16 comments

[ 0.23 ms ] story [ 47.3 ms ] thread
It's not MacPaint without Fat Bits!

And all those fill patterns... I remember using the brick pattern to make a wall and then spray-painting on it with the spray paint can. After that I kind of ran out of ideas on what to do.

I can still easily picture some of the patterns in my head, like the 3d ball one and the pie crust lattice one.

https://ia601607.us.archive.org/11/items/mac_Paint_2/00_scre...

Also, as a fairly young kid using MacPaint, I never really understood that the icon for the fill/paint can tool literally represented paint being poured out of a can; it always just looked like a unique, sort of abstract cursor shape to me. It wasn't until decades later using Pixelmator with its more photo-realistic tool icon (with the paint pouring out the opposite side) that I connected the dots on why the fill tool looks the way it does. It does give me sympathy for younger folks during the period of time when "Save" was still commonly represented by a floppy disk.

(Screenshot of the Pixelmator tool palette here: https://apple.stackexchange.com/q/139323)

Came here to say the same. I was willing to overlook the vectorization creating a very unexpected aesthetic. But the missing pattern brushes were a bridge too far!

The real version of MacPaint can be found here: https://archive.org/details/mac_Paint_2 but it’s not particularly mobile friendly.

There was a trick where you drew a circle, selected it, then there was a way to drag it around, leaving behind copies (option-drag?), which if you did it slowly and carefully, gave a decent approximation of a pipe. I remember drawing lots of intricate pipe networks as a child.
Being that this is a vector tool, maybe they should have emulated MacDraw instead.

My favorite thing to do with the Macintosh in my third grade classroom was to draw intricate mazes in MacPaint and then use the paint bucket tool on them. With that processor and algorithm, one could watch the maze complete itself in real time. A decidedly raster pastime!

Flood fill - the original AI!
I really miss the platinum UI. I’ve seen a few attempts at themes that kind of look like it for gtk, but they bit rot way too fast. Ah nostalgia.
I'm pretty sure this is just a skinned version of tldraw set to a Mac UI.
KidPix is my nostalgic painting program.
NeoPaint [0] for DOS was probably my first. I have few specific memories of using the software, unfortunately. But I ran it in DOSBox sometime in the last year and found the experience familiar but also not.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NeoPaint

Oh my, I thought until a number of years ago KidPix was a fever dream I imagined because nobody else in my hometown had ever used it or heard of it.
As great as this recreation is, it can't be MacPaint without the spray can and paint patterns.
Koala Paint, anyone?
It's very cute, but all the fun was ruined for me as soon as I saw it was vector-based.

Part of the charm of that era was the pixel-by-pixel determination.