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Windows 7 M3 Build 6780: The New Paint UI!
(Follow me on Twitter: msftkitchen)
Just a couple of hours after writing my little general overview of the new Paint and WordPad in Windows 7, some anonymous kind soul slid a screenshot my way of Paint to share with all of you wonderful readers of my blog! In conjunction with what I wrote below, the screenshot tells it all and should get some of you fairly excited to see the rest of this build. Blah, blah, blah… I’ll save the blabber for another post. =)
(Click the picture for the full-resolution image)
-Stephen
A ribbon with two tabs is kinda missing the point of the ribbon IMHO.
I’m curious about what’s on that View tab, as the primary item I can think of is already in the UI at the lower right edge of the window. Any shots of the view tab?
What concernes me the most is Fitts’ law – I hope there will be some kind of quick access toolbar available while drawing on the canvas – this way – if you are working on some big screens it might be difficult to always go up and down just to switch color or pick another brush. I am, however, quite confident that UX team will solve this in consisten matter.
i personally loved the Ribbion UI in 2007 and would love it if it were incorporated in W7 just like it was here… id love to see a good video/demo soon or the beta… hopefully it does come it october rather than mid-december
It’d be nice if they provided support for layers, but that’s probably too *advanced* in functionality for Paint.
Speaking of advanced functionality, though, if Microsoft is investing this much into redesigning Paint, I hope a professional-level image editing program is also in the works. As Microsoft Office Word is to WordPad, so should this new product to Paint!
So the side & bottom panels in the current Paint gets moved to the Ribbon and you think that's enough of an improvement over the existing Paint application? This is as useless a change as it can be.
I wish they would include Paint.net, which is free and a great product.
and why didn’t they just use paint.net as the replacement for paint and give that a facelift,maybe even support the product. seems to me that this was work well wasted. great going ms.
You’ve got a screenshot of an improved version of the office ribbon. This is also a preview of where they are going with the next office release. Very exciting.
They’ve simplified the ribbon, taking away lot of boxes and chrome, this makes it look cleaner and less distracting. Or they might just be working on this particular ribbon implementation and have not gotten to the extra boxes and gradients.
They’ve done away with the orb, which was problematic, since often users don’t click on the orb and then don’t know how to save their files.
They’ve cleaned up and refined the QAT tool bar, doing away with the rounded edge and left aligning the title, which is a great visual improvement.
Where’s WordPad 6.1 M3?
i know, i love Paint.NET. i hope they will put the ribbon on that.
@vector studio: improved? more like knock off.
If you download the Wave 3 beta version of Windows Live Movie Maker, it has this same “improved” ribbon. Not only does it look dodgy, but a lot of usability in the Office ribbon isn’t there nor even the glow for the title text.
I realize it’s not complete, but like the first post here, what is the point of the ribbon if you’re only going to offer 2-3 buttons per tab. Sure if they were menus you would still be clicking them, but they take up a HUGE amount of space for no apparent purpose. Luckily, yes, the “hide” feature of the office ribbon is intact in this variant.
The ribbon was such a disaster in Office 2007 that they decided to deploy it widely. Two tabs, great, the command you want will still be on the hidden tab.
People, Paint.Net is not a MS product, so you will not see it bundled with Windows. If you like Paint.Net, or any other piece of third party software, by all means feel free to use it, and to keep the MS subequivalent closed up.
Wordpad / Notepad?? Get Notepad++.
Paint?? Get the GIMP.
THANK YOU for these reasons:
- Paint finally gets updated.
- The Ribbon is awesome.
- This finally looks like a great app for the quick image editing I’d like to do on machines I can’t install Paint.NET.
*drool*
Finally, a UI for Paint that isn’t pain. Took long enough, although at this late point I’ll probably stick to Paint.NET (unless, of course, the functionality of Paint has finally stopped being painful as well).
Stupid design choice to reduce the design area in the shortest dimension on most displays.
Apparently in the rush to jam the ribbon into apps, they forgot why it was on the side of the display in the first place.
A new user interface is useless without any new application features. I wonder, did they change anything in code?
Who cares about Paint anymore? They should have done away with it long ago and bought Corel or they should just buy Paint.Net as a stop gap now.
Wordpad? When was the last time you used Wordpad other than to open a large file or one with pictures on a machine that didn’t have a real text or RTF editing tool installed.
Microsoft needs to get rid of both of them and offer something useful instead of wasting development time and dollars on such arcane and mostly useless products. Put something good in the box or don’t put anything at all. And make them optional for crying out loud. Who wants to waste 3 MB of disk space on Paint.
Pete: …because 3MB of wasted disk space usage is such an atrocity these days. lol. I’m sure there are much more useless things sitting around on your harddrive taking up 3MB than Paint.
Personally, I use Paint and WordPad all the time. I am a writer; I write daily. Do you know what I use to write in? WordPad. Arcane as it may be, I find it to be worth it’s weight in MB and then some.
As far as Paint goes, there isn’t a whole lot I can’t do with it. Sure, I understand where a person like you feels like you feel about it but I’ve worked with MS Paint for so long that I am way more productive with it than anything else out there. Can I use it for ALL of my photo-editing needs? No. But I can for 75-80% of them. If I can get updated versions of both of these “arcane” applications in Windows 7, I’m a happy camper!
Personally I think the look is awful. I thought Gnome wasted screen real estate but Win7 is going to take the cake!
We use the office ribbon in our application, and while I think it’s an interesting UI, I think it came along at the wrong time. These days all laptops and most LCDs are going to wide screen. Just as we lose height real estate on our screens, and gain width, Microsoft creates something that takes up a lot of space height wise, giving you less screen real estate.
Hmm. Interesting. Too bad I never use Wordpad.
Paint is supposed to be an entry-level application – it has to be simple to use. The core users of paint don’t want the interface to change (much) – they’re glad the interface stays the same, version after version after version.
All you people saying that Paint doesn’t have enough features are not the target audience.
For myself, I think the ribbon looks cool in demos, AND YET is a waste of space and slows me down. If something took that much space, but was easier to use, then I suppose it would be worth it. It is amazing that there isn’t a choice to turn it off. I have not ever been as unproductive moving between versions of office as to Office 2007.
Software vendors who made the interface more intuitive and useful rather than pretty will get my $.
i love the colors. but there are still some bugs.