Tuesday, October 11, 2016

Microsoft's Revamped "Paint"

This evening, it came to my attention that Microsoft has been working on an updated version of their classic "Paint" app, but "Windows 10-ified" and with support for basic 3D drawing/sketching...





Woah... this is an interesting move, though not completely unexpected, with the other basic 3D creation tool they bundle by default (IIRC) that's aimed more at people interested in 3D printing simple objects. Having begun my digital art journey with MsPaint in Windows 98 (I like to think I got quite skilled at drawing using a 2 button mouse on a pixel-by-pixel scale, "graduating" on to animate my first characters using MsPaint + MsAgent), it's interesting to see what the next generation of budding artists playing around with a "vanilla" PC will be able to start from.



On a side note, it's interesting to see how, after initially lurching towards the tabbed modal monstrosity that is the Ribbon (though admittedly, some of its core design motivations come from a good place), they've now gone back the other way in the "big fat buttons drowning in pools of whitespace" to be better suited to touch devices...

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The main question I guess for this new revamped Paint is: can I still easily crop my screenshots using this thing now?

 I mean, that was one of the major pain points I encountered during my attempt a few years back to go full Linux - being able to use a lightweight editor to quickly select + crop bits out of images (since firing up the 1000-pound gorilla that is GIMP or Krita to crop an image is just overkill, and the default image viewer hides crop under 2-3 layers of hidden menus).

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