Slashdot Mirror
Paint.NET: The Anti-GIMP?
Arno contributes a link to Paint.NET, a free-of-charge raster-graphics program for Windows XP machines. "Quote: 'Paint.NET is image and photo manipulation software designed to be used on computers that run Windows XP. Paint.NET is jointly developed at Washington State University with additional help from Microsoft, and is meant to be a free replacement for the MS Paint software that comes with all Windows operating systems. The programming language used to create Paint.NET is C#, with GDI+ extensions.' It really seems like a nice tool. I definitely prefer its UI to GIMP's."
I managed to grab a mirror if needed. Site kinda seemed slow, especially for a .edu domain.
Before we all do the obligatory "GIMP r0xx0rz, .NET sux", please try downloading this... after it's Slashdotted. Very nice product, it doesn't have the advanced image conversion GIMP does, but very useful indeed.
I wonder if they used P/Invoke so I can run this on Mono?
-1, Flamebait.
:)
Not that it's impossible that this is useful/good software, but to suggest so to slashdot? Come on..
-- If no truths are spoken then no lies can hide --
So, um, isn't this the kind of thing we can run under mono without having to deal with wine regressions? Didn't M$ just help linux and windows users alike here by using .net?
This program is so Anti gimp that it can walk and has full use of all it's limbs.
If it's meant to be a replacement for MS Paint as the blurb states, I don't think the Gimp should feel threatened. The chasm between Paint and Gimp is lightyears wide. It's unlikely this program could attract the OSS devotion necessary to become really big, especially what with its association with MS and the sometimes irrational dislike this inspires in some of us.
I do a bit of graphics stuff and i would never put my Photoshop to the side. it is by FAR the best graphics program out there. GIMP is nice for little things at work, but for personal use i would never use it.
75gb
dev, with mirror link: http://blogs.msdn.com/rickbrew/
http://64.233.167.104/search?q=cache:M2DW9zE1bnIJ: www.eecs.wsu.edu/paint.net/+&hl=en/
Much faster than either of the mirrors listed.
Hmm.... sounds fun. Maybe I should try it on a work computer so I can get a new one...
Unfortunately, just like most anti-particles in our universe, it appears that Paint.NET is in short supply.
You should care because one of the nicest features of GIMP, and indeed all cross platform OSS is that it DOES work on Windows. It's a major help to development to have that user base. If GIMP gets dropped for Paint.NET on windows ( which I'm not saying/seeing it will, but it DOES apparently have MS's interest ) then GIMP will lose "hands at the wheel" for development/testing and that will contribute to it losing a bit of steam, even if YOUR only concernt is linux. Ask not for who the bell tolls, sir, it tolls for thee.
BSD-like License: http://www.eecs.wsu.edu/paint.net/legal.html
Considering that it IS open source, your post looks rather moronic. FYI, RTFM before putting virtual foot in mouth.
try drawing with the fat brush
i am running a 3.0+ ghz and 2GB ram dell and the graphics painting sucks
they may want to work on speed a bit if they want to be taken seriously
I'd say, just like the article, it's intended to be a replacement for MS-Paint. It doesn't appear to have anywhere near all of the advanced features of Gimp.
It has layers, and an effects API, but that seems to be where the similarity ends.
The interface appears to be simple like MS Paint's, but I think it's seriously overstating that it's a Gimp competitor. Heck, sounds like the project has only been around for 2 semesters. How mature could it be compared to Gimp or Photoshop?
torrents are fun
FYI: .NET 1.1 installed. :)
Program also works on Windows 2000 with
First impressions: sure beats MS Paint
"In the spirit of all this freedom, we welcome any suggestions, as well as provide the source code free of charge for anyone who wishes to tinker with it. Please explore this website, download the software and try out many of the things you would do on those expensive commercial applications."
and the license
" Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy of this software and associated documentation files (the "Software"), to deal in the Software without restriction, including without limitation the rights to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell copies of the Software, and to permit persons to whom the Software is furnished to do so, subject to the following conditions:
The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software.
"
Well fuck me, MS is sponsoring not just free software but Free software, Very interesting! Oh and can we take this and shove it on Linux?
You would think Microsoft wouldn't let people mirror their software - after all, they always tell people that you can't trust software on mirrors. Huge security risk, you know.
I have blog like everyone else
The fact is that the GIMP UI sucks and the developers don't care. Therefore it's inevitable that GIMP will eventually be replaced by something whose UI doesn't suck. It might be some evolution of Inkscape, or it might be a port of Paint.NET, but it must happen, and the sooner the better as far as I'm concerned.
You don't.
First of all, the .NET framework is not badly designed. It's one of the best-designed products Microsoft ever came up with. The reason Microsoft released so much crap over the years, is probably because all their best programmers were working on .NET.
Secondly, their exist free (as in free software) alternatives. Mono is the best-known one, an other is DotGNU Portable.NET. But they're not 100 % complete yet, so I don't know if this Paint.NET will work.
The XP requirement is due to the use of GDI+, which is included with XP.
= /library/en-us/gdicpp/GDIPlus/GDIPlus.asp
However, GDI+ can be installed on NT4,W2K,Win98,ME see http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?url
As Linux doesn't have GDI+ I doubt very much that it will work with Mono.
why does the name have .NET?
I'm calling in Captain Obvious on this one...
http://www.allometry.com
Heretic. Turn in your Linux / Open Source badge and exit the building. Get out.
"Who are in control, they are not in control of anything - they don't even control themselves!" - Glen Beck
Ummm...I use the GIMP every day. I'm a website developer and graphic designer. I like Photoshop better than the GIMP, but other than some less-than-perfect GUI issues, I love the GIMP as well.
BenCurry.net
I see several interesting things here. Note how they had to use a GDI+ 'extension'? And someone is reporting sluggishness anyway, even on hardware that is fairly new. Tells me .net suffers from Java's Disease along with any other emulated environment and that the move to add in native hooks is already well underway. And of course it is in Microsoft's interest to make sure that .NET is 'multiplatform' in the hype but Windows only in practice.
.net and all it's works are nothing but a trap for the unwary. And will never live up to the hype anymore than Java did, although there is now hope for Java to become useful by jetisoning the emulation and making it just another object oriented language that GCC will grind down to ELF executables.
Let this be an object lesson for all you Mono fetishists,
Democrat delenda est
The UI is fine if you make an effort to learn to use it.
I believe thats exactly what everyone is complaining about. I'm sure the GUI is certainly usable once you learn it, the problem is that there is an enormously steep learning curve involved that turns the majority of potential users away.
If I replaced your car's steering wheel with joysticks, I'm sure that once you learn it you'll drive just fine. But you'll still curse me for forcing you to learn to drive that way. Most people will probably just give up. At the same time, I'm sure that there will be someone out there who will indeed be willing to learn it and say to everyone else "put some effort in, you whiny idiots."
I will stick with GIMP or Photoshop thanks. Maybe this program will mature in time and I wish the best to the development team. It may sound like I am being harsh and I apologize for that. But this whole topic came off very trollish to Me.
If Tyranny and Oppression come to this land,
it will be in the guise of fighting a foreign enemy. -James Madison
same here
Except, I'm starting to use the GIMP even more than Photoshop lately. I guess I'm just getting more comfortable with it.
I still don't understand why everyone has so many problems with the interface. Makes me think people are just re-hashing old horror stories from before 2.0. To me it behaves just like any other application.
ok, so.....
layer support sucks. only very few basic layer modes.
to work on multiple images, you basically have to start another instance of the program. functional but not efficient.
it is incredibly slow. i'm running it on a 1.8 GHz P4, 1 gig of RAM. I apply an effect on a decent size image, and go get a cup of coffee.
oh, try the "re-color" tool, if you've got nothing to do for a while.
can't get anti-aliasing to work right.
interface flickers quite a bit as you navigate through the menus. not critical, but rather annoying.
color picker does not display the color in hex, which makes it harder to use for web graphics.
on a good note, the interface is vaguely familiar to the ubiquitous and expensive software that we all love so much.
how is this anti-GIMP, anyways? it's not cross-platform, it's quite a bit slower, and is targeted at a totally different audience. I agree that it's better than MS Paint, but shit, MS Paint should have been retired years ago.
--- sig moved for great justice.
I don't think there is anyone specifically working on this yet, but I'd like to see it.
I downloaded Paint.NET a few days ago to see what it would take to convert it to run on GTK# with mono (much the same way the MonoDevelop guys ported SharpDevelop). The first issue I hit was that it seems to be tightly bound to Ink (the TabletPC SDK).
Nonetheless, I plan to do some more experimenting with it over the next few days. If anyone else is working on this, I'd really like to hear from them.
Joseph Hill (jhill AT arcfocus.com)
"I find that the harder I work, the more luck I seem to have." -- Thomas Jefferson
especially what with its association with MS and the sometimes irrational dislike this inspires in some of us.
.net towards those ends, avoiding any .net project like the proverbial plague is not only wise, it is critical to the self-preservation of any software developer wishing to work in an environment free of Microsoft's coercive control, be it Apple OS X, FreeBSD, GNU/Linux, Palm OS, Solaris, or anything else.
.NET, and, as you say, it addresses a different niche of users.
Based on Microsoft's behavior past and present, its effect on the industry and emergence of technology in general (quite negative), and their publicly stated intentions with respect to Linux, software freedon in general, and freedom to innovate vis-a-vis software patents and ligitagion in general (of which their funding of the SCO debacle is but a precursor), I'd say there is absolutely nothing whatsoever "irrational" about the dislike an association with Microsoft inspires in any of us.
Now, the expression of that dislike can sometimes take irrational forms, just as the expression of anger can on any subject, but that by no means belies the entirely rational, indeed very justified, anger and dislike being felt.
Finally, given Microsoft's long history and ongoing policy of customer lock-in, and their stated strategy of leveraging
I do agree that this program is no threat to the GIMP. Its licensing is more restrictive, it requires
The Future of Human Evolution: Autonomy
Have you heard of page sharing and copy-on-write? Most of these 80MB is shared between two instances of the app. At the same time fore each of the processes it looks like it has 80MB of code and data loaded. In reality both processes have the same thing, except for pages that differ. So code DLLs are mapped to the same areas of physical RAM and data segments are only in physically different locations if they've been written into.
Yet windows task manager shows 80MB anyway, because that's what individual processes see.
"No one likes working in a hamster wheel, and your shop smells of cedar shavings from here." - TaleSpinner
Okay I just loaded it up and I have the following to say about it:
.NET. Why? I don't have a clue.
.NET comparable thing is... Can it be ported? Again--Why is it necessary?
... at least for now. I like Paint.NET's simplicity but speed and memory consumption is unusable and it's hard to explain that to users... and the WinXP only thing is the kicker. I know lots of people still running Win98 and even though The GIMP isn't all that great for Win98, it still kinda runs anyway. (I think it'd be nice if someone out there were to build in a compile option to support Win98 and share the binaries... there's a need!)
(BTW, Thanks to whoever it was that supplied the link to the MSI. Very handy considering the death the original site suffered.)
1. It requires
2. It can only handle one document at a time, though I can load multiple instances. It doesn't QUITE make up for it... probably eats up gobs more memory than it should as a result though.
3. It is GOD-AWFUL slow. My machine is 2GHz with 512MB... not a hot-rod but no slouch neither.
4. There is no ability to drag a layer from one project to another. That's a pretty critical thing when you are importing several images to create a single image.
5. The UI is nice enough... I'm kinda torn between that and the GIMP UI. But since it's the functionality I care more about than the UI, I lean to The GIMP since it clearly has more and performs FAR better.
I could probably add more but I won't. This program is NOT (yet) a threat to The GIMP. And since The GIMP is cross-platform, there is no contest in my mind. Cross-platform, however, doesn't mean anything to those who will be using only Windows for the next 3-4 years. (And for that reason, the UI style is best for Windows-only users since they are likely to adapt to it more quickly than that of The GIMP.)
I think if they could address the problems I listed above, they'd start to have a contender on their hands. I don't like that it's needlessly not cross-platform -- I think someone mentioned something about the Mono project or whatever the Linux
Which would I recommend to users? The GIMP without hesitation
According to one of the GIMP developers, BigSven:
"GIMP is also not meant to be like Photoshop and we aren't trying to win PS users over. We are creating a tool that gets the job done. Some approaches of PS are worth to copy, others aren't. GIMP is not a Photoshop clone and it was never meant to be one." -BigSven
"Gimp was not written as a competitor to Photoshop." -mac[LAG]
Please do not compare GIMP with Photoshop, because that's a very sensitive point with GIMP fanatics, who go out of their way to ignore Photoshop, and wear their ignorance as a badge of pride.
-Don
Take a look and feel free: http://www.PieMenu.com
If they genuinely want FOSS to succeed as a mass-market movement, the slashdotters who keep pulling this line out of their posteriors will need to shut up. Not everybody who wants to use The GIMP is going to be a programmer, or a bored geek with the time free to do such things. For things like the GIMP to succeed, they need to attract graphics professionals - the majority of whom don't care in the slightest about the source code or programming. It's a stupid response, and I wish people would stop saying this every time that somebody has an issue with an open source package. It's called "User feedback", it comes from having "Users" who "Use" your software to "Do things". These strange people don't just sit around their bedrooms and scratch themselves all day, interspersed with the occasional porn download. They have jobs. They get paid to do work. They may go to their boss and say "Look, we can save $xyz by using this excellent free package instead of paying up for package ABC". They will not go to their boss and say "Look, there's this free package I like... can I spent a couple of months hacking it to make it usable for our needs?". Programmers do that. Creative professionals don't.