Paint.NET: The Anti-GIMP? 864
Arno contributes a link to Paint.NET, a free-of-charge raster-graphics program for Windows XP machines. "Quote: 'Paint.NET is image and photo manipulation software designed to be used on computers that run Windows XP. Paint.NET is jointly developed at Washington State University with additional help from Microsoft, and is meant to be a free replacement for the MS Paint software that comes with all Windows operating systems. The programming language used to create Paint.NET is C#, with GDI+ extensions.' It really seems like a nice tool. I definitely prefer its UI to GIMP's."
Mirror (Score:5, Informative)
Server meltin (Score:2, Informative)
good job /. (Score:5, Informative)
dev, with mirror link: http://blogs.msdn.com/rickbrew/
google cache (Score:5, Informative)
Coral Cache file: (Score:5, Informative)
Looks like it's Open Source. Cool. (Score:5, Informative)
wow this is SLOW (Score:5, Informative)
i am running a 3.0+ ghz and 2GB ram dell and the graphics painting sucks
they may want to work on speed a bit if they want to be taken seriously
Windows XP Only? (Score:3, Informative)
The author mentions twice that it runs only with Windows XP. It runs with Windows 2000, and presumably with any version of Windows that has the
Now I wonder, does it run with Mono?
Not Anti-gimp (Score:5, Informative)
It has layers, and an effects API, but that seems to be where the similarity ends.
The interface appears to be simple like MS Paint's, but I think it's seriously overstating that it's a Gimp competitor. Heck, sounds like the project has only been around for 2 semesters. How mature could it be compared to Gimp or Photoshop?
Re:A few questions about it.. (Score:5, Informative)
2) No.
3) It's open source.
4) See #3 and because all
Re:A replacement for MS Paint (Score:3, Informative)
Re:MONO? (Score:3, Informative)
Re:.Net (Score:1, Informative)
Re:MONO? (Score:3, Informative)
Re:BitTorrent! (Score:4, Informative)
Upside down layers (Score:3, Informative)
The whole point of layers is that you can stack them, so that you can see through a layer ON TOP to a layer ON THE BOTTOM. "On top" is generally synonymous with "above", not "below", and if you keep that mentality, you can view the layer window as a horizontal cross-section of your image.
This is, perhaps, a minor quibble (this is not going to make or break it for me), but it just jumpped out at me as being strange. I can't think why anyone would reverse the layer ordering except to make their software look "not-Photoshop"ish.
Re:A few questions about it.. (Score:3, Informative)
The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software.
Sure looks like a BSD-style license to me, it's just not GPL.
Re:wow this is SLOW (Score:4, Informative)
It was painfully slow. It stopped responding for about 5-10 seconds in the middle of a brush stroke and completely froze when i tried to exit throught the file menu.
Re:Bandwidth problem?..... download slow (Score:4, Informative)
Program also works on Windows 2000 with
First impressions: sure beats MS Paint
Re:It's a .NET product. Ewwww... (Score:5, Informative)
You don't.
First of all, the .NET framework is not badly designed. It's one of the best-designed products Microsoft ever came up with. The reason Microsoft released so much crap over the years, is probably because all their best programmers were working on .NET.
Secondly, their exist free (as in free software) alternatives. Mono [mono-project.com] is the best-known one, an other is DotGNU [dotgnu.org] Portable.NET [dotgnu.org]. But they're not 100 % complete yet, so I don't know if this Paint.NET will work.
Re:Windows XP Only? (Score:4, Informative)
However, GDI+ can be installed on NT4,W2K,Win98,ME see http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?url
As Linux doesn't have GDI+ I doubt very much that it will work with Mono.
Re:MONO? (Score:5, Informative)
If MS wanted this to really be cross-platform, why didn't the do what Sun did with the GUI side and have it work on other platforms. The only thing MS did was give us the C# language (which is nice) and a reference C# complier. That is a far way off from being cross platform. What really matters are the class libraries. Sun made theirs cross-platform and implemented them on multiple platforms, MS did not. Sun did not tie anything into just Solaris, MS tied the GUI end of .Net into just MS Windows.
If you write a .Net GUI app, it will not be cross-platform by default. You have to use some other class libraries like GTK#, QT# or wxWindows#. With Java, when you write a GUI app, it _is_ cross-platform.
Re:Mirror (Score:4, Informative)
You're welcome.
Re:.Net (Score:3, Informative)
Re:here here (Score:5, Informative)
Re:It's a .NET product. Ewwww... (Score:2, Informative)
Unless I'm mistaken, I don't believe any of the OSS alternatives implement (or plan to implement) GDI+.
Re:Mirror (Score:1, Informative)
I couldn't even pull up the article, thanks to The Slashdot Effect(TM)
Re:wow this is SLOW (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Mono. (Score:4, Informative)
I downloaded Paint.NET a few days ago to see what it would take to convert it to run on GTK# with mono (much the same way the MonoDevelop guys ported SharpDevelop). The first issue I hit was that it seems to be tightly bound to Ink (the TabletPC SDK).
Nonetheless, I plan to do some more experimenting with it over the next few days. If anyone else is working on this, I'd really like to hear from them.
Joseph Hill (jhill AT arcfocus.com)
Does Rotor count? (Score:2, Informative)
they just didn't actually implement it on multiple platforms, though they did release Rotor for BSD.
Is Rotor available for commercial use? Does Rotor implement System.Windows.Forms? And what's this about examples compiled under one GUI platform will not run under other GUI platforms [microsoft.com]?
What is the point of ISO standardization if you don't intend it to be cross platform?
Are System.Windows.Forms and the parts of GDI+ added by System.Drawing part of the ISO spec?
Senior programmer? (Score:5, Informative)
Yet windows task manager shows 80MB anyway, because that's what individual processes see.
Re:MONO? (Score:5, Informative)
Any group can make a new language and submit it for ISO standardization. Yes that would allow possible cross-platform implementations. But that is a far cry from actually being cross-platform.
Sun made Java when they were the largest Unix server platform and one of the largest server platforms (MS doesn't have server monopoly). Sun could have made Java only run on Solaris and just submit specs for anyone else. They didn't do that. They _wrote_ the code for multiple platforms so that Java could be cross-platform.
I just finished a C# GUI application (for personal use) that connects into Coast to Coast AM [coasttocoastam.com] with a StreamLink userName and Password and downloads the daily MP3's of the most recent show (or any date you pick). This app doesn't run on Linux or any other platform. If I had written it in Java, it would run out-of-the-box on those other platforms, that is cross-platform.
Re:What about this .NET thingy??? (Score:3, Informative)
The
Re:Here it comes. (Score:5, Informative)
Even Photoshop never used that clunky interface originally. The Photoshop MDI originated from the fact that on the Macintosh, Photoshop looked a lot more like the GIMP -- except that the menubar was on top, mac-related stuff, etc. However, the Photoshop programming team didn't want to figure out how to do that on Windows, so they simply made a "container window" to hold everything.
Since then, a number of programs have emulated that, even though they never had to. It was simply a hack to get around a Mac-->Windows porting problem.
Re:A replacement for MS Paint (Score:3, Informative)
You can run photoshop under codeweavers' crossover office. It's not perfect, but it works.
I'm sure Gimp has lots of nice features but the interface is a joke. And to those that tell me that I should just learn the interface, no thanks. All my other Linux applications make sense and have an interface that is easy to sit down and use. Gimp is a major exception even within the Linux application area.
I agree. I've tried and tried to learn gimp's "way of working", and despite getting things done, I still don't care much for it. It has all the functionality I need, but the UI is unfriendly. It has some good things compared to photoshop, like not being MDI, and good improvements have come, like filter improvements to match those of photoshop and doing away with the tool window madness (tons of windows, all the time) of earlier versions, but there's still a number of major irritations left in the UI and the supporting documentation.
My two wishes for the gimp would be:
- A guide that explains what gimp functionality corresponds to what photoshop functionality. It's gotten easier to find over the years, and the filters have been padded out so there's more of a one to one correspondancy, but as a gimp newbie it's often still not immediately obvious how to do things, and reading the entire manual to learn the equivalents is a no-go.
- Grouping functionality together more. For example, there are a whole range of selection tools in the toolbox, rectangular select, round select, freeform select, and so on. Why do they need to be different buttons, and why are common selections settings, like anti-aliasing and feathering, duplicated in the tool settings panel of these tools? It clutters and complicates the interface without providing any actual benefit, and seems to only be there to make sure the existing (relatively small) gimp userbase can keep the interface they've gotten used to, at the cost of diminishing migration from photoshop users to gimp (it makes a bad first impression to see a toolbox that cluttered).
Oh, and while I'm at it, will someone explain the point behind allowing different canvas and layer sizes? I don't get it. And it just gets in my way.
Let me repeat: gimp does everything I need it to, and has a for a long time. And yet I still use photoshop. If the interface was just a bit more simplified, and it was just a bit more obvious to migrate from photoshop, I'd be there. But as it stands...
RTFA + Try The F Program (Score:4, Informative)
(BTW, Thanks to whoever it was that supplied the link to the MSI. Very handy considering the death the original site suffered.)
1. It requires
2. It can only handle one document at a time, though I can load multiple instances. It doesn't QUITE make up for it... probably eats up gobs more memory than it should as a result though.
3. It is GOD-AWFUL slow. My machine is 2GHz with 512MB... not a hot-rod but no slouch neither.
4. There is no ability to drag a layer from one project to another. That's a pretty critical thing when you are importing several images to create a single image.
5. The UI is nice enough... I'm kinda torn between that and the GIMP UI. But since it's the functionality I care more about than the UI, I lean to The GIMP since it clearly has more and performs FAR better.
I could probably add more but I won't. This program is NOT (yet) a threat to The GIMP. And since The GIMP is cross-platform, there is no contest in my mind. Cross-platform, however, doesn't mean anything to those who will be using only Windows for the next 3-4 years. (And for that reason, the UI style is best for Windows-only users since they are likely to adapt to it more quickly than that of The GIMP.)
I think if they could address the problems I listed above, they'd start to have a contender on their hands. I don't like that it's needlessly not cross-platform -- I think someone mentioned something about the Mono project or whatever the Linux
Which would I recommend to users? The GIMP without hesitation
Re:wow this is SLOW - translucency (Score:3, Informative)
The fat brush worked just fine for me.
Then I turned off the "translucent windows" option... and the program slowed right the hell down.
So, it's one of those odd programs that runs FASTER with the effects TURNED-ON.
Mirror for download (Score:2, Informative)
Lasso select ... (Score:3, Informative)
Speaking of nice features: the lasso-select in this thing is pretty kick ass. Does any other software have similar real time highlighting of the selected area for the lasso?
What you mean, like the GIMP? Press "F" or click the third button in the tool pane and you are using lasso select.
I'm beginning to think that there are a bunch of people out there who just like to spout off without engaging their brain. The GIMP has a ton of great features, the dockable toolbars work fabulously, it has great support for the Wacom Intuous tablet I use and it does pretty much everything I need it to do. Plus plugins like Resynthesizer make removing spots and creating tilable textures from digital photos really easy. Criticise the tools you use, not the ones where you just visited the web page.
Cheers,
Toby Haynes
Re:here here (Score:3, Informative)
I use GIMP all the time on Windows and Linux. Now that the Windows version 2.2 with GTK 2.4 supports my Wacom Intuous 2 pad, I'll use it even more.
I use GIMP for image manipulation and for painting and it is a great piece of software. Without it, I would have to spend hundreds of dollars on Photoshop, something that I can't afford.
Re:Here it comes. (Score:4, Informative)
Paint.Net - Constructive Criticism (Score:3, Informative)
Performance was not a problem on my PC. Some have reported it is on theirs. I am running a P4 3.2 GHz HT w/512 MB RAM.
Now to the constructive criticism...
The memory problem is a big one. I'm guessing that the history list is largely responsible for the offense, and that some disk cacheing could remedy the problems. Garbage collection isn't a license to grab all the RAM on my PC.
Anyway, a good free program all-in-all. A bit of a heavyweight to be a Paint replacement though.
Re:Interesting (Score:3, Informative)