MS Paint for OS X: Your Life Is Now Complete
I was grabbing a beer last week with a friend and we somehow stumbled onto the topic of Photoshop and how a lot of the people we know only use it for the simplest tasks: cropping, re-saving images in different formats, etc. We then joked that those people could use MS Paint, but there’s no MS Paint for OS X. Why Apple failed to include an MS Paint equivalent in OS X I will never know…
I’ve looked on the Internet several times for an MS Paint for OS X and always came up empty-handed. I’ve seen programs like Seashore, but they weren’t slimmed down enough; I wanted something ridiculously simple. Well friends, I’ve finally found the holy grail of simple image editing/painting for OS X: Paintbrush.
Paintbrush is available as a free download and is everything you’d expect from an MS Paint clone. It loads incredibly fast, can open almost any type of image, and lets you edit and paint images quickly and easily. Paintbrush fills the void Apple created when they removed MacPaint from the OS.
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Patrick on April 27th, 2009 at 8:42 am
My life is now complete.
Matt J on April 27th, 2009 at 9:09 am
MS Paint handles both the tasks you described extremely poorly. It does not resize, as far as I know, and has no support for PNG.
YL on August 30th, 2009 at 12:20 am
Bullshit! MSPaint supported PNGs *the latest* when it was released with Windows XP!
Huub on April 27th, 2009 at 9:13 am
Ow.. Macpaint, i believe i still have it on a floppy somewhere..Even with some beautiful pictures.
But does anyone know why Apple stopped with the development of Macpaint?
SirThunder516 on October 22nd, 2009 at 2:56 pm
there wasn’t enough people buying it separately so apple discontinued the entire MacPaint line… but this paintbrush thing is really impressive
Ideafix on April 27th, 2009 at 9:26 am
Well the only reason why I use MS paint is when I do a screenshot: Printscreen -> Paste in MS paint -> Select only the part of the screen I need -> Paste it in my document.
In my mac, I don’t have that need: Command + alt + shit + 3 works for me! =)
Is good to know there is an alternative to MS paint in mac, though.
Guillaume Mahieux-Sudre on April 27th, 2009 at 10:27 am
Already knew that software, but no doubt it’s really useful in some cases (like copy/paste of objects from Pages/Numbers, which looks ugly when pasting in Preview).
Greg on April 27th, 2009 at 12:09 pm
As someone who has done his share of layout and graphic work, Paint on PC’s is an invaluable tool in the toolkit for simple tasks. Perfect by no means, I was astounded coming back to the Mac years ago that Apple never really came up with a replacement for MacPaint. Sure, there must be a fair share of programs like this, but it really should have been built into the OS, or at least tossed in as an aside to iLife.
Matt has a point that resizing is a dicey operation, but PNG is a format Paint will deal with.
Let’s hope this is a worthy Mac client.
kortina on April 27th, 2009 at 1:00 pm
Downloading this immediately. Sweet!
Pustoolio on April 27th, 2009 at 3:22 pm
Cropping, scaling and resizing, changing format can be done with Preview. FWIW.
Jimmy on April 27th, 2009 at 4:03 pm
For me, this is no replacement of MS paint. It’s no where near as easy to use. I dislike how you have to set the size ahead of time. In MS paint you can just adjust it as you go. And the biggest feature that is missing is being able to cut things out, in shapes other than a square. In MS paint there was a little button that had like a star with a dotted line, and then you could cut something out in any shape you wanted; and I used that feature a lot for picture editing. This program does not have that feature.
savaged on April 28th, 2009 at 2:56 am
I shall download this tonight, thanks. I’ll put it with Tux Paint, which the kids love.
Chriswan on April 30th, 2009 at 12:19 am
It still can’t crop or create border by dragging the sides of the pictures like paintbrush
So Paintbrush on Parallels Desktop is still needed in my case :D
Veekee on October 13th, 2009 at 11:25 pm
This software is nooooo where near a replacement for MS Paint. I had to get parallels and download Windows & just to use paint. Most people dont realize all the things you can do with paint. Anyway…this software is crap. You cant even cut a selection and resize or something. MS Paint on Win 7 is completely awesome!!!!!
Eust on November 16th, 2009 at 6:34 pm
Does paintbrush allow you to crop sections out of pictures?