Tag: Windows

Paint No More

Microsoft is deprecating MS Paint. I'm never been a Windows, but on the few times I've had one on a work desk, MS Paint was a cute, useful tool; BMP was a terrible format, but once it could save as PNG or JPG it was fine.

Update 2017-07-27: Paint isn't being killed, but sent to a farm upstate

I'd mock, but oddly OS X has never shipped with a real paint program. The closest is an Xcode sample project Sketch, which IIRC was shipped pre-installed at one time, and you can grab Xcode for free and build (you may have to open the project and set Deployment Target to your OS version, because it'll be too old). And Sketch is just a toy line-drawing program, not a pixel editor. You can sort of draw in Apple Notes now, but don't rely on that, I get terrible results and often lose those sketches.

Obviously, there's plenty of professional software, like GraphicConverter, Acorn, Pixelmator, Sketch - no relation?, Photoshop, etc. I miss Fractal Design Painter, but dislike the way Corel Painter went.

I'm not opposed to leaving this to independent developers, just surprised by Apple not Sherlocking a major application category.

You Have Updates

WordPress just told me I have a bunch of updates, so I pushed the button, at my convenience. iPhone has a bunch of updates, but I certainly don't have autoupdate turned on, I'll look at those when I feel like it.

I don't understand how people put up with their software deciding to "update" on them without permission.

Mac is insistent with the "updates waiting" dialog, but you can tell it to fuck off indefinitely.

Linux is like a broken car you have to go dumpster-diving to find new parts for.

But Windows breaks into your home to change your shit around. Just no.

Installers

Indie game dev leads you to some dark and terrible places.

I so miss the App Store being an endless payout slot machine without spending $10M on advertising, and miss the 6-figure jobs for fixing peoples' apps because nobody knew Objective-C (even less know it now, but they're stupidly trying to rewrite code they don't understand into Swift, which will break again in 6 months).

Now I'm a poor but honest pixel farmer, forced to shovel shit to get to market.

Making a Mac binary for Reaper's Crypt was trivial (on a Mac, probably impossible elsewhere), and produced 1 file: "Reaper's Crypt.app" (a Mac application bundle, hiding all the mess so you don't see it).

Making a Linux binary was not much harder, and produced 17 files and directories, with libraries and data scattered all over, with the binary sitting in the middle where nobody could see it. So I'll have to make a little script to go launch that untidy mess. When I did Linux, there were at least 3 standards for icons, and by now I'm sure there are 13 more, so they get a raw image file.

Making a Windows binary required me to install WINE with MacPorts, which took hours, and the binary is in the middle of a similar mess of 20 files and directories. So for this I need an installer to make a .msi file, which nobody I know has done this decade; I think I have a handle on this. But now I don't know if I need 32-bit "win32" or 64-bit "win32" (what.); there's no fat binaries in Windows, so it's one or the other.

I am not Hercules, and these Augean stables are filthy.