Paint on Windows is getting layers and transparency support
blogs.windows.com
blogs.windows.com
MIT license.
Telling /users/ who are NOT community members to make changes to some corporation's application that happens to have source available, in their free time, and then donate that labor to some billion dollar corporation? fuck THAT.
Fix it your own damn self, Microsoft. I have better shit to do.
it only counts if it has "libre" in the name? MIT-licensed isn't good enough? WTF
if you're complaining without a plan of action to address the complaint, you are speaking for attention alone.
fork it and fix it, then use that version. open your fork so you can help others.
you other commenters can continue to complain and whine endlessly or you can put your money where your mouth is and actually do something.
what's it gonna be?
You should never be working for a for-profit organization without compensation.
There's a somewhat decent argument to be made for non-profit organizations, but there's none for for-profit orgs like Microsoft.
you open source people, man. you give all developers a horrible reputation. put up or shut up, lol
I have no idea what you want to express with your second paragraph, though.
I have to say I'm disappointed seeing you defend exploitative labor practices.
* Patching the binary locally without its source code to do what I want it to do
* Submitting a patch upstream to an open source project
and arriving at the conclusion that the latter is preferable.
Doing free work for an employer is always parasitic with regards to its employees.
You have a third option here which you didn't list, which is forking the project into one which is working in favor of the public; removing the CLA and giving each contributor shared ownership of the project. Your contribution should then be made to that project.
do I have to tell everyone what the MIT license allows?
And yes, Notepad and Calculator take much longer to start now than they ever did - not sure if it's SmartScreen, a Store Update check, or if SEND_DIAGNOSTICS is enabled on production builds, but I bet it's some Program Manager making some idiotic decision because some useless KPI requires it.
(I guess one could argue that programmer mode should include IEEE-754 floats, but I'm fine with that mode being limited to integers, it's plenty useful already. But it does require switching to another mode if you need a calculator to calculate floating point numbers)
This is reasonable, but what is incredibly annoying is that when you type in a number while in Programmer mode, if you then change to Scientific mode, it blows away the number you typed in.
Of course that doesn't mean it should have been loading so inefficiently regardless.
Am I supposed to play a multiplayer game when it takes 10 minutes to open and another 5 in queue and then few before it starts?
Blizzard launcher downloads 137 MB to launch some games EVERY time. In fact some game did not even start, probably due to mismatch of version on the patch server and game server. Nobody in Blizzard seems to notice nor care at all. The whole management board should be fired.
I remember paying 10 dollars for starcraft remastered and it plain didnt work, because blizzard doesnt bother to fix their battle.net app (all they did was try to rename it to blizzard app). Now statcraft bw works, but it didnt for few weeks.
You finish your work, want to start the game and it cant even start fast.
It still feels like they just break UX to support touch devices better than older UI would. I might just be showing my age, or out of touch, or perhaps because I only use Windows for work but I have no intention of ever using touch on a device running Windows. My laptop screen support touch and I turn it off as it's and unexpected behavior to me (if I touch my screen I'm probably just pointing at something/showing to another person).
Touchscreen-first design does this to apps ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Technically incorrect, I don't ;)
What's bad about it? For me it always does the job whenever I fire it up. Looks sleek, clean, scales nicely to whatever size you make it, and isn't distracting.
In Programmer mode if you type in a number larger than 32 bits and the window is scaled to its smallest size, the lower row of binary is cut off a little bit.
TBH date calculator is my most used feature there.
But calculator app in macOS... Real horror.
Try to open units converter from top app menus.
One day your boss comes: your calculator is obsolete, you need to use the one on the wall with every number being 25 x 25 cm (10 x 10 in). Good luck
Also, the new calculator kept the same standard layout as before, it's not like they now shuffled the numbers and buttons aground randomly to confuse you. If you're that easily confused by a coat of paint, maybe you're in the wrong job.
And yes, workers did have to switch calculators from time to time. Source: my mom, an accountant.
I get it, "Microsoft bad, Windows bad", but your argument is a very weak nothingburger.
What I do on any Win11 machine is keep an archived copy of Windows 10's System32 folder, and pin the old copies of apps to my start menu.
...From my cold dead hands!
Windows really needs a simple default hotkey to do a partial screen capture quickly, and save it to a reasonable directory.
shell.azure.com
> 2. trenchant wit, irony, or sarcasm used to expose and discredit vice or folly
like solitaire
Seriously, is your post satire or you think 23 mb for a calculator app is good?
Whole windows 95 (including a calculator app) fit in 16MB of RAM. In fact even less, since you could run few programs on top of it too. Connect to internet even..
23MB for a modern calculator in this day & age when many apps are written in Electron/EdgeHTML/web technologies is pretty good
Do people even use uTorrent anymore after the advertisements were brought in? I use qBittorrent when I need some Linux ISOs and in an idle state it's using 20MB which isn't bad either.
The ancient version of utorrent (before ads) works fine.
Am I really the only person who has a copy of "calc.exe" from win 2000 that replaces c:\windows\calc.exe immediately after any windows [re]install?
My work only currently only give machines with 16GB RAM which gets eaten up by Edge/Teams/Outlook, security applications incl. Defender and then any dev tools on top of that. Trying to campaign for 32GB machines but bureaucracy takes its time in the public sector. The IT team have also just removed Paint 3D for some reason via InTune.
Just opened Paint right now on my Windows 10 desktop and it's using 13MB of RAM for a blank canvas.
For pasting a screenshot and putting some rectangles/arrows on it, it works a charm.
Something to be said about Paint!
The number of times it crashes vs snipping tool, its like night and day.
yet i keep coming back for monosnap.... it made my snippets look somewhat professional (gone handwritten arrows lol)
[0] it takes somewhere between half to a second, there is a visible delay between double click and the window appearing but i can live with that. I'm not using KDE as my DE, it is possible it'd start instantly if i already had the KDE libs in memory.
(Sidenote: Shoutout for Pixelmator Pro, the Mac app that similarly has more than enough for me, and has allowed me to stop needing Photoshop. I've never bought an Adobe product outside of work, and now I don't use any either.)
Use pencil tool set to size 1px. Pencil does no blurring; paintbrush does.
But then, that would probably get paint.net on a downward spiral, so maybe it's for the best?
Code is still available, not sure worth building though in 2023 when there are other options
If FOSS then Pinta [0] is the best option imo. GIMP is not bad either but feels very janky and all over the place sometimes (lacking some elementary features while overblown in other departments)
Krita [1] is the other one I'd recommend though it's a digital painting app, not a image editing one. But you can do edit images with it
It’s a great tool.
If anyone is heavy into pixel art, you may also be interested in Aseprite[2].
I think it would have been kind of cool if they kept a small team dedicated to making Paint gradually better, getting it into parity with something like Paint.NET or something like that.
I feel like there was a lot of low hanging fruit that they could have added that left the interface largely untouched; they could also have had a "basic" and "advanced" layout, where the "basic" keeps things more or less how they were in Windows 95, and advanced is for integrating new features.
Years ago I re-released an old and honored tool. A strange path.
It was the simple code editor used on an early office computer. The programmers all used it daily.
First, the source was gone. The team that made it, the last remaining member that remembered it, said "It was just a checkpointed version of our general document editor. We've continued development and have a hundred more features now."
Moving to the document editor wouldn't do. Can't have programmers confused by formatting and mail-merge features on a C source file.
So I took the current Document Designer source, ripped out everything formatting-related, kept some useful multi-document features. Added some special programmer-specific features (paste-to-anchor point etc for fast prototyping). Got something not too much larger than the old Editor, and much much smaller than the latest document tool.
And...hardly anybody used it. Even a little change from ol faithful was too much for most of the teams. No surprise; their job was writing code, not relearning tools to write code.
Anyway I had my own personal useful tool after that. Even if I was the only one that knew how to use it.
Hint: it does not mean "things I disagree with or don't understand"
https://www.tenforums.com/tutorials/109878-search-bing-notep...
Sadly pain is always up to date :(
(no, I didn't move to paint.net. LodePaint, Wally and pure old PS (before CS))
There's a component in WPF called InkCanvas, it pretty much is Paint.
You realise this is basically an HN meme?
No, not really. It’s a simple program and Microsoft would literally just need to glue together their own existing components.
I did it for a job interview project in 4 days using C# and WPF. And I am by no means a talented developer.
I could see when people think creating something like Uber in a day as an arrogant HN meme. But there’s no moving parts here.
What’s even funnier is thinking that MS buying a mediocre old paint editor is a good business move. Paint.Net is practically an undergrad’s project.
It would start off as being a week, maybe two or three as the developer runs into a few tricky corner cases. Then it would sit in a backlog for a few weeks until QA sees it. Then a few days later you would get it back with a bunch of issues, some of which are legitimate bugs, others that are differences in what each side thinks the requirements should be. This would in turn get passed to various stakeholders who would garden shed their vision for an all in one paint program, that would lead to a large meeting between developers, sales, product management, and many others. Eventually executive would step in with a specific vision with no obvious involvement from everyone else, and then the actual development would begin.
As one of my co-workers says, "It will be ready two weeks after the requirements stop changing."
I'm not even being sarcastic. I've seen this same pattern on at least a dozen new products I've helped develop. This is when things go reasonably well. When this don't go well, this horrible cycle repeats for years until either some eldritch horror is released, or the entire project gets shutdown.
It takes more than 30 seconds to open a file, it takes more than 5 minutes to make a trivial one one change, it takes more than a day to test and push that one line change, and it takes a week before that change is verified and merged. An entire application - regardless of how specific the requirements and how well understood the implementation - will takes weeks to months to get to the point where it can be released to the public.
(modern paint seems fine, and it does launch quickly, but the vibes are off)
That said, I'm grateful that Paint.NET has managed to remain independent, as MS might've ruined it.
I do wonder who still uses MS Paint that would find these new features compelling, and why MS keeps adding new features to it. Surely they've done some research that shows people want this? Or is it still developed to justify paying the team that maintains it?
If we were talking acquisitions, they should also buy up the Notepad++ guy.
Not sure where the infringement would be. In any case, Paint.NET won second place last year in the "Creativity – Graphics and 3D" category of the Microsoft Store App Awards. [0]
[0] https://blogs.windows.com/windowsdeveloper/2022/05/27/announ...
It would be a logical next step at some point to integrate AI image generation as well, using OpenAI Dall-E.