Microsoft has announced – through a boring table, because Microsoft – that MS Paint has been deprecated. This means that it will soon be removed from Windows completely, superseded – supposedly – by their new Paint 3D.
When Microsoft Paint will officially be removed from Windows has yet to be confirmed, while a precise date for the release of the Windows 10 Autumn Creators Update is equally up in the air. Whether, like Clippy, Windows users will celebrate or decry Paint’s removal, it will be a moment in the history of Windows as one of its longest-standing apps is put out to pasture.
To be honest, I don’t quite understand why you’d use Paint for anything since Paint.NET is far more capable and also free.
As an import filter
Expecting -on this slimming effort- as an optional download.
Yeah, because it allows to sort bad artists from geniuses : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v2g5qbvb7F4
It is simple, really. It is always there (on any PC), it launches instantly, lets me crop, scale and annotate things.
Sure, there are countless better drawing programs out there, but mspaint served my extremely basic needs.
What MS fails to understand is that my replacement won’t be another Microsoft product. They stopped making acceptable user interfaces for me ages ago.
Edited 2017-07-24 14:14 UTC
Who creates good user interfaces nowadays?
At least in the desktop world there are still some guidelines that almost all applications follow to some extent, but in the mobile/web world everything is in anarchy where programmers/designers implement whatever they want no matter if it will look nice, beautiful, consistent, easy to use, for the majority of people.
The ribbon interface doesn’t entirely suck. It’s better than nested menus. It’s better in the same way a punch in the stomach is better than a kick in the nuts, but it’s still an improvement
Because it’s included with OS. You can’t just go installing Paint.NET on every single computer/server that you happen to log-in to. Also, Paint.NET is much slower, heavier and has too many features that MS Paint users don’t need. MS Paint is “the notepad” of bitmap graphics.
It’s the same as saying “I can’t understand why would anyone use notepad when notepad++ is far more capable and also free”. In certain use-cases, “far more capable” is actually a disadvantage.
Edited 2017-07-24 14:31 UTC
Well, a little more options would be good, hence Notepad2 is a good alternative to something more ‘evolved’ like Notepad++.
Btw, Wordpad from XP was better than Worpad from 7+, because ruler and wysiwyg preview. I use more that Wordpad than the installed Word Starter 2010 that require permanent internet connection.
Yep. Classic MS Paint is useful for exactly one reason – because it’s guaranteed to be present on every Windows machine you use… giving you somewhere to paste screenshots into when trying to capture bug reports.
Of course, a decent screenshot tool would render that unnecessary, allowing you to save the screenshot to disk without pasting it into Paint first. But you can’t rely on a decent screenshot tool on arbitrary Windows machines either…
Snipping Tool?
Steps Recorder?
You can if you use Firefox. PageShot is available via Test Pilot and will be a standard feature of the browser from version 55 forward ( shipping early August ).
http://www.debugpoint.com/2016/10/firefox-launches-experimental-fea…
https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/nightly/all/
Point take though, Firefox itself is not available everywhere.
It’s also not a general-purpose screenshot tool. It’s a useful enough tool if you want to capture browser content… not so much if you want to capture an arbitrary desktop window (like a settings dialog I’m trying to get the user to capture and send me).
The Print-Screen (or Alt+PrintSrc) -> Ctrl-V into MS Paint has been a quick an dirty way to get screenshots
for a very long time. There are much better ways (snagit, etc) but many times you may not be able to install software and MS Paint just gets the job done.
Hopefully there will be a good, solid light-weight out-of-the-box replacement. I have a bad feeling it’ll be something that requires a download from the Windows Store….
Exactly this. I suspect what will happen is what happens with some of my other users: They’ll paste screenshots into a Word document and send me the .docx.
Paint’s super useful and built-in. Anything else, no matter how good it is (Irfanview, Paint.net) has a little bit of a barrier to entry.
For screenshots, win+prntscr creates a PNG in the users’s pictures folder.
Also, Windows still includes the Snippy tool, which lets you do pieces of screenshots.
Possibly Windows 10 only? I didn’t know about that feature, but it doesn’t work for me on Windows 7 anyway…
I think it was added with 8 or 8.1, now that I think about it.
Don’t forget ReactOS ships with open source reimplementations of most XP applications, including wordpad, notepad and paint!
If you just can’t live without Paint, use the ReactOS version!
Sure, install a new OS just to get a clone of a simple paint app..
No, he didn’t say that. He said install the ReactOS versions, they should run on any MS o/s just as they do on ReactOS.
Defeats the purpose. As mentioned above, one of main advantages of MS Pain is that it is present on absolutely all Windows systems by default. If you have to install something, it’s entirely different story and use-case.
[Post Redacted]
Edited 2017-07-25 08:57 UTC
Any version of Windows that allows you to run Win32 apps. It’s most, but not any.
Cross between Depraved and Deprecated is Depracated!
Not all work computers allow their users to install programs, so Paint.NET wouldn’t be an option. So MS Paint was always available.
Thankfully, I can usually find portable apps that work on locked down work computers
I use the ReactOS version of regedit at work to bypass the group policy “issues” i have when trying to use the Windows version…
It doesn’t actually mean this, though, at least not in the Windows world. There are parts of the Win32 API that have been deprecated for 20 years, but are still included in new versions of Windows.
What this does mean is that it officially will no longer be developed anymore. Which doesn’t actually change much – the last time there were any remotely notable changes was when it was updated to have the Ribbon interface in Windows 7. Before that, there have been scant few changes going all the way back to Windows 3.1
Since the app is self contained, and doesn’t introduce anything in the way of security risks, it could very easily just sit there, unchanged but still included, for 20 more years.
Yeah. Regular metafiles have been deprecated for 20 years. We are supposed to use HENHMETAFILEs, however, try to put one in a rich edit control. The regular (deprecated) metafile works flawlessly. The one we are supposed to actually use has problems if you actually try to put it into a rich edit control without converting it to a regular metafile, when you stream out the contents, the enhanced metafile data will be hosed. I wish they would fix that…
But, you are quite right that Microsoft goes way out of their way to support old software.
Like Paint maintenance required a large amount of resources inside Microsoft. Like…
Sure, run a binary executable written by a pseudo open source project that cooperates with KGB. Great advice.
Maybe I like the idea of a non-US 3 letter government agency spying on me for a change
The age of bloatware is taking another toll.
Lean and efficient software has to go. We want layers upon layers of crap that eat up all the hardware resources as soon as we upgrade, even if it is just for a simple pixel editor.
New generation of “developers” are simply incapable of producing lean and efficient software. Most of them aren’t even capable of supporting such software. That’s why it’s happening.
According to http://www.cnbc.com/2017/07/25/microsoft-paint-not-dead.html MS Paint is not dead but will be a free download from the MS Store instead…
I’m guessing that it won’t be 34kB like in the Win9x days. It will probably suddenly become 20MB.
With an animated paperclip that’ll tell you how much you suck at drawing.
1) it loads super fast (faster than Paint.Net)
2) takes seconds to learn
3) perfect for programmers who want to use a simple tool to take a screen shot, circle some stuff, add some text, and msg it to others. Artists don’t want to talk tech and don’t care to read docs. They want to see images that convey the information. Paint lets programmers do that easily.
https://blogs.windows.com/windowsexperience/2017/07/24/ms-paint-stay
Of course, now that it’s a Store Thing… maybe it will come with some really great ads!!
But as others have said – if you have to install it from the store, it’s lost its one great advantage, the fact that it was a tool that’s guaranteed to be available on every Windows PC, no matter how old or new, no matter how locked down.
For more than 20 years, there’s been a simple process you could give a user for capturing screenshots for errors – press print screen, run Paint, paste, save, and email it to me. Because Paint was guaranteed to be there.
While I’ll miss paint (it’s nice as a superfast crop/convert tool), the badly named “snipping tool” has been installed by default since 7, and is a perfectly capable screenshot utility.