Comment by soneca | Hacker News Reader

Comment by soneca | Hacker News Reader

Once I read somewhere that Paint.NET developer is the only in the interwebs than can make a living out only of donations for his software. I don't know if this is true, but it is totally deserved.

I use Paint.NET for a lot of things, most of them professionally. If I someday get lucky in this startup lottery thing, I intend to donate some thousands of dollars.

EDIT for add: I see a lot of comments talking about using Paint.NET for croping and resizing. I do so much more than this. I actually create all kinds of communication materials with it. Flyers, images for a landing page, business cards, etc. The layers feature is what make it of great value for me. Also the feature to open different images at the same time is great to create an image that includes a logo, a stock photo, a standard background.

Two things that are missing: be able to save it using CMYK color scheme (better for professional printing) and saving as PDF (easier to send it to graphic stores).

Sadly, this reminds me of the joke:

http://www.memecenter.com/fun/1114268/my-gift-to-winrar-if-i...

I wouldn't donate to winrar. The original author died years ago and the program hasn't made any advances since.

I think you're talking about Phil Katz the author of PKZIP and the creator of the zip format. AFAIK, Eugene Roshal, the author of WinRar is still alive and kicking.

It appears you are correct and Wikipedia cites confusion surrounding this issue. Donate away!

Maybe he makes money also with the 50 pages displaying ads you have to visit before to be able to download the file. But this does not detract from the qualities of the software, that I use daily.

What am I missing? I had three clicks, zero ads.

I clicked here: http://www.getpaint.net/download.html

Then I clicked here: http://www.dotpdn.com/downloads/pdn.html

Then here for the file: http://www.dotpdn.com/files/paint.net.4.0.install.zip

I use adblock, but when I fired up another browser, I still had three clicks, and the only ads were one typical square block ad, that didn't get in the way at all.

these are the ads:

https://www.dropbox.com/s/q9dzn78tfh2srnb/Screenshot%202014-...

It isn't really a bad thing. He's giving the software away for free. I'm never a fan of the ones that pretend to be the download link (the ad on the left linked to http://www.mac-zip.com/lp/freezip_osx/df?mnag=155060&mnct=45... god knows what kind of stuff you'd get if you downloaded/ran that...)

Interestingly, others seem to be seeing two ads. With Chrome I only get one ad square, the one on the left part of the page. The ad on the right never shows up.

Just use ninite.

Maybe. Myself I just used the "If you’re using Paint.NET v3.5.x, go to the Utilities menu and click on “Check for Updates.” path.

I would also like to have a confirmation from HN if the developer indeed make a living only out of Paint.NET.

The developer of Paint.NET works for Microsoft. Thus, he does not "make a living only out of Paint.NET."

Of course, that does not say whether or not he could live off Paint.NET if he wanted to.

thanks!

ninite.com may help with that.

You can also install from Chocolatey: https://chocolatey.org/packages/paint.net

cinst paint.net

Actually RGB is better for professional printing. Printers typically have specific colour profiles for their printers and converting your CMYK profile to their CMYK profile will usually result in differences you weren't expecting.

RGB -> CMYK (@ the printer) will be closer to what you expect (what you saw on screen).

I didn't know that, thanks!

I said that because I use an online printing service, and everytime I send a PDF they demand it is in CMYK. As they look very professional in everything else and the quality of the final product is great, I just assumed it was a best practice. Good to know.

Sorry, but this makes no sense. You have the same issues with portably reproducing colours with RGB that you have with CMYK. Either way, unless you're working with calibrated hardware and explicit colour management, you don't have much chance of getting a printer to reliably reproduce what you saw on your screen; sometimes it simply isn't possible, because your RGB and CYMK representations aren't going to support exactly the same gamut.

Well yes you'll always have the Additive vs subtractive colour problem.

But I don't understand how RGB has problems reproducing colours... webpages seem to do fine, and that's all they do?

I'm pretty sure the Dwarf Fortress guys also survive purely on donations.

So does joeyh with git-annex. I am sure there are many others.

Survive is the right word, they receive about $4k per month between two of them.

What about the Gimp? It can do all Paint.Net does, plus more, also save to PDF and they where adding CMYK support last time I checked.

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