Paint.net is now available on the Windows Store | Hacker News Reader

Paint.net is now available on the Windows Store

blog.getpaint.net

102 pointsNicoJuicy49 comments

Does anybody make money with the Windows Store?

I just went there and search for "paint.net" and the app wasn't in the results. The closest thing was the book Getting Started with Paint.NET.

It also returned Wild Gorilla Slots, and a bunch of fantasy games like Grim Legends 3: The Dark City.

Why do app stores have such a hard time with search?

From the link, near the top:

> (It may take a little bit of time before you can search for Paint.NET on the Windows Store. I’m told that things take up to 24 hours to “propagate.”)

Does Microsoft's database run on DNS?

I wonder if every machine stores the entire catalog, and periodically syncs.

I assume on limited connections, it will never sync, meaning if you use a latop tethered to your cell-phone, you will see the windows-appstore of 1984. (any old date would have done, but this one rhymed)

Even DNS only takes 5 mins tops

When you talk about DNS propagation you have to take cache into account. You could set TTL that low (even if you do, some will ignore it) but normally it's a lot longer so you often get times like 24-48 hours for complete propagation.

Sure. But even so, the search results are terrible. Gorrila slots?

Supporting this, for all the work the developer (Rick Brewster) has done over the years, $5.99/$8.99 is a really small price to pay.

I hear you, paint.Net is my go to app for editing since many years

But 30% goes to Microsoft. I think better option would be to donate directly to Paint.net project.

I'm with you. Been using paint.net on and off since my high school days, and now that I am a wage earning adult, I'll be making a donation today even if I no longer use it all that often, because of how much I've used it in the past.

Firstly, Paint.Net is an awesome program. Thank you.

I don't have a problem with the author wanting to charge for it as it is his software afterall, but I really wish more software vendors would follow Redhat's model of charging for the stable and supported version of their software, and giving away the bleeding edge 'Fedora' version for free.

As a techie, I love getting my hands on the new and most innovative stuff; I'm okay with breakage.

As an IT manager, I just want the stuff to work and be stable, with well planned upgrades.

I'm not sure where software authors got the idea that charging for their newest and buggiest features was a good idea. When I'm buying software, I am buying robustness and stability. I just want it work.

If redhat charges for stability, then won't they make the free stuff as little tested as possible.

I won't pay for redhat style software at all. It's based on locking people with fud.

RHEL is a subscription for their support, if you don't need it then run CentOS - it is as rock solid if not more.

If it's Rock solid, what support do I need? Besides if they are selling support, they are not selling the software as a product. Paint.net is a product and not some support subscription.

here you go: https://developers.redhat.com/blog/2016/03/31/no-cost-rhel-d...

Paint.NET via Windows Store has one major advantage: automatic updates. Besides it's still is a free software and it's not a subscription - as far I understood it's just one time payment. I wouldn't mind paying for that if I used Windows.

The bigger issue is 30% MS tax:

> And you can still send a donation if that’s your preferred way of providing financial support. This is actually more effective because Microsoft does take a 30% cut of every transaction that goes through their Store.

The release cadence for Fedora is much higher. It uses newer everything than the Redhat releases. Fedora is buggier.

>> I won't pay for redhat style software at all.

Will you pay for software? Or do you write and build all of your software yourself? If I ran my business on Centos, I would consider buying Redhat subscriptions once I got to a certain scale. Depending on your business, you might need to have vendor warrantied and supported software for compliance with your insurance and industry regulations, for example.

Open source and free software is all fine and well when you are tinkering with in your bedroom, or at a small startup, or indeed when doing proof of concept or small projects, but when your operations start to scale up and you are looking at resource allocation and want to make the best use of your own resources, having support contracts often makes loads of sense.

A friend of mine work in the Aerospace industry and they where running to some weird bugs with their Java application when they upgraded their Redhat servers. It ended up being some weird kernel thing and Redhat sorted it within a few days. It sure beat them hiring their own kernel dev.

I went to college with Rick. He's an awesome guy and deserves to be paid for his work on this. He's the only developer of it. Look at what photoshop costs. It's a tiny amount to pay for what you get.

Still lacking text outline, which is still available as a dll plugin.

Other than that, one the best software on earth. I have never used photoshop, and I don't need it.

My biggest issue, as a web developer, is my inability to handle PSDs. There is a Paint.NET plugin that does a semi-okay job, but it's not good _enough_.

Do you have a good plugin for working with PSDs, or are they not in your personal scope of necessity?

I don't know, I don't really use photoshop. If PSD is binary, I guess it would make things hard, but easier if it's text or xml.

It's a binary format which has 20 years of backward compatibility shims present to support 14 versions of PS. And it's huge and complex. No fun at all.

Reminds me of this PSD parsing code comment that isn't happy about the file format.

https://github.com/zepouet/Xee-xCode-4.5/blob/83394493f51991...

Yep, pretty much. I started on a parser long ago as a side project and... quickly decided there were better uses for my free time.

This is one of the few applications I'm missing badly since I switched to Mac.

Is there a decent free equivalent for Mac? I've tried Gimp, but many things are complicated, hidden or slow.

Patina isn’t free, but it’s only a few bucks and is a decent “Mac-first” paint program.

> The Store release of Paint.NET is not distributed free-of-charge. This allows many things to converge and solves a lot of problems, while still providing value for new and existing users (err, customers?).

So let me see if I've got this straight. I can go to the Windows Store to get Paint.NET, in which case I will have to pay USD$8.99 for it. Or I can go to getpaint.net to get Paint.NET for free, in which case I will expose myself to a barrage of misleading ads designed to get me to download malware (see https://jasonlefkowitz.net/2013/03/google-and-paint-net-need... -- I wrote that four years ago, but the ads are as bad today as they were then).

"Now you can pay us money to skip past the part where we try our hardest to screw up your computer!" is a real innovation in software marketing.

I'm of two minds. On the one hand I hate the practices that software companies engage in order to create income from software that is not sold to users. On the other hand, I hate the idea that $8.99 has become an outrageous price for a software company to charge.

And to be clear, there's no free lunch. Small open source projects often burn out developers when the software is not built as part of their job and big open source projects funded by corporation and built to serve that corporation's interests such as React or Kubernetes and aren't useful to ordinary users in the way that Paint.NET is.

>I wrote that four years ago, but the ads are as bad today as they were then

But to be fair (and mind you I am not particularly appreciative of Paint.Net nor of this new "procurement model", as the two things I have an allergy for are .Net and the Windows Store ;) ) a large part of the Internet has similar download pages (with deceiving ads), which is not an "excuse" or a "good thing" but surely it is something with which any internet user has by now learned to avoid or workaround.

I would put the blame also (and mainly) on those that allow such deceiving ads to be served to these (or similar) download pages (aka Google).

However I would instead underline how in this blog post there is no mention of/link to www.getpaint.net, while there is (as an example) a clear one in the first line of the blog post for the previous release:

https://blog.getpaint.net/2017/07/20/paint-net-4-0-17-is-now...

So - understandably - the Author attempts to push a little bit the "Windows Store" source, maybe - indirectly or at a subliminal level - hinting that "experts" can have it for free (because they can actually find the download page and link) while "n00bs" will better be paying the "entry ticket" and go to the Windows Store ...

Why would you hate. Net ? It's an awesome environment

>Why would you hate. Net ? It's an awesome environment

I don't hate it, I have a form of allergy to it, it is not the same thing.

I personally like small, portable, self-contained programs capable of running "everywhere" both in "installed" OSes and in reduced environments, such as a PE or RE, and .Net based programs are none of them (this is not specific to paint.net, that is an actual practical example of how "awesome" the environment is).

.net core apps are portable and can be self-contained, not sure if they match your definition of small though(what's PE/RE?)

> what's PE/RE?

Preinstallation Environment [1] and Recovery Environment [2], basically stripped-down "live" versions of Windows for deployment and repair purposes. They're frequently customized by PC vendors and corporate IT departments.

[1] https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-hardware/manufactur...

[2] https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-hardware/manufactur...

Maybe I can better explain myself.

A program like paint.net is a program that normally would be "installed" on a "fully installed" OS.

The fact that it uses the .Net subsystem is mostly "transparent" (to be picky it is transparent on recent OS's where the .Net subssystem is installed anyway, not so much on older systems where .Net is not installed or is installed by default in an earlier version that may not be compatible with the program at hand and needs an update).

For it and for any number of programs that only make sense on a full system this is not an issue at all.

The allergy I declared revolves about small tools that would be useful both in a fully installed system and in a reduced environment, such as a PE or RE (Pre-installation Environment or Recovery Environment) typically used in recovery or repairing scenarios, typically booting from removable media such as a USB stick or CD/DVD .

In these cases it is more complex (and anyway adds several tens of megabytes to the build, which implies also often slower booting) to have a working .Net environment suitable to run the given program/tool.

Because of tribalism. Your tribe won't accept you any longer if you stray too far. Some people also really enjoy feeling superior to others, so they do whatever they have to in order to appear as such.

These superior tribalists are usually the people who go around saying things like "I personally like small, portable, self-contained programs capable of running everywhere..." instead of things like "I like using the best tools for the given job so that I can better serve my users."

Or, you know, he or she has an allergy to it - didn't you hear that part?

Sure, I would be immediately kicked out of the tribe of do-more-with-less-bytes, had I not declared the superiority of small, self-contained tools.

Think of it as an opportunity to support the project, not as some sort of devious trick.

Google said they were going to go after those ads on AdSense with misleading "download" and "install" buttons.

https://consumerist.com/2016/02/05/google-hates-those-fake-d...

But right now, the misleading ad showing on getpaint.net is an ad for a Google product. Lol.

https://imgur.com/a/OdgpG

I don't think the Duo ad is confusing - it clearly shows that the install button will take you to somewhere to install Duo.

The misleading buttons are ads on download sites that just say "Install" and make the user think it's the button to download the item the user is looking at (in this case, Paint.NET).

I don't think that's clear at all; there's no border around the ad, so you've got quotes about how great Paint.NET is, some info about Google Duo, and then a big INSTALL button. It's not at all obvious that Duo and Paint.NET are unrelated, if you don't know what Duo is.

I have those ads blocked in the HOSTS file; that explains why I didn't see them. Nonetheless, when looking for where to download it, my eyes first went to the "Download" link at the top of the page.

From many years of browsing, I've learned that huge flashy "download" and "install" buttons are almost always to be ignored...

Or I can go to getpaint.net to get Paint.NET for free, in which case I will expose myself to a barrage of misleading ads designed to get me to download malware

Maybe I was already "primed" by your post or just from previous experience, but I visited that site and the first thing I saw was the "Download" link in the header, leading me to https://www.getpaint.net/download.html , and then https://www.dotpdn.com/downloads/pdn.html and finally to https://www.dotpdn.com/files/paint.net.4.0.18.install.zip which I believe is the actual file (didn't open nor run it.)

I didn't see any other ads, probably because I have an adblocker and JS off by default. I've seen far worse sites with this configuration, and even then I managed to get what I was looking for.

Note: as absurd as this may sound, I have never used Paint.NET but only heard of it, so this is the first time. So... how did I do? Did I find the right link, or was that the malware?

Try again with your adblocker off. Then consider whether you would advise your <insert non-techsavvy relative here> to attempt the same.

Without ads being blocked, you have to avoid two giant "Start Download" buttons: https://i.imgur.com/o4MXM4Z.png

Perhaps trivial for a "savvy" user to avoid, but people do end up clicking on them (e.g. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4cAfPWgiE7E)

It's too bad you're downvoted. Paint.NET's developer has been willing to infect people's computers with malware for years, and now he wants people to pay him. There are so many better options for image editing, like GIMP, Krita and so on. Why support these scummy practices?

I just can not see how the windows app store is a good thing.

Firstly, it adds a 30% surcharge to every application. Secondly, it is a walled garden, and everything is fine until microsoft decides they don't want your app there, or it conflicts with a product they want to sell.

I fully support the developer right to monetize his application but, I think once there is a large ecosystem of profitable applications on their store, I look for Microsoft to update their TOS, to require exclusive distribution rights on application. By then, it's lose your largest revenue stream, or lose your donation based customers.

I think most developers will stick with the store, and that's a shame.

What is this "Windows" "Store" you speak of? /s

Or... why would I help anyone who locks my options down as hard as Microsoft?

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