Archive of UserLand's first discussion group, started October 5, 1998.

Complaint of the Day

Author:Chris Cothrun
Posted:7/21/2000; 12:10:20 PM
Topic:Complaint of the Day
Msg #:18891
Prev/Next:18890 / 18892

I fully expected MS to have updated MSPaint by the time Win98 came out to include this feature. It is an understandable oversight in 1994-1995 when they rolled out win95, as the concept that everyone could create content for the internet was not widely understood and even MS was gunning for their own MSN online service.

But by 1998, I think they even had FrontPage Express available for free, their answer to Netscape Composer. They have that silly little image editing application that comes with Office97 that will save .jpg and .gif files. All the pieces and parts are there, it wouldn't be giving very much away to let MSPaint save files in a web friendly format. Why not integrate all this into a set of utilities that allowed simple page creation and uploading that comes with the operating system?

And while they were at it, they could have offered a free hosting service that was the default option for their Web Publishing Wizard. Brand it with Hotmail or MSN or something along those lines. It would have provided a nice upgrade path to FrontPage, too.

Ah well, it would have been nice back in 1996 when I aspired to get stuff on the internet. Now I've got my own tools that are much better than they would give away. No, I take that back, it would be nice to have a basic set of web publishing tools included. Imagine how much easier it would be to help people get started if there were the basic tools there. Especially the Image tools / .gif / .jpg.

Hmm, now I'm going to drift... I went to ultimatepaint.com and downloaded the freeware Ultimate Paint 1.91. Its just about exactly what I'm asking for. Sure, its a little funky. No options on color depth or quality when saving .jpg and .gif. But it works. I'm gonna have to reccomend this from now on. Not as nice as say Paint Shop Pro but free as in beer has some nice advantages for lots of people.

Since we're somewhat platform agnostic, what exists for the Mac as a starter web page kit? Does MacPaint export .jpg and .gif now? Are there free FTP utilities to get pages to a hosting service ala MS's Web Publishing Wizard?. Linux has The Gimp and Emacs, it doesn't need anything else.

OK, back to my day job.

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