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Comment by president | Hacker News Reader

One of the most nostalgic things about Windows was messing about with MS Paint to kill time in the days when the internet didn't exist yet. I wish OS X had some kind of native paint program. Seems like such a basic thing, why not include it with the OS?

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The irony is that MacOS used to come with a really good paint app up until system 7 or so:

https://www.computerhistory.org/atchm/macpaint-and-quickdraw...

The closest 3rd party app I've found to ms paint is Paintbrush, but that's a bit too primitive compared to paint and it doesn't work that well with retina screens.

What horrifies me is that the iPad still doesn't have a basic Calculator built-in, while the iPhone does.

PS - I'm familiar with the Spotlight Search trick (and asking Siri) but that is pretty limited.

I know this isn't what you're looking for, but if your desperate you can use Siri as a calculator.

I wouldn’t consider using Spotlight as a calculator a ‘trick’. It’s a very powerful way to write out complex expressions.

But yet still not a calculator.

Siri needs an Internet connection to do anything.

I remember drawing ovals, circles and then using the fill feature to put colors in there. That were some fancy colorful circles back then :)

osx has a perfectly useable markup tool, the one that pops-up when you print-screen. Weirdly enough, I don't know how to launch that with a blank canvas.

Interesting. I may figure out a way easily to get a full screen of white (full-screen in a browser on a blank HTML page?) to hackily print screen to use that as MacOS "paint", heh.

Those are the same markup tools found in Preview.

If you open an image or PDF in preview, just go to View -> Show Markup Toolbar

Or you can choose tools right from the Annotate menu.

Seashore (a severely gimped GIMP) is a decent simple editor for OSX.

https://github.com/robaho/seashore

You can do it from Preview. You can even CMD c a video frame in QuickTime and in Preview select File>new from clipboard.

Preview.app has all this. Just go View->Show Markup Toolbar.

But the Internet has existed for over 20 years. Wouldn’t it be better to encourage the use of open source where a community can develop and the app will get much better?

Krita, for example, seems popular: https://krita.org/en/

Krita is a simulated canvas and doesn't cover the tiny scope that Paint does. It has the same problem as Paint 3D: too complex.

My point is that including "barely good enough" by default hinders the development of other open source apps for the platform.

I know nothing about Krita other than its existence. I imagine there are other options.

Paint.NET is probably the best option, but Microsoft would probably have to fork it as the UI has novelties (floating panels and so forth, which non-technical users might struggle with). The hard thing about Paint is that it fills a similar niche to Notepad or Nano.

> hinders the development of other open source apps for the platform.

Filling the same niche as Paint is hardly improving the world. As soon as your Paint clone does anything innovative it fails to fall inside the constraints of Paint.

As a simpler example, any Notepad clone that added, say, tabs would instantly fail to be a Notepad replacement. I'd seriously question how much value OSS competition (consisting of a native textbox and menu bar) is adding to the world. Edit: Just because OSS can compete doesn't mean it should.

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