dried pasta) unless it got damp or was attacked by mice/insects in the interim. After all, pasta was created in order to make a nice corn-based foodstuff that would keep for ages in the days before refrigeration..
Other dried foodstuffs are available.
'Bring back Solitaire and Minesweeper...'
Feh!, was never taken with them...the first couple of MS arcade releases (Arcade/Return of..) however followed me around for years and mysteriously appeared somewhere on the fileservers wherever I worked (I know, I know, me bad &etc)...in fact (checks the odds'n'sods directory on the NAS...) bugger (fires up Win7 on the Netbook for the first time this year...) excuse me while I go waste some time seriously investigating this here BZ.EXE file....
MS-Paint is actually a pretty nice tool for those times when you wish to carefully, as opposed to quickly, adjust the image pixel by pixel. Not merely 'airbrushing' areas in a semi-automated way, but carefully plucking out defective pixels and replacing them one by one. End result can be perfect.
Yes, I've also used Photoshop and many other advanced tools. MS-Paint is just another tool in the tool box.
I've got copies of Paint, Notepad, and Wordpad from Win2000 (or maybe Server2003) all squirreled away in zip files somewhere in my Gmail account. They all run fine on Windows 10, although the text area in Notepad doesn't get a frame around the edges in Win10. None of that newfangled ribbon foolishness for me.
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