Paean to Paint

With Valentine's Day drawing near, Jensen Harris posed an interesting question on his blog last week: What software do you love? The fun part is reading the comments (up to 145 of them so far). Some of the software mentioned by the readers brought back very fond memories; some descriptions intrigued me into making note of the name to look into later.

So I started thinking about the question. There were quite a few contenders, but I finally recognized that my favorite of them all is...Microsoft Paint.

Yeah, I know, nobody respects Paint and a list of all the graphics things it can't do would go on and on...but there it is, number one on my list. Why? It does what I need, simply and quickly and without a fuss. Anthropomorphically, I see Paint as a sturdy little mule.

I can open a digital photo in Paint, resize the image file, and save it under a new name, in about the same time it takes my more robust graphics application just to launch and open the file. I can customize screenshots quickly and effectively, without the "noise" generated when I work in a more complex app. Paint just does what I want.

There have been very few improvements to Paint over the years, and I'm glad. Dear Paint, don't ever change.

Is there software that you're especially fond of? Head over to Jensen's and add your favorite to the growing list.

Comments

• Anonymous
  February 10, 2006
  Another simple and free alternative to paint is Paint.Net. Found over at http://www.eecs.wsu.edu/paint.net/ it's a very impressive program.
  
  Much as paint is nice and simple, it's sometimes a bit too limited! ;)
• Anonymous
  February 12, 2006
  I saw Paint.Net mentioned in Jensen's post comments and that was one I was intrigued enough to flag, Mat. I'm going to try it because I'm not happy with the mature Paint Shop Pro (years ago PSP was good for my purposes but it got too bloated). However, for the quick crop/cut/resize/recolor/change text activities, I'm pretty sure I'll stay loyal to Paint. :-)