MS Paint has broken in so many different ways since they started "improving" it. One big frustration is that the hit areas around selection handles are now oversized--probably because someone read about Fitts's Law. You can no longer move small selected regions because whenever your mouse is within a mile (seemingly) of a handle, it grabs the handle instead of the region.
Agreed. It is impossible to make an interface that works well for smaller screens with touch input, and larger screens with pointer input. You will always end up sacrificing information density and precision on the larger screen.
Somebody in the Windows team must have realized that they can now vibecode all the missing features into MS Paint without having to dig into the legacy codebase themselves. New brushes, layers, and now rotation.
We all know where this is headed. Sooner or later, they're going to drag copilot into it.
It sure why the downvotes. Given the number of photopea clones getting vibe coded there really is no excuse for paint to lack functionality found in ImageMagik 30 years ago
Funnily enough, it was because of this missing feature that primary-school-me figured out that you can emulate rotation using the (somewhat inexplicably present) skew feature. Matt Parker did a video about it a few years ago too[1].
So am I saying this is needless bloat and Micro$oft have lost their ways? Yes! Back in my day we had to do it by hand -- the sheer entitlement (pun intended) to expect a computer to do computations for you. The children yearn for practical uses of trigonometry!
MS Paint has broken in so many different ways since they started "improving" it. One big frustration is that the hit areas around selection handles are now oversized--probably because someone read about Fitts's Law. You can no longer move small selected regions because whenever your mouse is within a mile (seemingly) of a handle, it grabs the handle instead of the region.
> probably because someone read about Fitts's Law
probably for touch screens, like all the oversized, over-padded ui everywhere
Agreed. It is impossible to make an interface that works well for smaller screens with touch input, and larger screens with pointer input. You will always end up sacrificing information density and precision on the larger screen.
They should just have a manually selected touch mode. They are second class citizens and should be treated as such.
(2026) in the title made me giggle
It's hard to imagine how the selection rotation demo shown could be less informative...
Because it's a shape rotation, not a selection rotation. I was confused for a minute too.
Somebody in the Windows team must have realized that they can now vibecode all the missing features into MS Paint without having to dig into the legacy codebase themselves. New brushes, layers, and now rotation.
We all know where this is headed. Sooner or later, they're going to drag copilot into it.
It sure why the downvotes. Given the number of photopea clones getting vibe coded there really is no excuse for paint to lack functionality found in ImageMagik 30 years ago
I swear to god and I don't know why, but if they do that, that will be my final straw with Windows
They already did, there's a copilot button on the ribbon now
TiL MS-Paint.exe has a canary version.
Funnily enough, it was because of this missing feature that primary-school-me figured out that you can emulate rotation using the (somewhat inexplicably present) skew feature. Matt Parker did a video about it a few years ago too[1].
So am I saying this is needless bloat and Micro$oft have lost their ways? Yes! Back in my day we had to do it by hand -- the sheer entitlement (pun intended) to expect a computer to do computations for you. The children yearn for practical uses of trigonometry!
[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1LCEiVDHJmc