March 10, 2006; updated April 20, 2007
Paint.net is a replacement for the Paint program that comes with Microsoft
Windows. In all the over 20 years that Windows has been available, Microsoft
Paint has gotten almost no attention.
Students at Washington State University decided to build a replacement for MS Paint as a senior design project. Some of the students, now alumni, continue its development. Paint.net was released in May, 2004 and so named because it was built using Microsoft's .NET architecture.
The program is excellent. While it will be instantly familiar to MS Paint users, it is much richer in feature, has a contemporary user interface, includes basic photo retouching tools, and supports more file formats including PNG. Paint.net also has its own file format (.pdn) in which information about layers is preserved. Support for layers makes paint.net much more powerful and useful than MS Paint.
I use paint.net almost daily. One of my common tasks is taking a screenshot, cropping it, resizing it, and saving it for Web use. Paint.net is much better at this task than MS Paint and much, much faster than Adobe Photoshop Elements or Photoshop.
The developers have a page that explains their plans, called the Roadmap. Some good features are coming in the current version 3 and the long-range plan for version 4 looks very serious.
Paint.NET is currently free for the download. Donations used to go to the WSU foundation to support future senior design projects but now support the project itself. Although donating to the school was a nice gesture, I'm happy that the money now goes to keeping this great program available.
March 2, 2006
I am impressed with Xara. It languished when it was owned by Corel, but now it is back in the hands of its original developers. A new version of Xara X, renamed Xara Xtreme, was released in October, 2005 and the price was reduced from $179 to $79.
It is an extraordinary value for the money. It runs very well in older PCs and has minimal memory requirements, a refreshing change from the huge footprints of Adobe products.
There are quite a few demonstration videos at Xara's site. I commend them to you; they are brief, focused, and crisply done.
Xara is planning to create an open source version targeting the Linux and Macintosh markets, an interesting development.
There is one catch. Xara Xtreme can import Adobe Illustrator (ai, eps) files but only up to Illustrator version 7. That leaves a lot of open territory, as Illustrator is effectively at version 11 (CS2). With so many vector files in the Adobe format, this strikes me as quite a limitation.
April 20, 2007
Thank goodness. Somebody at Microsoft came to their senses and changed the name of this product to Microsoft Expression Design. At best it's still an average name but it's a lot better than the original.
After a year, Design has reached the Beta 2 stage, which means only a few months are left before the product is finally available. I downloaded the beta today and will report again when I've had more of a chance to examine the program. If Microsoft's claims prove out, a gauntlet will have been thrown down.
The big news is that Expression Design is able to handle both bitmap and vector editing at the same time from within the same program. That's an impressive step forward. Just to be able to use one program instead of two means only one program to learn and one program to buy. Design is not as feature rich as the Adobe duo of Photoshop and Illustrator and thus is unlikely to make converts out of professional graphics artists, but I believe it could shake up the middle of the market.
Since Expression Design was first announced, Microsoft has made a change. Originally, it was estimated that Design would cost $300, making it incredibly competitive against the Adobe Photoshop/Illustrator pair. Now, however, Microsoft has created a bundle called Expression Studio. Studio includes all four Expression Products - Design, Blend, Web, and Media. The Studio FAQ suggests a price of $600 for Studio. Considering that the individual components were originally listed at about $300 each, Studio is certainly aggressively priced.
However, there is one wrinkle. Expression Design will not be available as a separate product but only as part of Studio. From my perspective, this means that Design is really intended as a tool for developers, perhaps Web developers, as opposed to a general purpose artistic tool. I find that a bit disappointing.
I am very impressed with Expression Web, the successor to FrontPage. If Design shows the same kind of thoughtful effort, it could become a very important product in developer circles. And if the four Expression products integrate well with one another, Expression Web and FrontPage users could easily become Expression Studio customers.
One more piece of good news - Expression Web owners will be able to upgrade to the full studio product for $349. An upgrade to Web from FrontPage costs $99. That makes the list price of Studio for FrontPage users $448.