MS Paint is my favourite Microsoft program ever. Even on GNU/Linux I can't do without it (just using Wine).
The SHIFT + [drag] feature of MS Paint (kind of like on-the-fly brushes with transparency) is the killer feature I haven't seen in any other program.
Exactly that feature on p19! And what a nice manual. Those B/W pixel patterns are so pretty.
I wish there was a way to run those old programs. I once managed to get KidPix in B/W to run on an emulator but somehow it stopped working. I always felt that MSPaint was to pixels what Vi is to text. (Photoshop/Paint.NET/Gimp are more like Word)
Why has noone made clones of those old paint programs? (Maybe I ought to stop whining, and just do it myself. That manual is a great reference, though.)
Mini vMac is an excellent emulator for the Mac Plus. I have quite a collection of old mac software that I backed up from my original floppies, and I'm glad I did. Who knows how much longer those would have survived before they all had errors.
Check out mac garden if you are interested in old mac stuff, it's great.
If you ever make a clone of an old paint program (maybe in a web browser? should be possible nowadays) let me know :-)
I might go as far as saying that MS Paint for Windows Vista is the my favorite program period. It had every feature I could want (excluding transparency) and nothing else. The interface was quick and intuitive. I think it was pretty much perfect
MSPaint does actually have transparency (at least the XP version has)! The "secondary color" desides which color is to be transparent, if you move stuff and have transparency enabled (in the "selection" options).
So it's even sort of possible to emulate layers by having multiple MSPaints open.
I don't know about that particular feature, but after looking around I found that Kolourpaint (4?) has essentially the functionality of MS Paint, with better usability and without its annoying bugs.
It's kind of a Debian/Ubuntu issue, but it is kind of heavy having to install 150 MBs of desktop environment (with database server, wtf?!) to use a paint program. Kind of difficult to compile from scratch too ( the ./configure file seems to be missing in their SVN repo). But looks really cool on the video :-)
I recently switched from Windows to Mac for my main work computer. Paint.NET is the program I miss the most on a day-to-day basis. Does anyone have a recommendation for a similar program for common uses like e.g. screengrab a web page then put a 50% transparency yellow highlight on a portion I want to call out? I'm happy to pay, but know next to nothing about the Mac ecosystem.
Before anyone runs off and grabs Pixelmator, see if Preview.app can do what you need. If you just need to highlight something in an image or add a note, it can do that.
If you need more, grab Pixelmator. It's an excellent program for basic image manipulation and drawing. If you need professional level tools, grab Paint Tool SAI, Photoshop, or GIMP as you need. Pixelmator will not be a good replacement for this programs.
The built in picture viewer (Preview.app) can do this:
* Click the pen in a box button next to the search bar. A new toolbar will appear.
* Click the rectangle button between the wand and the oval. Three new buttons will appear. If you mouse over them you can see what they do.
* Draw a rectangle around the area you want to highlight.
* Click the fill color button (it's right next to the border line thickness button)
* Choose "Show Colors..." from the color menu that pops down.
* Select any color and any opacity of that color to fill the rectangle
Here's a of keyboard shortcuts for taking screenshots: http://support.apple.com/kb/ph11229 These shortcuts will put the images on the desktop.
I prefer to use a little tool call SnapNDrag to do screenshots. It's $10 on the app store: https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/snapndrag-pro/id430397512?mt... It's a simple app on top of the operating system's existing functionality. It's just a fancier version of the built in Grab.app.
(Also, if you haven't looked into Alfred or Quicksilver for app launching, I recommend it.)
You can try running VMWare Fusion, Parallels, or VirtualBox to run Windows and therefore Paint.NET :) I personally use Fusion and it's been great for purposes such as this.
Honestly, I'd recommend Photoshop. It's just as fast to do that with Photoshop as any less-full-featured application, and there's the advantage of a) a whole lot more functionality beyond that and b) tutorials for anything you could ever want to do with it available on the Web.
Of course, it's not cheap, but I suspect you're more interested in the best rather than the cheapest tool.
Great program. Absolutely terrible website. Where's the download link? I can't find it amidst the giant "download this crapware!" graphics all over the place.
It's quite obvious, the site is all static content so even if you can't tell the ads from the contents by their visual appearance, just press F5. It also quite literally says "download" right at the top:
On the second page, scroll down if you don't see the buttons. Notice that the advertisement has an AdChoices button (and it also changes on reload). Also, the instructions are right there underneath the ad:
On the final download page, there are obvious signs to tell where you should click. The download button is surrounded by a huge click target in a box that features an AdChoices button and if you look closely you'll see it quite literally says "Advertisement" (FFS). Most importantly, the page tells you to click the link labelled "Free Download Now" to the right, where the ad sits below.
I wouldn't say it is obvious. The ads you got when you took your screenshots weren't the most confusing that show up. Here is what I got on the site: http://imgur.com/a/WvFd6
First impression for me of the page is that the content is on the left, and the ads are on the right. That's because the part I have circled in red looks like Google-style text ads. My mental ad blocker filters them out.
The download button I have circled in yellow then sets off alarms. It's in what I have decided is an ad column, and the color reminds me a bit of the deceptive download ads CNET's download.com likes to use on their site to trick people into downloading the wrong thing.
I return to the left column, which I have identified as the content column. The download button there, which I have circled in green, is in a place where a download button would not be unexpected. This is the one I will probably click, unless the small, greyed out, notice that it is an add for "Free Zip" somehow catches my attention.
If instead of trying to download from the front page, I click the download link at the top, we get to the second page. What I'd do there depends on how tall my browser window is. If it is tall enough to show the real download section at the bottom, my attention would be drawn to that, because it looks enough like download sections at other places (because of the layout, and because it lists versions, sizes, and mirrors).
However, if that ends up not visible, then I'd probably click the ad I have circled in green. This ad fits right into the flow of the content and is a place where a download link for paint.net would make sense.
I think pages can be classified into "consumption" pages and "activity" pages. A consumption page is a page where the reader is there to consume the content of the page. For example, a product page at an online store would be a consumption page. The reader is there to read the information about the product. The front page of the paint.net site is a consumption page.
An activity page is a page where you are there to perform some activity. At an online store, the checkout page would be an activity page. At the paint.net site, the download page would be an activity page.
Third party ads on consumption pages can be fine. People on consumption pages are often just looking, and ads give a chance to get some money from such visits. When people get to activity pages, they have usually gone beyond the just looking stage. You've got them on the hook, and now you want to reel them in. There should be no outside temptations or distractions put up at that point.
Sites like this need to be called-out and shitlisted.
They have no regard for whether computers get infected. It's even worse when it's a site for supposedly "legitimate" software (or any download) allowing huge green [DOWNLOAD] buttons and deceptive ads. These links almost always lead to spyware/malware traps. We all know it. Many of us wonder about how many people it hurts. It's obvious to most of us to decipher what is/isn't a correct file. However, it isn't obvious to a general audience. And that's a very serious problem for anyone who actually cares about other people.
It's also a reason I leave adblocking off for general browsing. I like to see which sites are careless. Regarding Paint.NET itself, it's one of the closed-source programs I use sometimes while on Windows. Sure, it's a good step above MS Paint. (Maybe one of these days it'll have basic effects brushes too.) Yet any credit I would've given to their effort goes right out the window with a shameful site. But that's a calculation for revenue they're making: one they'll have to live with.
or use the following command line for expedited service:
>> cat complaint.txt >> /dev/null
As an advertiser, you have very limited options for controlling the ads. If you try to manage them one by one, you'll be playing whackamole for forever. Probably the most effective method is disallowing all ads for software on your pages (via the Ad Review Center interface, handy picture available here: http://www.seobook.com/images/google-get-rich-quick.png), but if you're a software company, that a) denies legitimate advertisers the ability to put ads on your page and b) will result in you making very, very little revenue.
If getpaint.net wants to maintain a site with deceptive ads, that's their explicit decision. I couldn't care less about their limited choices. Excuses like that are worth a null device. It's not up to anyone else to figure out for them how they should create an honest/ethical source of revenue. Likewise, complaining to Google is nearly a dead-end. The only decent solution is calling 'em out. Express disappointment and recommend against them. Maybe they'll care. Maybe they won't.
Yep. I blogged about the Sick, Sad State of Windows Apps [1] and gave the Paint.NET website as an example of a terrible experience downloading and installing apps.
This is why browsers show you the link target in the status when you hover a link. It reads "googleads..." when you hover it, so those who still think it's legitimate when they see that deserve to get pwned.
Paint.NET is, by the way, the only donationware which I'm aware of which makes the founder(s) a full-time income. Well-earned, too -- I've found it indispensable over the years.
What "fuzz" is this referring to? I have for a long time preferred GIMP to paint.net for its portability and versatility, but neither of these compete with MSPaint in any way-- they fill a completely different role.
Agree. Simple tasks I use MS Paint for are more complicated in Paint dot net. Plus it has annoying floating windows that I'm forever dragging out of the way then trying to find again when they get lost. Why do so many paint programs have this inconvenience? Just dock them like Visual Studio.
GIMP is great for editing photos, but a poor choice for creating bitmap (non vector) graphics. It's a big hassle even just to draw a straight line in GIMP. MS Paint is the reverse - easy for graphics, ill-suited for photos.
As I noted elsewhere on this page, Kolourpaint4 is the Linux equivalent of MS Paint. There are others which aim for the same niche, one called (MTPaint? or similar?) for example, but I found them harder to use.
> GIMP is great for editing photos, but a poor choice for creating bitmap (non vector) graphics. It's a big hassle even just to draw a straight line in GIMP. MS Paint is the reverse - easy for graphics, ill-suited for photos.
What? Photos are bitmap graphics and Gimp has nothing to do with vector graphics. You're really confusing a lot.
To draw a straight line in Gimp you just hold shift.
GIMP is not for creating Vector graphics, though you can have vector elements through bezier curves. Inkscape, however is created for this exact purpose.
I think MS Paint was just the standard shitty software that everyone was comfortable and used when they were kids or whenever. Also the fact that it wasn't updated until Windows Vista says something.
Well coz its readily available unlike Paint(.)Net and its simple and quick like notepad.
Actually the lack of features is what most people love the most about ms paint.
It's a shame Paint.NET is no longer open source. I tried out Pinta on GNU/Linux, but it's very buggy and not quite as nice. I just use Gimp these days.
Try http://pixlr.com - they got both express version for simple tasks, and full photo editor with rich features. For my needs it's better as PS - load faster, dont crash, and I can work with it everywhere.
While their website is an anti-pattern, I do have to applaud one pattern that paint.net was early (if not first) to adopt: Asking you about updates when you exit the program rather than when you first open it.
Contrast this with Notepad++. Every single time I open that app -- which I only do when I have pressing, immediate work to do -- it imperiously demands that it and its plugins be updated for various trivial, if not irrelevant things. I'm sure there is an option I can find someone in the hierarchies of options, but as a default interface behavior that is atrocious.
The only time you should interrupt work -- and app start is a primary indicator that work is afoot -- is if it's a critical security update. Otherwise do something less obnoxious.
http://pradiiphira.hubpages.com/hub/Microsoft-Paint-Features...