http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FuKREmsiD9o
Apple had an almost identical drawing program in the early MacOS version:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MacPaint
There were tens of better drawing programs meanwhile, for example I remember being able to do animations as a 5 year old kid using the fantastic Fanta Vision program under MS DOS (pity the editing isn't shown in the video):
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mjj7Yf3JRvE http://www.old-games.com/download/5732/fanta-vision
Unfortunately the leading open source painting programs are remarkably uninspired, interfaces of Gimp and Inkscape are truly a mess, but then artists are hardly Linux users. On OSX there are a lot of great painting programs, for example:
This is not the only objective measure of UX.
BTW you replied to a comment that suggested looking at alternatives to Gimp...
The GIMP I use because I'm used to it, but I find the interface a little annoying.
Even if someone doesn't like Inkscape, the issue of Inkscape's interface is completely different from the issue of The Gimp's interface.
>http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MacPaint
Because Bill Gates wrote MacPaint. When Windows was in development, he likely wrote MSPaint, or at-least got a developer to make it similar.
The original MacPaint was developed by Bill Atkinson, a member of Apple's original Macintosh development team.
Deluxe Paint is still my favourite, but there's a long list of much better paint programs for the Amiga too, but the vast majority of people who have used MS Paint have never seen any of them.
Dan Silva (the creator of Deluxe Paint) worked at Xerox before he got to EA. While there designed an in house paint application for the Xerox Star based on inspiration from SuperPaint by Richard Shoup (at Xerox Parc). When Silva joined EA in 1983, he wrote a version of Doodle for MS DOS for in-house use at EA - this port was named Prism. Deluxe Paint started as an Amiga port of Prism.
(Source: The Future Was Here: The Commodore Amiga, Jimmy Maher, The MIT Ppess Platform Studies series)
So they have shared heritage, given that MacPaint too was largely inspired by work at Xerox, and it's possible Silva made adjustments to Prism/DPaint after MacPaint was released since its release predated the commercial release of DPaint, but the application was already in use before MacPaint was released, though only in-house at EA.
If you look at the SuperPaint UI you can see its influence on some other painting applications too - Koala Painter on the C64 for example has a separate tools page that looks very close to SuperPaint.
But they are fundamentally different in other ways too - DPaint was designed specifically as a tool for artists first, and turned into a product afterwards. You see the difference in the various painting tools and brush support etc. that means you can actually "paint" with DPaint in a way you most certainly can't with MacPaint. The workflow is very different - you can do great things with MacPaint (or MS Paint) too, but it is far more laborious because it's hard to do much freehand drawing with it.
For me, when I moved from the C64, where I'd used Koala Painter - similar in capabilities to MacPaint - to the Amiga and started using Deluxe Paint, I first started drawing the same way I'd done on the C64: Laboriously placing pixel by pixel, with the occasional line draw or flood fill. Freehand was easier than on the C64 thanks to a mouse instead of a joystick, but the tools were not a good fit for that other than for large surfaces. But then I started experimenting with DPaints tools, like smear and blend, and my drawing style changed and got much more fluid and relaxed and it actually carried over to paper as well.
Source: I used all of these programs at the time, and spoke with people at EA who were familiar with the development of Deluxe Paint and Studio/x.
There are some superficial UI similarities between MacPaint and DPaint in how they both switched from a big separate panel of tools to toolbars along the side, but that's pretty much the only similarities I can see between the two that were not already present in SuperPaint, and it's line with a general trend, and even there it's not all that obvious where DPaint draws most of its inspiration.
They differed substantially in that DPaint is geared towards making the entire screen available as a canvas, and most people I know who used DPaint spent most of the time with the UI hidden, only turning it on briefly to pick colours etc., or when using the split screen zoom (to date I hate the way most paint apps do zoom with a vengeance - DPaint had it right).
In many ways the UI of SuperPaint is closer to the UI of DPaint than MacPaint is. The windowed interface with multiple toolbars of MacPaint was totally foreign to Amiga paint apps that for years followed the Deluxe Paint model of putting tools firmly at the screen edges and making them easy to hide.
I don't see much influence from MacPaint that matters frankly, though I'm sure you're right there was some - MacPaint did after all make it out the door sooner and it'd be silly of them not to look at what was well received. But in the overall design, the influence from SuperPaint is plain - all the functionality shared between MacPaint and DPaint was there in Xerox' SuperPaint years before.
Other than their shared heritage with SuperPaint and superficial UI stuff, to me the two are fundamentally different - the "some innovations" is what makes DPaint interesting at all: MacPaint is not usable as a paint application; DPaint is. By the time DPaint came out, the market was flooded with MacPaint clones. But pretty much all of them lacked the paint tools that made DPaint exciting.
I'm not sure where Studio/x comes in - they post-date DPaint by several years as far as I can tell (wow - that's a hard product line to Google; I'd never heard of them before); the field was extremely crowded by then.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GrafX2 http://code.google.com/p/grafx2/
This splendid gentleman's work appears to be constructed from geometrical shapes plus some pixel level editing. His professional background would have required a very good eye and patience (my partner Ruth can remember pre-computer typography, layout and film-setting having trained as a graphic artist).
I suspect that his use case could be met using mtPaint, a free/libre painting program which allows pixel level editing without palette dithering &c. and which has the geometrical shape tool along with the ability to change what happens when you overlap the shapes. mtPaint can work with 8 bit palettes. Jason Rohrer uses mtPaint for his screens in the 8 bit games he produces [2]. I think the point of this gentleman's work is precisely its pixellated nature and use of primary-ish flat colours.
My takeaway from this thread on HN is that high quality work can come from very simple tools.
Others might have started off with tinkering with BASIC and whatnot but I think I'm fortunate enough that it turned out to be my gateway drug into computers anyways.
Layers, vectors. Give me break. MS Paint was more intuitive in the 90's than any software to date.
I don't really understand why anyone in their right mind would have anything positive to say about MS Paint except that it is ubiquitous, and they remember having fun with it when they were still a kid. It's really a pretty lousy program, more like what you expect from a code sample shipped with a compiler.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GEOS_%288-bit_operating_system%...
HN: Git is intuitive and Windows Paint is not straightforward.
KDE's kolourpaint is basically a clone with more features: http://kolourpaint.sourceforge.net/screenshots.html
Pinta has this layer idea more prominent, but it can still be used as simple as you want: http://pinta-project.com/
mtpaint has a lot more features than ms paint. The gui is unintuitive, but if you get used to it I'm sure it's just as easy: http://mtpaint.sourceforge.net/