Follow-up: Microsoft Paint will live on after outpouring of support for 32-year-old program
Microsoft is getting ready to put out to pasture one of its oldest and well-known programs.
Microsoft Paint, which came out the same year I was born — 1985 — appears on a list of features that are removed or deprecated in the Windows 10 Fall Creators Update.” Paint is checked as “deprecated,” which is an interesting way to refer to a soon to-be-discontinued program, meaning it is “not in active development and might be removed in future releases.”
The Microsoft page does not make it clear when exactly the program will be removed.
The concept of Paint is not going away all together. As part of the Windows 10 Creators Update, Microsoft introduced Paint 3D, the evolution of the classic drawing program with support for creating 3D objects and sharing them with a community called “Remix.” While the programs hold the same title, The Guardian notes that Paint 3D is not a straight update to Paint and doesn’t act like one.
For reaction to the news we turned to Clare McGrane, a Windows user in the GeekWire newsroom and illustrator of the above image:
MS Paint was a vital part of my childhood as a fully inducted member of the Microsoft family (my dad has worked there for over 15 years). It was the ideal creative outlet for my shy-and-artistically-untalented younger self, giving me the freedom to write all over the walls in crayon — but not in real life, just in the digital one. I was also a bit of a goody-two-shoes.
I still use it to edit photos and put together images for GeekWire stories. It’s honestly easier than Microsoft’s native photo editor, which I can’t even tell you the name of. Its simplicity, the thing that people seem to dislike about it the most, is what made me love it. You can’t color correct, you can’t put a filter on anything but gosh darn it you can crop a photo in under six seconds without having to deal with a single sub-menu. I’m not looking forward to learning how to do that in a different platform. Today I had the pleasure of using Paint on a Surface touchscreen device with a stylus for the first time, to illustrate this piece. It was a fitting if painful way to say goodbye. #RIPpaint #neverforget
