Microsoft ctrl-Zs 'killing' Paint, by which we mean offering naff app through Windows Store Brushes bristled when Microsoft placed Paint on a list of deprecated features for the Windows 10 Fall Creators Update. Now Redmond is promising fans that Paint won't be splashed into the abyss – just moved elsewhere. A Microsoft spokesperson told The Register that "many of the MS Paint features people know and love" such as " …
Indeed, Paint is a very useful application.
Moving it to the App Store and even making it free was really the wrong decidion.
Thousands of 'corporate builds' lock down their systems so much that even getting an MS Application from the App Store would not be allowed for possibly millions of users.
Many places would have to 'certify' the application. Even getting a miracle out of god might be quicker than that process.
I can only hope that MS has learned a useful lesson here.
However, I get the feeling that this is just a temporary reprieve at best.
and then announce a few days later, it's available in their app store, all you have to do is create a Microsoft account.
This is a lame trick to get people to use Microsoft's rubbish app store, and it will backfire, they will go there** to get Paint, and discover how crap the store is....
**the dwindling consumers that care about Windows.
If MS bothered to give a damn about customer feedback, they never would have made the ribbon, the metro UI, or Win10.
This isn't listening to customer feedback, it's merely saying "Fine, you can have your old Paint, but we're putting it behind a software store we can eventually charge you (more) for, remove it ''for compatibility issues'', & generally fek with you over at our whim."
Read that MS reply again. "Many of the features" is not ALL of the features, so already the new has kicked the old into the gutter. "Available for free" is only *now*, it doesn't say if that will stay true in the future, so a bit of software that used to be free & included in the OS itself is now no longer the latter & not necessarily the former.
This may just be my synecism showing but MS has burned its customers so many times in the past that it should include a lifetime supply of aloe vera gell with each copy of Windows.
"Moving it to the App Store and even making it free was really the wrong decision."
I had ALREADY predicted they'd make it a UWP "app" (read: CRAPP).
So this comes as NO surprise, really. Predictable, certainly. And I bet it'll have ADS (at some point in the near future). Just wait.
The ribbon is mostly ok, but only because on Paint, there are almost no controls.
Plusses:
Zooming is better than it ever was on XP (even with the additional hidden zoom level)
Negatives:
Why the fark did they screw up colour selection? Left click for primary, right click for secondary - great right? Aparrently not.
Now you need to make sure that the colour you want to change is selected, then go to the palette, then click it, then go to the other colour selector, click that, then select the colour for that. urgh.
Not hard to find but frustrating to do.
"Both the UK government and M$ seem to operate ... Utterly clueless and totally out of touch with the people" ...
Ever since Billy Gates left control of M$, things have been going downhill. It takes a genius (like the many that M$ hired) to make software work. It takes an even smarter genius to make things work simply. Uncle Billy had that kind of smarter genius. the kind that's sometimes labeled, "Common Sense." Common sense ain't so common, after all.
@AC
Billy Gates - none other than the man himself done on Paint by Pat Hines
They didn't reverse their decision, this is a classic Microsoft PR stunt. The intent was to always make it a store app, but get the press coverage and outcry first, and then the Microsoft account signups to follow.
All this and Microsoft still cant work out why every loathes them, its bullshit like this. They need to sack their entire PR and marketing department and employ humans in their place, perhaps humans that don't treat every costumer like they are some brain-dead cretin.
Both the UK government and M$ seem to operate the same way. Utterly clueless and totally out of touch with the people.
I am pretty sure that Microsith is not the only software company that is guilty.
I am also pretty sure that it is not just the British Government that is out of touch with "the people" - whoever they are.
Any large company that follows, or is influenced by, US business practices and attitudes is primarily interested in the bottom line and screw the customers and actual people who do the work.
I think governmental failings come from that side of the pond too.
..but last build I looked at, it was either missing a huge amount of basic classic paint features, or did a bloody good job of hiding them. I'm reasonable technical, but with all the 3D Controls, doing some of the basic stuff like transparent cutting was either impossible or a ball-ache.
There's a lot to be said for paint Classic's "Keep It Simple, Stupid interface"
I'm not dissing on paint 3D: it's an amazing free built in app for doing rendering and 3D printing, but they're two different programs with two very different usage cases.
It's not that everyone loves paint, its that it is quick, familiar and is already installed. Even having it on the store is going to be a pain. My users aren't able to install from the store, but having a free and quick application that allows them to do basic image manipulation is very useful, I guess then it'll be added to the build...
I was seeing suggestions of Paint3D, GIMP or Paint.net or the 'free' Photoshop CS2 as alternatives. Which is fine but a very rough test had me open paint , resize an image and save it in less time that GIMP took to load. I guess the same would be true for paint.net and PS would be worse. And although I've not used it for more than 30 seconds I'm assuming Paint 3D is wildly more complicated than paint even for the same basic functions.
It's like getting rid of notepad because you've bundled Wordpad, their functions are comparable but notepad is lightening fast and does the minimal function that lots of people need with zero fuss.
like refusing to respect that some files may use '\n' for line endings and not '\r\n'?
like choking on UTF-8 files that don't have a BOM included?
Wordpad does handle the '\n' case, but is terribe in all other respects (but it is still fast).
I use neither and opt for notepad++ for text file editing - fast, and packed with actually useful features,
Yes, ok, I knew some nerds would pull me up on this! I chose to gloss over Notepad's shortcomings for the sake of brevity but I completely agree, however the point is that notepad is quick and easy for a lot of quick operations (much like paint is) but falls short on some areas (much like paint does).
You wouldn't want to have to use wordpad for your basic find/replace you don't want to have to use paint 3d for your basic image crop/resizing.
"It's not that everyone loves paint, its that it is quick, familiar and is already installed."
And while no one has mentioned it, I don't like that idea that MS can just remove whatever app they want with OS updates. You can deprecate it and not support it... just like all of those winXP apps that I still run, but remove it? Yes, we all acknowledge and EULA, but do we now have to start worrying what MS is going to take away with each OS update?
Tux Paint! The noises it makes crack me up every time.
I was in Edinburgh's sick kids hospital a while back and saw they had a (hopefully disconnected) Windows XP desktop running MS Paint to keep the kids amused. The temptation to install Tux Paint via a USB stick was very strong but so was the risk of my wife divorcing me on the spot.
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