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Microsoft Software Windows

Microsoft Paint To Remain Part of Windows 10 After All (theverge.com) 114

Microsoft had been planning to remove its popular Paint app from Windows 10, but the company has now reversed course. From a report: The software maker had been warning Windows 10 users for months that Paint would be removed, and those warnings vanished in the latest May 2019 Update (1903). "Yes, MSPaint will be included in 1903," says Brandon LeBlanc, a senior program manager for Windows at Microsoft. "It'll remain included in Windows 10 for now." LeBlanc didn't reveal why Microsoft had removed its warnings, but it's clear Paint will no longer be removed from Windows 10 in the immediate future. Microsoft previously marked Paint as "deprecated," meaning it wasn't in active development and could be removed in future releases of Windows.
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Microsoft Paint To Remain Part of Windows 10 After All

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  • by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 23, 2019 @11:48AM (#58477940)

    It will now be called Microsoft Paint Edge and will be based on the GIMP code.

    It won't work.

    But it will watermark all your images stored on OneDrive.

    With someone else's watermark.

    • No lies detected.
      • by cayenne8 ( 626475 ) on Tuesday April 23, 2019 @12:13PM (#58478052) Homepage Journal
        Actually, why doesn't MS go ahead and start new development work on MS Paint and upgrade it and make it something you'd really find useful to use for Photo editing, etc...?

        It would be nice to have a very good basic editor that comes with Win10.

        • by xlsior ( 524145 )
          Anything bundled with windows that would halfway be considered to be a competitor for commercial software would be guaranteed to lead to more lawsuits against MS for leveraging their os monopoly to give them an unfair competitive advantage in the image editing software market.
          • Anything bundled with windows that would halfway be considered to be a competitor for commercial software would be guaranteed to lead to more lawsuits against MS for leveraging their os monopoly to give them an unfair competitive advantage in the image editing software market.

            I wonder if that would be such a problem today as maybe in the past?

            Apple pretty much gives away a TON of useful software with purchase and no one blinks an eye these days.

        • by TheRealMindChild ( 743925 ) on Tuesday April 23, 2019 @01:55PM (#58478624) Homepage Journal
          Legacy compatibility. MS Paint is an embedded OLE object from the 16bit Windows days. Anything to supersede it would need to be a new project, sort if like how we have Edge and IE. IE is an embeddable ActiveX control (ShDocVw.dll/IEframe.dll), so you can't just get rid of it because there are still things in use that depend on it.
          • MSPaint is a native part of the OS, and it is that native core functionality which is part of the whole Microsoft deal.

            I've been thinking, if OneNote was as capable and as intuitive in the image editing and basic non-cloud file sharing front, more people would use OneNote over MSPaint. Since OneNote is now part of Windows 10. Now just need a fast way to open an empty OneNote Notebook.
    • There is also a rumor about a new version of Windows Media Player based on VLC. ;)

    • ...and sell them as stock images. Under someone else's account.

    • The company announced today that it will be integrating a windows operating system emulator into cross platform Minesweeper. Now all Windows apps can be launched and the file system accessed from inside minesweeper. Windows itself as a stand alone operating system has reached end of life. Customers are advised to upgrade to Minesweeper, and later this year Minesweeper 360 online, the first on-line only operating system. A VR headset version is anticipated in 2020

      • MS paint will be an add-on to the VR version requiring a Skull Trepinator for full 8-bit color direct to cerebellum interface.

  • by jellomizer ( 103300 ) on Tuesday April 23, 2019 @12:01PM (#58477994)

    MS Paint is not meant for artwork, or drawing, But just for cropping, or sketching a simple image on a picture. It opens fast, simple controls, and you are done, faster then an expert would be to find the free form brush tool in Photoshop.

    • Yep, the killer app for me in MSPaint is re-sizing because I don't always want to share full-sized images. That and the occasional crop, and 95% of the time that's all I want. It opens instantly and there's no learning curve.

    • Exactly. I use it just about every day to crop and resize screenshots. It's not much good for anything else but it doesn't need to be.
      • Re: (Score:2, Informative)

        by Anonymous Coward

        "windows+shift+s" will change your life, I almost never open paint nowadays

        • This. Haven't used paint since I found out about it. Although, I preferred when it still opened the snipping tool, since that allowed me to add annotations.
    • by Higaran ( 835598 )
      I disagree, there have been many people making AMAZING art using MSPAINT for years now. Yes it's not designed for it, but it's good simple tool, kind of like an etch-a-sketch, and you can do some cool stuff with it.
    • by Tablizer ( 95088 )

      Indeed, for the few things it does, it does it quick and easy. I do a lot of the rough work in Paint, and then finalize in Gimp. Gimp is too many key/mouse/eye movements for certain functions and function changes. I just wish they had a blur/sharpen, tint, and contrast/alpha adjustments.

    • Yep. It's the Notepad of image editors.
  • I cannot believe they have laid off the developers and deprecated Paint. I know there are Creator builds that increase the available colors from 16 to 32.
  • by Ashthon ( 5513156 ) on Tuesday April 23, 2019 @12:13PM (#58478056)

    It says a lot about the incompetence of Satya Nadella's Microsoft when they can't even produce an effective replacement for Paint. UWP has been shown to be worthless for desktop productivity applications, and their "Modern UI" tablet-style interface has been an utter failure, yet they continue to push this as the future of Windows. Nadella still believes in his "mobile first" strategy, apparently not realising that users have actual work to do that can't be achieved with touch-optimised apps on mobile devices. Nadella's incompetence is only being hidden by the large increases in revenue he's generating by turning everything into a subscription service, but there's only so far you can screw your customers with ever increasing prices and ever declining product quality before people start to look elsewhere.

    Nobody at Microsoft seems able to recognise these failures, both in terms of software quality and software design. The company has been gradually filling up with soft-skills project managers and UX designers who believe themselves to be highly creative and talented, but have now clue about making effective, useful software. They simply follow the latest fads and have turned software into something similar to the fashion industry, with frequent redesigns to follow the latest fashionable trends. While they're busy being trendy and "creative" Microsoft's software is falling apart. Comparing Paint to Paint 3D is a perfect example of this, and while Paint is a fast, effective productivity tool, Paint 3D is a worthless toy for children.

    I'm a life-long Windows user, but I've lost all confidence in Microsoft. Their buggy, unstable, invasive and poorly designed Windows 10 was the final straw for me, so I switch to Linux Mint Cinnamon. I've found it to be far more stable than Windows 10, far more customisable and far better at meeting my needs. Microsoft can't get anything right these days, so I'm done with them.

    • It says a lot about the incompetence of Satya Nadella's Microsoft when they can't even produce an effective replacement for Paint.

      Actually it says a lot that they tried. Paint is not a tool worthy of replacing. It's a tool worthy of being made irrelevant through core features in the OS.

      and their "Modern UI" tablet-style interface has been an utter failure

      According to whom? From what I can see their modern UI does everything the previous Windows UI did while also allowing context sensitive changes if you're using a touch based interface. The release of this and their Surface line (which turned out to be a decent profit centre) has caused the entire industry to follow suit producing touch sensitive laptop

    • Nadella still believes in his "mobile first" strategy, apparently not realising that users have actual work to do that can't be achieved with touch-optimised apps on mobile devices.

      In trying to play mobile catch-up to Google and Apple, they risk killing their sacred desktop cow, and they'd be left with nothing if they did because they historically fail more often at mobile than the Lakers have at getting into the playoffs.

    • It says a lot about the incompetence of Satya Nadella's Microsoft when they can't even produce an effective replacement for Paint.

      Why should they? There are other image editing programs that you can use.

  • by MBGMorden ( 803437 ) on Tuesday April 23, 2019 @12:41PM (#58478226)

    Paint is pretty limited but it's still a useful program you can count on being installed on any random computer.

    Personally though I prefer paint.NET as a quick and free editor with a decent feature set. GIMP is OK too but on a Windows machine the GTK toolkit just feels out of place.

    • Yeah, I thought everyone just used Paint.NET at this point. It'd still be a mistake to remove it. If they took it out of future versions of the install media, then users trying to manipulate screenshots as part of a network connectivity error after initial install might be in a situation where they had no tool for that purpose at all. Back when operating systems came on floppies it made sense to keep the bundled accessories to a minimum, but not so much now.

    • by antdude ( 79039 )

      I miss the old JASC (before Corel)'s Paint Shop Pro. Paint.NET is slow and bloated IMO like GIMP.

  • Great now put Windows Media Player back in Windows.

    • Great now put Windows Media Player back in Windows.

      Right, and I can't wait to adjust all the file associations, again and again...

    • When did they take it out?

      • by Tablizer ( 95088 )

        When I first got Windows 10, it didn't have Media Player, but some silly tablet-esque replacement. After a lot of googling & fiddling I got it back.

        But another thing yanked out per earlier versions is Movie Maker. It may be put-back-able with similar amounts of fiddle faddle.

  • My bet is that it's still deprecated by the definition in the original post of "it wasn't in active development and could be removed in future releases of Windows", and they just removed the warning because it was upsetting people.
  • Comment removed based on user account deletion
  • by roc97007 ( 608802 ) on Tuesday April 23, 2019 @01:17PM (#58478394) Journal

    There's a free paint program called "paint.net" which used to be found at (duh) paint.net, but I just checked and they appear to have lost the domain. It's now available at getpaint.net.

    This is from memory, but my daughter, who is an artist, switched to paint.net (now getpaint.net) from Microsoft Paint because paint.net was still being developed (MS Paint appears to be stagnant) and (again from memory) paint.net had better stylus support.

    For what it's worth. If you're a serious artist and for God only knows what reason [1] you're on the Windows platform, you might give it a try.

    [1] That's actually not a fair snipe in this day and age, as Microsoft is making real efforts to cater to content creators. Whereas, although Apple was at one time the go-to platform for content creation, they appear to be more in line with content consumption these days.

    • I really liked Paint.Net the last time I used it, but I was never doing any serious work with it, just basic image editing.

      As an aside, I remember the web site always being getpaint.net, so I'm not sure when they might have lost the paint.net domain.
    • Except you can load, paste, crop, save and exit in Paint before you can load Paint.net and its plugins...
    • MSPaint Stagnant? Surely you meant it was a finished product?

      MSPaint is not a competitor to Paint.NET, Photoshop, Gimp, or Paint Shop Pro, except for those wierdo edge cases.

      MSPaint is feature complete. Its biggest attribute is that it is ALWAYS installed on Windows. Second, it loads instantly.

      Not all image editing is about making professional quality edits. Some image editing is simply about gathering documentation.
      • MSPaint Stagnant? Surely you meant it was a finished product?

        MSPaint is not a competitor to Paint.NET, Photoshop, Gimp, or Paint Shop Pro, except for those wierdo edge cases.

        MSPaint is feature complete. Its biggest attribute is that it is ALWAYS installed on Windows. Second, it loads instantly.

        Not all image editing is about making professional quality edits. Some image editing is simply about gathering documentation.

        I use the same argument for vim. It doesn't do inline photos or headers and footers, but some version of VI is guaranteed to be part of any *nix distribution.

        I'm talking about something here that I know very little about, which makes me a bit uncomfortable. I can only tell you what my daughter told me. She's the one with artistic training.

        So, paraphrased, I'm told that MSPaint is suitable for drawing circles and arrows but not much more than that. If you have a variable pressure stylus and you're doing

  • Look, I can see you don't want to support every stinking piece of software out there until the End Times.

    However, it doesn't seem to make much sense to deliberately leave out a perfectly fine little utility like Paint (or games like Minesweeper, Freecell, etc) when they are essentially the closest thing to a "completed" piece of software we'll ever encounter?

    Can someone explain to me the rationale for NOT including them in a way that doesn't leave MS looking like greedy fucks?

    Because I know I was disappoint

  • by LordHighExecutioner ( 4245243 ) on Tuesday April 23, 2019 @02:03PM (#58478658)
    ...but please remove Windows 10, thank you!
  • By constantly removing features (or moving them to pro/enterprise versions), Microsoft is teaching people not to upgrade. Nor are they unique in this respect, most companies do it. As a result, people (and companies) are delaying upgrades, which makes their systems vulnerable.

  • by The New Guy 2.0 ( 3497907 ) on Tuesday April 23, 2019 @03:15PM (#58479006)

    Paint may be complete in features leaving nothing else to be developed, but it's still used everyday by users. Why wouldn't they include it in all future versions of Windows?

  • I remember when I first installed Linux. I was like, wow, I get this graphics program for free that is so much better than MS paint. I didn't know about Photoshop because I wasn't using Photoshop. I learned how to make artwork on the GIMP, and I never looked back. I can't imagine using such a clunky useless program for doing graphics like Ms. Paint again.
  • by Radical Moderate ( 563286 ) on Tuesday April 23, 2019 @04:41PM (#58479508)
    Sorry, I do not want to download Snip & Sketch from the damn store. Just leave Snipping Tool alone! It's simple and it works. I realize those two qualities are red flags to MS developers, but just stop it already.
  • That is the best news. I am so happy.

    Now work on your quarterly updates fucking over 30% of the PCs in the world. Mmmkay?

  • MS clearly doesn't understand how people use computers running their OS. I use mspaint on nearly a daily basis. Why would I use the snipping tool when mspaint has largely better functionality, particularly if I want to quickly mark up a capture? Mspaints greatest asset is ms have left it alone for 2.5 decades and thus haven't filled it with shit-ware and O365 tie-ins like the rest of the OS

Keep up the good work! But please don't ask me to help.

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