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Microsoft IT Technology

Microsoft To Retire Paint 3D 38

Posted by msmash from the drawing-the-line dept.
An anonymous reader shares a report: Microsoft Paint isn't one of Windows' best photo editing apps, but in the recent past, the software giant introduced some exciting features, such as layer support, to make the app more viable for Windows users. While Microsoft was pouring the Paint app with new features, the Paint 3D app was dying a slow death. The app will finally be delisted from the Microsoft Store in November this year.
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Microsoft To Retire Paint 3D

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  • My Windows 11 machine still has mspaint.exe installed. Does this mean mspaint has outlasted its supposed successor? HOORAY! [yellow5.com]

    • Notepad's a text editor. Hard to get improvement there. Calculator's a calculator. Hard to do math better.

      MS-Paint is a tinker-toy - but its within the abilities of nearly all users. Photoshop is amazing; but I'd rather have good old MS-Paint to do a quick annotation. It's the equivalent of a kid's box of crayons - the small one, eight or sixteen colors. It's not the equivalent of an artist's studio with easel, multiple types of paint in every color and super fine horsehair brushes. In the hands of

      • Sometimes, an app is finished. (Score:4, Insightful)

        by drnb ( 2434720 ) on Monday August 12, 2024 @01:06PM (#64699230)
        Sometimes, an app is finished. Just bug fixes and adapting to new OS API revisions.

      • It would be easy to improve classic notepad without ruining it. All they still needed to do (since adding support for files with Unix line endings) was add multi-level undo. Instead the windows 11 version is tabbed and has a bunch of other crap thrown in as well, which I for one find irritating since I neither need nor want any of that functionality.

      • Notepad's a text editor. Hard to get improvement there

        Line numbers, syntax highlighting, spelling/grammar checking: these are some of the many features that are available in numerous basic text editors that come standard with most Linux distros. And all of those editors are much newer than Notepad, yet seem to surpass Notepad's utility within or shortly after their first release.

        Calculator's a calculator. Hard to do math better.

        Hex/octal/binary modes, binary boolean operators, exponents, factorials, tri

        • Many, perhaps most, features aren't wanted by all users in all use cases. For example, Microsoft updated Notepad for Windows 11 to keep your recently edited documents open. This came as an unwelcome surprise when sharing my screen during a meeting. So I had to switch to Notepad++. Notepad++, of course, had the exact same feature, which, along with its many other frills, had kept it from being my go-to for quick-and-dirty, fire-and-forget, honest-to-God NOTES for years. But Notepad++, seemingly unlike N

          • Also, when my child was in middle and high school, and had to write essays and reports, I had to force her to use Notepad. Because when she used Word, she would obsess over the font, color, and formatting for literal hours, getting next to no writing done.

            Limitations are an important part of all creative work.

            • I completely agree with this and I purposely omitted all formatting features from my list of text editor functions missing from Notepad because I consider that omission a feature.
          • It's simple to change this behavior, although I wish it was not the default. Click on the gear icon (settings) on the extreme right in the menu bar. There is a setting in the Opening Files section you can switch.
            • I changed the "Opening Files" setting from "Open in new tab" to "Open in new window", which was the only other option. That didn't make a difference, or at least not one that I cared about. But the very next setting was "When Notepad starts", which I changed from "Open content from the previous session" to "Open a new window". That seemed to work. Thank you.

        • Microsoft keeps these things around as they are because they are expected features of legacy Windows platforms, you know, for backward compatibility. Something the Linux family doesn't care much about

          • It wouldn't introduce any negative effects to have these features disabled by default and hidden from the UI until a user goes out of their way to enable them.
          • Oh, absolutely! Notepad is essential for demonstrating when you've pwned a Windows box, without that a lot of pen-testers would be out of work.

        • Hex/octal/binary modes, binary boolean operators, exponents, factorials, trigonometry functions, logarithms, etc. Again, most of these are available in the default calculator app of any given Linux distro.

          Some of that stuff is in the Windows calculator too, it's surprisingly decent. It's also frustratingly dumb though, for example it can ignore dollar signs but won't ignore spaces in parentheses when you paste.

  • MS keeps fixing the wrong shit (Score:4)

    by Tablizer ( 95088 ) on Monday August 12, 2024 @11:33AM (#64698896) Journal

    Most regulars just want MS-Paint (2D) de-bugged and slightly improved. The 3D gizmo was clunky when I tried it and I stopped trying, so ignored it.

    Fire your marketers, and get your techs to focus on bugs bugs and bugs. When MS tries to get fancy, it usually comes out a year or two behind competition anyhow. If you keep losing in track, stick with shot-put where you at least get B-minuses. 95% of MS users use it for compatibility and familiarity, not for trends, and MS's culture is too F'd to change this, but they keep pretending and failing.

    MS-Paint could still use some blurring, sharpening, and hue tools, both spot-wise and full. Layering would be nice, but nobody I know has ever got the UI right for making layering intuitive, so casual users ignore such.

    • Paint.Net (Score:5, Informative)

      by JBMcB ( 73720 ) on Monday August 12, 2024 @11:50AM (#64698946)

      Replace Windows Paint with Paint.Net, having it default to an "Easy" mode that looks just like Windows Paint.

      Heck Paint.Net uses 140MB of memory on startup, and Windows Paint uses 70MB. It's twice as much, but in the grand scheme of things it's not that much more, and it does a *lot* more than Windows Paint.

      • This is the way.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Tablizer ( 95088 )

        The defaults for Paint.Net seem geared toward line drawing, not photo manipulation. Users really want Photoshop Lite most the time.

        • Picasa was _the_ photo manipulation tool. But like all products that Google acquires, itâ(TM)s now dead.

        • Photos (Score:2)

          by JBMcB ( 73720 )

          Isn't that what the Photos app is for? Paint.Net was meant to be a beefed-up Paint, which it is.

      • Re: (Score:1)

        by Anonymous Coward
        Ok. Then they'd also have to hire the guy who maintains it. He'd actually have to want to work for Microsoft and follow all the nonsense rules they have -- for starters, moving to Seattle to RTO. He'd be spending half his days in pointless meetings like all MSFT people do and his career would be based on getting ahead in a giant bureaucracy. He'd get the minimum number of vacation days because MSFT starts ALL new hires (unless you've way high up in the org chart on hire, and I mean WAY high up) at the same

    • Re:MS keeps fixing the wrong shit (Score:4, Insightful)

      by PsychoSlashDot ( 207849 ) on Monday August 12, 2024 @12:05PM (#64698994)

      MS-Paint could still use some blurring, sharpening, and hue tools, both spot-wise and full. Layering would be nice, but nobody I know has ever got the UI right for making layering intuitive, so casual users ignore such.

      Know where "AI" power might fit? MS Paint and up-scaling. Most of us don't need CoPilot to (incorrectly) summarize an e-mail for us. But image enhancement might actually be useful...

      • I want Clippy in a captain's hat (as my copilot). He'll see me scribbling in MS Paint. He'll say "This looks horrendous. Do you want me to generate a photograph or illustration based on your sketch?"

        And then "You might have to describe what some parts of this image are. I have no idea what this is (circles a squiggly line in the corner)."

      • MS-Paint could still use some blurring, sharpening, and hue tools, both spot-wise and full. Layering would be nice, but nobody I know has ever got the UI right for making layering intuitive, so casual users ignore such.

        Know where "AI" power might fit? MS Paint and up-scaling. Most of us don't need CoPilot to (incorrectly) summarize an e-mail for us. But image enhancement might actually be useful...

        "Add a callout bubble pointing to the green rectangle at the bottom of the image. In the callout put the words 'click this button for the settings you need to change' in a readable color/size."

        "This is a bar graph. Change all the red rectangles to purple. Change the blue rectangles to yellow. Add medium-gray shading to the background of the chart above 30 on the vertical axis."

    • As far as I can tell, the most common use case for Paint is to take a picture or a map and annotate it with text and some basic shapes. 3D Paint seems to have a "but who is this for" problem. People who just want to draw quick squares and text on things were fine with Paint. (As you said, debugged and slightly improved. Paint's ability to scale photos is atrocious.) People who want to do more will probably find a program that does what they need rather than use the little toy 3D rendering/image editing prog

  • Paint 3D is weak (Score:3)

    by TJHook3r ( 4699685 ) on Monday August 12, 2024 @12:02PM (#64698982)
    Why Microsoft makes it so difficult to provide the functionality of a Biro and a napkin is beyond belief. We're all online now and I want to scribble a quick diagram, yeah good luck with that. Each line is set on the canvas and can't be moved, unless you cut the entire region and move it. PowerPoint is the close out-of-box replacement for physical paper. MS Whiteboard is even worse - performance stutters and crashes if you dare add more than a few squiggles!

  • I kind of wish MS would just adopt Paint.Net (Score:5, Insightful)

    by slaker ( 53818 ) on Monday August 12, 2024 @12:12PM (#64699030)

    Paint.net was created by college students given access to early versions of C#. It doesn't have all the bells and whistles that something like Photoshop does but it's a vastly more capable editor than MSPaint.exe and it can use layers and has a plugin system for added functionality.

    I install it on basically every PC I have to use. It'd be easy enough for Microsoft to buy it off its creator and ship it with Windows. That would probably cost less than building a real replacement and Windows users generally would get a mature and capable image editor out of the deal.

    • Paint.net was created by college students given access to early versions of C#. It doesn't have all the bells and whistles that something like Photoshop does but it's a vastly more capable editor than MSPaint.exe and it can use layers and has a plugin system for added functionality.

      I install it on basically every PC I have to use. It'd be easy enough for Microsoft to buy it off its creator and ship it with Windows. That would probably cost less than building a real replacement and Windows users generally would get a mature and capable image editor out of the deal.

      I dunno. Microsoft has spent hundreds of billion$ on so many other acquisitions like Activision, Github, LinkedIn, Skype, Nokia just off the top of my head, do you think they can afford to acquire paint.net as well, just to improve Windows?

      = = = =

      On a side note, have you seen the new Los Angeles Intuit Arena? [youtube.com] It is kind of incredible and Steve Ballmer paid for it with his pocket change. [youtu.be] Hoop hype!

      • Re: (Score:3)

        by slaker ( 53818 )

        I dunno. Microsoft might NEED the money it makes in about 10 minutes to pay for extra plant rentals in its lobbies.

        Improving Windows on the other hand does seem counter to purpose.

    • Paint.net was created by college students given access to early versions of C#
       
      It was created by A (singular) person, Rick Brewster (rolo), with a very much released version of Visual Studio.NET. Why are you just making shit up?

  • For a hobbiest 3D printer like myself, your options on creating simple 3D diagrams are very limited

    - You can use TinkerCad in your browser. This is OK for very basic things but it is hard to open and edit things in TinkerCad.

    - You can use Paint3D

    - You can get a Ph.D in 3D and use Blender.

    None of these are good. I always end up importing and exporting between 3 or 4 different tools to make what I want, which are usually very basic shapes.

    • You are missing a quite a few 3D modelling programs: [wikipedia.org]

      * 3D Slash
      * Leopoly
      * MeshMixer
      * Moment of Inspiration
      * RealityMAX
      * Rhino3D
      * SculptGL
      * SelfCAD
      * SketchUp
      * Spline
      * Wings3D
      * ZBrush

      That said, learning Blender is probably one of the BEST long term investments one could do since:

      * It has been around for ages and thus there a literally hundreds of tutorials online,
      * It is open source and is constantly being improved.
      * One will never "out grow" it, it has tons of features.

      For 3D printing YMMV.

      • I have tried most of those and they are all super complicated. SketchUp is the only reasonably beginner one there and yes it is one of the ones I do shit in to export into Painr3D or TinkerCad because they make something else easy.

        There is no program end to end made for beginners.

  • Paint does what I need (mostly circling something and adding text). If I need more, I use GIMP.

    C'mon, Microsoft, stop trying to solve *all* the problems. Just do a few things well. Heresy, I know.

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