mspaint.exe for the Mac
Mac OS X comes with lots of things Windows doesn’t. It comes with one of the best browsers out there (Safari), a huge dictionary for both spell checking and definitions, a handful of good media programs (iTunes, iPhoto, and Front Row; I hate each of them but I’m in the very small minority), the best desktop calendar program ever (iCal), an AIM and Jabber client (iChat), an Image Capture program that can pull photos from 90% of cameras and scanners without installing a darn thing, printer drives for gosh near everything, a solid mail client that doesn’t try to take over your life, the simplest and most effective backup software ever (Time Machine), a secure password saver and retriever (Keychain), a system-wide Address Book that any application can hook into, and let’s not forget a decent Unix shell environment. [1]
The one place Windows actually comes with better default software is mspaint.exe. Whether you want to point something out or make highly precise technical diagrams, mspaint is about the easiest thing ever. Sometimes you want to make a boxes-and-lines diagram with OmniGraffle, and sometimes you want to do some Art with Canvas or ZBrush or The 800-Pound Gorilla… and sometimes you just want to draw something.
So today I found PaintBrush, an open-source bitmap editor for Mac OS X. It’s mspaint, translated to the Mac look-and-feel. Its tools are: pencil, eraser, select, paint can, bomb, line, bezier, text, box, and oval. It does no antialiasing. It can’t resize images after you’ve created them. It only has ten levels of undo.
I am so happy.
[1] Insert boring discussion about bundling and anti-trust here.
March 1st, 2008 at 9:13 pm
ha, nice find Joey-mon. I’m with you on iPhoto actually, and who knows, I might be more inclined to get away from iTunes (I hate the way it organizes my mp3s… folders inside of folders inside of folders of chaos) if I could find/knew of a better alternative. I used Audion like omg years ago, but have been relatively happy with iTunes since its debut so never searched around.
I’m actually trying Thunderbird and Firefox 3 out now after growing to dislike Mail and Safari (though I miss both now and fear that my worry going in is going to be true: neither one will satisfy by itself…). So since that was pai waay more information than you needed on this thread, nice find =P
March 8th, 2008 at 1:07 pm
Ryan, my big objection to TBird is that it stores its mail in large files, almost as bad as Entourage.
Makes for nasty long backups.