If there is such a thing as a software hall of fame, MSPaint deserves to be in the inaugural class. Microsoft has written some real crap over the years, but MSPaint is no one of them. Its a shame that Microsoft seems to have left MSPaint behind after XP. I've tried all the open source MSPaint alternatives, and none of them even come close to being as good as MSPaint. Its like the "Super Mario Bros" of desktop software.
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):
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:
MsPaint only receives that kind of response from people because it was near universally available for a lot of people.
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.
Deluxe Paint single handedly got me into the animation industry! So great. I was 11 years old, pre-internet, never used a mouse before, and still could find my way around it easily. Animbrushes FTW!
If you like Deluxe Paint you might want to check out grafx2. It's a GPL licensed graphics program inspired by Deluxe Paint. I've been messing around with it a bit, and it's pretty cool. Would probably be useful for sprite art, or similar style art.
Deluxe Paint was an obvious extension of MacPaint for color work, but the ultimate version of it (written by the same people) was Studio/32 for the Mac (which also predates MSPaint). Let's not forget Photoshop and Fractal Painter predate MSPaint.
Deluxe Paint is not an extension/clone of MacPaint unlike most of the early paint applications of the era.
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.
The history is interesting, but the influence of MacPaint on DeluxePaint was absolutely plain. (DeluxePaint clearly had some innovations over MacPaint.) Again, Studio/32 (and Studio/8 and Studio/1) were the full-circle -- the best of everything. Indeed, I often wish Studio/32 had had greater influence than Photoshop, which had and has a far inferior UI.
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.
How exactly? Pretty much all of the functionality in MacPaint is in SuperPaint, which predated it by 6 years (I'm assuming you're not confusing them, but this is the Xerox SuperPaint, not the later Mac application of the same name).
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.
I have been using Gimp easily for 10 years now and Inkscape for at least 5, I know them decently well, and I appreciate they at all exist and the hard work that went into at all implementing the individual features. But the UX is terrible and this is objectively so, just sit a new computer user in front of Gimp and watch his agony when trying to use it. The open source "bazaar" model of software development in general isn't the best at coming up with good interfaces, you need a coherent vision of a single person with some authority for that.
Gimp yes, Inkscape no, everyone I sit in front of Inkscape loves it and it made me overcome my feeling of "I'm a programmer, I can't do art" thanks to it's great interface and smooth learning curve.
Some people say a UI must be judged by experienced users, because newbies don't understand it yet. Others say a UI must be judged by newbies, because experienced users get desensitized to UI problems over time. (For example, every programmer can use their own program easily, but that doesn't mean the UI is good.) I think I trust the newbies more, because I've seen many bad UIs that experienced users like, but I haven't seen many bad UIs that newbies like.
Ah, my mistake. I could have sworn I had read something about Bill Gates developing for MacPaint. I think it was to do with editing text that had been placed on an image.
When Windows 95 first came out, it came with a little tutorial booklet by Microsoft with some activities based on Paint, Wordpad &c to show off the desktop tools. I used that booklet to walk students through the new UI, and we always had a lot of fun with Paint, especially when the College obtained a colour printer. Oddly enough, I used the structure of that tutorial - the idea of a walk-through demonstrating features of a default install - when I knocked up a bit of a tutorial for Ubuntu Unity 2d[1]
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.
Growing up before I knew anything about computers I always asked my parents if I could play on the home PC, which really equated to MSPaint time.
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.
Back in 1995 when I was about 9 my parents paid a princely sum of Rs. 500 to enroll me for 4 classes of MSPaint spread out over 1 month at a local school that had secured two personal computers with color monitors back in India. So, I guess MSPaint was my gateway drug too :-)
[For comparison, I think a loaf of bread in India that time used to cost about Rs. 5.]
The original mspaint.exe has survived all these years by running hassle-free on Wine and on new editions of Windows. But I wouldn't say MS abandoned Paint: Win8's "Fresh Paint" is one of the coolest touch-based apps out there: http://blogs.technet.com/b/next/archive/2012/11/15/behind-th...
Nothing gives me more rage than opening "other" drawing software, selecting the "paint bucket", and clicking anywhere inside an enclosed shape and not seeing it fill with the color I selected.
Layers, vectors. Give me break. MS Paint was more intuitive in the 90's than any software to date.
You could argue MS Paint was about as intuitive as the geoPaint application in GEOS on the C64 [1], which has an almost identical feature set and user interface as MS Paint.
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.
"Every" 8-bit home computer had similar applications, and much earlier than GEOS too, though GEOS is a good counter-example because its windowed and so much more directly comparable.
Hear, hear! I'm not sure why it wasn't copied more widely. Hell, I'm using screenshots / PDFs of my Keynote presentations instead of heavy-weight vector graphics programs.
Paint.NET seems like it should come close to being as good as MSPaint and it was originally developed to be its (spiritual) successor by interns at Microsoft.
Fantastic app. Routinely a reference point for me when I am talking about excellent free software. Wish there was something nearly as good for OS X but almost everything on Mac is terrible and costs good money.
This is hilarious. Not only is MSPaint awful by today's standards, it was awful when it shipped. It was grossly inferior to paint software written for the Mac, Amiga, and DOS.
It does have the ribbon interface though, right? Sure, it's still mostly there- but what made the original so great was its straightforward interface. I find the ribbon interface takes that away.
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/
