Microsoft Teases Windows 11 Update To MS Paint (pcmag.com) 95
On Twitter, Microsoft Chief Product Officer Panos Panay shared a teaser video for "the beautifully redesigned Paint app," with the promise that Windows Insider Program members would be able to start testing the app for themselves in the near future. PCMag reports: The video is light on details -- which isn't all that surprising given that eight seconds of its 18-second runtime are devoted to the intro and outro -- but it does show off a new user interface with dark mode support that matches other Windows 11 apps. Windows Central also noticed something missing from Paint's new interface: An option to edit the current file in Paint 3D. Could this mean that Paint has emerged victorious from the 4-year-long battle that's raged between the competing apps?
The conflict began when Microsoft released Paint 3D alongside the Windows 10 Creators Update in 2017, then announced just a few months later that it was planning to deprecate the original Paint with the Fall Creators Update. Many feared that would be the end of Paint, but Microsoft later clarified that it was simply moving the app to the Windows Store instead of bundling it with Windows 10. It then decided to continue shipping it with the operating system anyway. It seemed like Paint and Paint 3D would coexist indefinitely. That changed again in March when Microsoft stopped bundling Paint 3D with Windows 10 and moved it to the Microsoft Store instead. The tables had finally turned.
The conflict began when Microsoft released Paint 3D alongside the Windows 10 Creators Update in 2017, then announced just a few months later that it was planning to deprecate the original Paint with the Fall Creators Update. Many feared that would be the end of Paint, but Microsoft later clarified that it was simply moving the app to the Windows Store instead of bundling it with Windows 10. It then decided to continue shipping it with the operating system anyway. It seemed like Paint and Paint 3D would coexist indefinitely. That changed again in March when Microsoft stopped bundling Paint 3D with Windows 10 and moved it to the Microsoft Store instead. The tables had finally turned.
Zzzz (Score:1)
Zzz...go away, lameness filter, I'm trying to sleep.
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Translated: They fucked up MSPaint (Score:5, Informative)
So the calc became a windows store app, meaning that if the windows store app corrupts, you can run calc.
Now MSPaint.
Oh, and let's not pretend they can be trusted to "improve" shit. UIX has been a downward trend is 2000. Yes, there are things they could have done to improve the user experience. Instead, today, there are functions you need one control panel to do, and others that you need the other for.
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Having used Windows the last time when XP was still the newest version... may I ask: ... What was there to ruin?
I remember having used a program with the same feature set on a "Tulip" computer somewhere in the 80s, and even back then I found it to be more of a "my first program" example than an actual program that people seriously used.
Re:Translated: They fucked up MSPaint (Score:5, Funny)
Having used Windows the last time when XP was still the newest version... may I ask: ... What was there to ruin?
Let's start with something simple: the print settings window:
1) It's cluttered, so why not hide all the options people use by moving them to an "advanced" screen.
2) Next, take all the binary yes/no settings and change them from those outdated radio buttons, to pull down menus.
3) Finally, it's too small, it only takes up about 16% of the screen. Let's expand it to fill the entire vertical space, make the text bigger, add whitespace. No, more whitespace than that. Keep adding whitespace. Keep going with the whitespace... that's better. Don't stop until the last interface element is hidden halfway off the screen, so the user has to scroll down to see it on a 1080p monitor. Oh, and be sure there are no visible scrollbars, we can't hide any of that valuable whitespace.
4) Now, do the same for all of the settings control panels. But only with half the content... and choose at random what options go in the newly designed settings windows, and what stays in the old one. For fun, put about 10% of the same settings in both places. Oh, and be sure you make the old control panel hard to find.
Re:Translated: They fucked up MSPaint (Score:4, Funny)
Well, this is succinct and painful to read because it perfectly tracks the Win10 settings.
My favorite is adding a printer manually. "Add printer" and you get a "Searching for printers and scanners..." thing that won't allow you to choose "the printer that I want isn't listed" which won't appear until after a several second delay and is not clearly a link and is in grey text in a a smaller font. They put it at the BOTTOM of the list of things in the "searching for" list that keeps periodically jumping down as new printers show up. My work has probably a couple hundred printers showing up gradually there, and there's no search box so you can just say "ok, you found this list, is the printer in building 2, room 123 here?"
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meaning that if the windows store app corrupts
You talk about random app corruption as if that's a thing. Likewise if your system is fucked up to that extent you care about ... Calc and Paint?
You are making not even one iota of sense.
Heck I consider your post a glowing review of the upcoming Windows if this is what you chose to complain about.
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Heck I consider your post a glowing review of the upcoming Windows if this is what you chose to complain about.
100% once the complaints reach a certain level it's time to declare it a success, I'm not a fan of Windows but at this point if MS Paint and Calc are the critical thing tying somebody to Windows then perhaps they need to broaden their horizons a bit. Can't say I've ever experienced corruption in these applications over the course of using Windows since 3.1.
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No, he was talking about Windows Store getting corrupted, which absolutely is a thing.
Yes he is, and then is incredibly concerned about not being able to use Paint as a result. Think about that for a moment.
Slashdot Car Analogy Time: My car's wheel fell off and all I care about is the cup holder doesn't work. Wowes me!
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The Windows calculator is actually surprisingly good. It's got decent scientific and programmer functions, copes with very large numbers easily, uses an internal number format that avoids most of the issues with standard IEEE floating point formats etc.
The latest versions have graphing too.
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Calc customized for you seems like a very easy VB6 program to write...
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Indeed. The continued ineptitude of MS is really astonishing. You would think they have learned a thing or two by now, but they seem to be regressing instead.
Now all they have to do (Score:2)
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I'm up for it!
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You're a slashdotter, not a porn star.
Re:Now all they have to do (Score:5, Funny)
I remember firing up MS Paint in Windows 3.0 in the early 90's and thinking: God damn, this will be brilliant once someone figures out how to add dark mode.
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Windows 3.0 didn't have Paint (nor Wordpad, or what it was called - it had Write, I think). It had PaintBrush. I don't know if there's any connection between it and older ZSoft PaintBrush for DOS, but I've always somehow assumed there was. :D It really was, although I'm sure it's gotten far beyond the ol' PaintBrush by this date. Haven't really used it since W95.
I remember when we got a new 75Mhz Pentium system in '95 and I was trying it out thinking what a let down and a downgrade this Paint thing is
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Anyone remember color schemes? ... User-configurable themes? ...
Not even Wilhelm Portal remembers?
*Holds his QtCurve very tightly*
"I will never let you die!"
Priorities (Score:5, Interesting)
Of all the things that Windows users are screaming for... is a new version of Paint really that high on the list?
Re:Priorities (Score:5, Insightful)
I feel like out all the stuff added to Windows 11, a new version of Paint is the among the more harmless.
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Yes, there are multiple teams, and there is just one company. Microsoft should be much more invested in the core OS for the sake of security and stability and not yet more eye candy changes. They probably introduce new exploitable and crash triggering "features" as they keep changing the UI. Their dev resources should retasked. They should have been touting Windows 11 for a long list of bugs and vulnerabilities addressed and not a centered taskbar and new paint job.
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I wouldn't mind a screenshot hotkey that automatically opens paint.
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Shhh, as long as they are kept busy with that, they can at least not fuck up something that we actually use and need.
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Unfortunately they are large enough to be able to fuck up multiple things at the same time.
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Which Windows users do you know? Personally I haven't used MS Paint since the XP days, but others are not the same. Paint was an embarrassingly basic program and users who don't have Photoshop or something else installed actually rely on it.
These days when we install an OS we expect a base level of functionality. I'd argue this was more important than including a built in tool to repair 3D printed meshes, which they introduced in Windows 10.
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I would not. There are _so many_ drawing programs, many of them browser based, and many of them free, that there seems little point to investing effort in a modest painting program.
Re:Priorities (Score:5, Insightful)
Paint's an extremely useful tool for quick edits to things like screenshots and such, so it's fairly important. Especially since its demise was supposed to happen fairly soon as it was entering deprecated status in Windows 10 and was only revived after a rather big outcry.
Take a screenshot using Snipping Tool, then paste it into Paint to make some censoring bars over stuff you don't want exposed, and then copy and paste it into your document or chat or whatever. It's a workflow that works remarkably well because Paint is so lightweight you don't have to wait for Photoshop or GIMP.
Re:Priorities (Score:4, Informative)
Paint! Seriously? (Score:5, Insightful)
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https://www.howtogeek.com/3211... [howtogeek.com]
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From the link:
3D Pinball for Windows seemed like magic back in 1995, and is surprisingly playable even today.
LOL, no it didn't >:D There were so much better Pinball games already, it was like some PD game from early 90's as far as how it felt and how much detail and gameplay features had been put to it.
P.S. I don't mean this as response to commenter, just as comment on the link :) It made me chuckle.
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Solitaire and Minesweeper!!
Accessories folder... (Score:5, Insightful)
Accessories Folder apps all seem to be moving to the Windows Store, this included Solitaire (and its spinoffs), Character Map, and Minesweeper.
The point of the Windows games was to teach things like drag-and-drop and right clicks... now they're about how to get software from the Windows Store.
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It's still teaching the important things to the user.
Only that it's now things that are important to MS, not the user.
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The point of the Windows games was to teach things like drag-and-drop and right clicks... now they're about how to get software from the Windows Store.
If that is the case, then MS are doing a good job. Kids these days can drag & drop and right-click before they can walk. But getting something from the Windows store... there's a challenge.
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Kids these days can drag & drop and right-click before they can walk.
Actually, that takes until they're 13 in the USA because of a stupid law.
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Close, but not quite. It's about moving to the Windows Store, and getting used to micro transactions. The basic solitaire game now requires a several hundred MB download, and requires you to watch 30 second ads between games, unless you pay the "premium" subscription which removes ads. WTF does a solitaire game need a recurring revenue stream?
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And why the fuck are we sent to fucking Twitter of all places? There's no other source of video apparently? Jackass Dorsey must be given his dues, apparently.
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why the fuck are we sent to fucking Twitter
My guess is that these "news" are even too non-newsworthy for MS itself.
Ya know ... (Score:2)
My current hardware won't support Windows 11 and I wasn't going to spend the $$$ to buy a new system that would, but since they've updated MS Paint ... I mean, why didn't they lead with that? /sarcasm
Well, yes (Score:2)
Paint 3D has a clunky interface. Sure, it can do a couple cool things, but not things that most people ever need to do.
When it's time to do some simple image editing, markup, flipping, conversion, or whatever, it's Paint time.
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MS Paint Will Never Beat GEOS Paint (Score:4, Informative)
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Ha, you laugh but that thing got me through high school. Not the lobster, but geoWrite and my 1526 printer.
GEOS still boggles my mind. 64K GUI on a 1MHz 8 bit CPU?
I mean sure I had a 512K RAM expansion, a mouse, and a 3.5 floppy drive so I didn't experience the sluggishness too much.
But that lobster still makes me smile today.
Oh WOW!!!! (Score:3)
I might just have to ditch my Linux system and GIMP to switch back to Windwos now.
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Gimp runs fine on Windows.
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Gimp runs fine on Windows.
It does? Whoa! I didn't know that.
But if I did switch to Windows then I'd have to reinstall all my WINE and Steam games and move all my non-Steam game profiles and saved games onto a Windows 11 system. Assuming they even have Windows versions, which would would also mean getting a whole new computer as my 3 year old gaming rig doesn't meet Win 11's minimum system requirements.
Then there having to learn a new OS. That's just too hard. I'll just stick with Linux. Guess I'll just have to miss out on the
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LOL. Some of us have to use Windows at work. I just didn't want anyone to think that they have to give up GIMP in that situation. Gvim is also available in native windows version. And of course there is cygwin, too. So you can run xterm, bash, and gvim under cygwin, too. Along with whatever command line stuff you are used to.
Re:Oh WOW!!!! (Score:4, Informative)
As long as you avoid the Sourceforge corrupted version with all the adware. It was the mark of the worst period of Sourceforge history, when they injected the GIMP binaries being published from an abandoned repository with unwelcome, undisclosed, and very difficult to remove adware. I admit that I encountered: that kind of publisher burdened nonsense is why I prefer to use CygWin based utilities if compelled to use a Windows system.
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I like Partha's gimp builds for windows and OSX
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As a GIMP user myself I don't recommend it. Windows and windows software is too easy to use. You don't get that same masochistic satisfaction trying to edit an image in anything other than GIMP and leaving it will leave you feeling empty inside... flaccid even.
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Gimp is often used as an example as to why you don't let programmers design an interface. It's by far the most frustrating program I've worked with.
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ANSI standard paint (Score:2)
The thing is I don't want it to change. Someone should just publish an ANSI standard for paint and never update it so we can just keep it exactly the way it is.
This is what makes this country great! (Score:5, Insightful)
Folks, this is what $2 Trillion in market capitalization enables you to do: It allows you to take risks!
When you have this level or resources at your command, you can afford to include -- for free -- not just one, but TWO entry-level paint programs with your OS. That's right: Two completely separate entry-level paint programs, included at no extra charge.
Microsoft can afford to play the long game and let those programs duke it out in the arena of user mindshare until the ultimate entry-level paint program prevails!
The end result: You get to use the best damned free entry-level paint program among those you'll find bundled with Windows.
And to think, some people say that we should take that all away by making big tech companies pay nonzero tax. Is that what you really want? A choice of only *one* bundled entry-level paint program, as if Windows was some kind of Soviet grocery market?
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Au contraire, Microsoft has poured considerable resources into messing up the original paint program over the years. Do you think that adding that ribbon came free?
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Until you realize that paragraph you typed has a typo in it.
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Snip (Score:2)
Will it be as annoyingly slow as working with the new Snip & Sketch when compared to the Snipping Tool?
Whatever Happened to Microsoft Photo Paint? (Score:2)
There was a fear in the 1990s that Microsoft would buy Adobe and take over their product development, but it's always been a better deal for Microsoft to build their own darned apps. Why they still bundle the craptacular MS Paint is anyone's guess because they should be building and supporting world class applications, not throwbacks to Windows 3.1
Re:Whatever Happened to Microsoft Photo Paint? (Score:4, Informative)
All kidding aside, I love microsoft paint. I paste screenshots in it and mark them up to communicate requested changes or to illustrate questions about engineering drawings/documents. But I don't really want it to do any more than what it does now. Well, maybe it would be nice if I could re-edit text boxes after creating them. But I am happy with it the way it is. GIMP is overkill for this application.
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Because the bundled apps are just meant to be crude demo apps, if you want something actually useful they want to sell you that separately.
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MS Paint was actually introduced in Windows 95 - Windows 3.x bundled with Windows version of Zsoft's Paintbrush, dubbed as "Microsoft Paintbrush" (but with credits for the code to Zsoft). I remember so well how disappointed I was when I first saw MS Paint in '95 - before I actually used to work with Paintbrush sometimes, but MS Paint was really close to useless for me. Of course it's changed since that, but originally Paint felt like a downgrade :D
I see them often mentioned as a same product, but MS Paint w
They actually *can't* remove paint (Score:5, Interesting)
On Windows, sometimes people think they are pasting an JPEG/PNG/bitmap into a Microsoft Word document when they are actually pasting a "Paintbrush Picture Object" which is a OLE object in Microsoft terminology. If they actually removed paint from Windows, billions of documents and presentations would be unable to display their images. So they have to leave the core of paint in the OS for backwards compatibility even if they remove the UI. I suppose they could ship it with Office, but that still breaks 3rd-party programs that used OLE.
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> billions of documents and presentations would be unable to display their images.
Good. Most of the images in documents are useless. _No one wants_ an artisanally drawn set of brush strokes is used to capture the eye for the company logo.in their email.
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This won't apply to emails. An email client will convert any pasted object into an JPG or PNG before sending. This problem would only apply to something OLE-based like MS Word, Wordpad, Powerpoint, Visio, Excel, etc.
Most of the images in documents are useless. _No one wants_ an artisanally drawn set of brush strokes...
I question if that is truly the majority of images in documents. Almost every document I encounter is a technical document with screen shots, diagrams, signatures, or engineering drawings in them.
never liked the new one (Score:2)
I never liked the new Paint. And I missed the classic MS Paint on MacOS.
So these days, when I need it, I use jspaint.app.
Works great.
Also in the news (Score:2)
All the people who care please meet in the phone booth behind the MS headquarters.
Seems inexplicable... (Score:3)
And while we're on the subject of garbage tools shipped with Windows, maybe tools like notepad should be jettisoned into the sun and replaced by something more capable.
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Yes, people probably like it to be simple - totally featureless then again, nope. Features that don't make it any harder or more confusing to use, there's no justification of not providing any. Any decent OS needs to include some sort of text-file editor, and we're not living in the 80's - the days when you could get away with shipping an OS that bundled EDLIN as only text-editor (and it wasn't like you could just go to internet and download one) are far gone.
I find it ridiculous that people are actually de
Isn't this illegal? (Score:2)
Isn't threatening harm to someone a criminal offense? This sure sounds like a threat.
Second video: changes in Win-11 (Score:4, Interesting)
I found the second, much longer video more revealing. It's more generally about the changes in Win11. Here are the points I found most important or revealing. Editorial comments in parentheses.
Layers? Transparancy? (Score:1)