“If you remember MacPaint, then don’t tell anyone. You’re older than you think. Way back in the day, when Apple’s birth pangs brought us the Mac, it also brought along MacPaint, a bitmap graphics app sans color,” Ron McElfresh reports fro McSolo. “The claim to fame was point and click drawing and integration with MacWrite, Apple’s Mac word processor. MacPaint died in the late 1980s.”
“If MacPaint were alive today, it would look something like iArt Pro. Instead of being priced at $125, as MacPaint 2.0 was back in 1988, it would be priced at $7.99, the same as iArt Pro,” McElfresh reports. “What you get with iArt Pro is familiar to MacPaint users. A color palette, a lasso, an erase, fill with color, pick color, a pencil and brush, a magnifier, and assorted tools from rectangle to curve to line, and effects from blur to sharpen to burn to dodge and more.”
McElfresh reports, “iArt Pro is misnamed and shouldn’t be considered pro anything. I’d like to say that it’s about as simple as a painting app can be. It’s not. $5 less and you can try iPaint which is ruthlessly crude (three brushes and nine colors but no eraser). Free gets you Paintbrush which is really closer to MacPaint and priced right.”
Read more in the full article, with links to the apps, here.
Yeah…OK….I even USED MacPaint! Created my first computer designed logo in it. Thanks MDN. Make me feel old today. 😛
I preferred Canvas — raster and vector combined!
Do anyone out there know the status of CANVAS…? Will they ever deliver a Mac version?
Here’s your answer.
http://reviews.cnet.com/8301-13727_7-10328604-263.html
I loved Canvas 3.5 back in the day. I used it all the time when in grad school. Then the program just turned to complete crap.
Anyone remember Futurewave Smartsketch??…incredible program…almost as good as Bryce 2 for PowerMac.
Amorphium blew my mind with the sculpting wheel…I made
people drool over my Lombard Powerbook with those programs…and it still runs today.
Yeah. I remember. It didn’t sell, so Jonathan Gay turned it into an animation program – Futurewave Splash, added a plugin for the new Netscape browser application and then sold it to MacroMedia who renamed it Flash.
Have a technical question and would very much appreciate if someone could help to address it?
Just bought s new Mac Book Air which came with the Lion installation memory stick. Can I use it to install Lion on my iMac? I am currently running Snow Leopard there?
I haven’t used the OS on a USB stick yet. But I would assume its much like the Install DVDs that used to come with the computer. Those were tied to the specific model release of that Mac. So, no, I would say that USB stick probably only works with that model of a MacBook Air.
But its worth a shot anyway. Its either gonna let you install it, or it won’t work at all.
yes, you can.
Yes.
I used my Lion install disk (that I made) to upgrade my girlfriend’s MacBook. It said 5 household licenses so I went for it and it worked.
I want SuperPaint and WriteNow back or at least something that can read the files.
January 24, 1984. Macintosh 128k. One of the very first customers to buy. Stayed awake for 36 hours straight, mostly playing with MacPaint. When I woke up I couldn’t see straight. Went to the Doc. Diagnosis: Severe eye strain. Eyedrops & rest (eyes closed) fixed it, then right back to MacPaint, with breaks this time. That’s what started it all, MacPaint.
I want to see Shufflepuck Cafe for the iPad!
“I’m not a wimp!”
That was such a good game!!!
Not only do I remember MacPaint. Not only did I use MacPaint. I still have my MacPaint Disk.
Thanks, Steve
Hey, lets not forget to thank Bill Atkinson.
For QuickDraw as well as MacPaint!
Do you mean MacDraw. That came out in ’84.
I ran a consulting business with that original program for 16 years before I needed to upgrade to a more sophisticated piece of software.
Pretty sure he means QuickDraw: that was the graphics rendering engine that made MacPaint, MacDraw… heck, everything that wrote to the screen, possible.
Also Bill wrote HyperCard, if I’m not mistaken. ::sniffle::
I remember MacDraw. A couple of Apple employees came by to the Orange County (California) Mac user group meeting some of us started and demoed the beta version of that program. Really cool stuff as we were just starting to see that the Mac was capable of doing. (yes, I just really dated myself)
I did mean QuickDraw by Bill Atkinson. He also did HyperCard, but that came later.
The headline was kind of misleading. It implies that Apple released an official update to MacPaint. A less-than-honest trick to get me to click on the story, and it worked.
I’m proud to admit that I used MacPaint. Without MacPaint, I probably wouldn’t be a graphic designer today, although, I have to say that I preferred PixelPaint which came out a few years later.
Yep! MacPaint, MacDraw, MacWrite used them all and then later Cricket Draw. Then moved on to Illustrator, PageMaker the list goes on.
I didn’t have a Mac back then, I had an Atari 520 ST. So I used NeoPaint (and another paint app, can’t remember the name). Same idea, but it had 16 colors … unlike MacPaint’s initial black and white … which could be chosen from 512 possible colors. It also supported color ramp animation … which wasn’t really animation, but kind of cool anyway at the time.