MS Paint, I am leaving you.
I said I would come back with a review of the software I had installed yesterday, and I have returned with some early verdicts.
I was an early member of the anti-vista bandwagon. It was bloated, buggy and finding drivers that worked was a mess, and these things all remain true. I stuck with my trusty Windows XP, and chose to find alternate means of getting the functionality I was missing out on in vista. One thing that windows Vista had that I didn’t was a fancy alt-tab. I too wanted to switch applications in style, and yesterday I found my way of doing it. With one of the windows power toys called the alt-tab replacement. The power toys are windows XP apps which weren’t give the proper testing time so they never made the final XP release. Now I have a graphical preview of a window when I alt-tab to it. Booyah.
My photo editing app of choice has always been MS Paint. MS Paint just has that feeling, that distinct “This is allowed to be sloppy because it was done in mspaint” look. I have constructed some masterpieces in paint, and have mastered every feature that the program has to offer. Sometimes I cry myself to sleep at night, just thinking about the graphic program that the world forgot, but Microsoft kept giving us anyway. They needed to upgrade it, or offer plug-ins, or toss it out and start anew. Something needed to be done.
Like practically anything Microsoft releases, there is a freeware alternative that takes the basic usability of a MS application and turns it into everything the user could ever hope for. I would like to introduce Paint.net, or as I like to call it “MSpaint as it should have been”.
- Gone are the days where you can only rotate on a 90’ angle.
- Gone are the days where you have only one layer to work with.
- Gone are the days when you only have 3 undo’s before you are stuck with it.
- Gone are the days you don’t have a magic wand tool.
And that is only from 10 minutes of playing with it. I think
when MS Paint comes home and see’s me lying in bed with paint.net, things are
going to get violent.
Stay tuned for more half-assed software reviews tomorrow. And maybe some paint.net nonsense if I feel like playing around with it some more.
Cheers.
IMBC: 413 + 50 = 463
Total: 16212
Comments
Good call on paint.net though. It IS delightful.
To be fair, the alt-tab replacement isn't half as elaborate as the 3D aero alt-tabs. It is essentially the classic XP alt-tab only it displays a little window preview to the left of the icons. I'm willing to spend a couple clock cycles for that as long as I spend less time trying to figure out which window I want.
@lumini
I have toyed around with gimp, but I never got comfortable with it. I havn't checked out gimpshop, but frrom what their homepage is telling me I will be installing this shortly and playing with it. Luckily i'm not using vista so stability issues shouldn't be an issue. Seems like a solid reccomendation, I appreciate it.
Thanks for the input guys.