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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?
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.
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.
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
I think what he's trying to say is "I am scared to bring my hax0red version of photoshop to work" :)
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?
"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.
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."
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.
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.
Since they say that Paint.NET is the Anti-GIMP, if I install both this software and The GIMP at the same time, will my laptop explode?
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