I tried Paint.NET, and quickly gave up, after I found out that it doesn’t even have one of the most basic necessities in computer graphics - “snap to grid”.
I could be wrong, but I think snap to grid is patented functionality, which may be why they didn’t include it. I would just send them an email and ask.
Hey Now Jeff,
I heard a great conversation on Paint.NET on DNR #229 with Rick Brewster. $10,000 what can I say, Wow!
Coding Horror Fan,
Catto
Bravo, Mr. Atwood. I too am happy to pay for those great small programs that I find essential. The call for PayPal- or charity-donations for non-commercial projects is spot-on.
Radiohead’s recent experiment I think is very telling. In case you’ve been living under a rock, Radiohead released a new album without a record label and charged “whatever you want to pay” for the album. The average price paid for the new album was estimated to be between $5.00 and $8.00 with over 60% of people not paying anything ($0.00).
I wonder, is there an economic correlation that can be made to the results Radiohead received versus what happens in the Open Source Software donations arena?
Also, would asking potential users to “pay what you think this software is worth” before downloading be a better business model than simply asking for donations? It’s subtle, but they psychology is very different.
“Wasn’t Paint.net originally written with MS support as a proof-of-concept of the .NET application?” -Chubber
No. That was not the intent of Paint.NET.
Thanks for the Taskix link. I have wanted this for so many years, and I never thought I was to see it without a new windows.
Stuff like Taskix, Ultramon, Tortoisesvn, etc, . just makes Windows so much better.
Does anybody know any good virtual desktop add-on to windows? I have used it on linux, now Leopard has it, but windows? I am used to working with multiple monitors now, but I don’t have them all the time, so it would be nice with some extra desktops.
There are some nifty ideas and utilities out there, but sadly so many are buggy or make the computer crash. I am open to test and try new applications. But when the application that extend the operating system I tend to be more cautioned.
Peter, try the Virtual Desktop Manager power toy found at:
http://www.microsoft.com/windowsxp/downloads/powertoys/xppowertoys.mspx
People accepting donations should use more than a single Paypal link. There’s a big community out there which refuses to use Paypal for various reasons. Why limit yourself to a single source? I know Paypal is the most popular but still. Google and Amazon have similar payment methods.
Michael - There are many applications which I would not have “paid” anything for had they asked it that way, that I did donate to later on after using. Paint.NET would be one such example - I expected very little when downloading (and thus would have thus “paid” nothing), but after using it for a while I really like it (and have sent a few bucks their way).
I couldn’t agree more about Paint.NET! It is a super product with a well thought out interface. I must prefer its dialogs to the generic ones seen in other applications.
As an example I pick the save dialog you see when you close Paint.NET with unsaved changes. Rather than the generic “Do you want to save?” with yes and no buttons it presents a custom dialog with buttons labeled “Save” “Discard” and “Cancel”.
This is much better as you know what clicking each button will do whereas the generic dialog takes a second for you to think “Umm what does clicking yes do?”.
Several times I have used programs which change the wording to something like “Do you want to discard changes?” and I am lazy so do not read assuming it is asking me to say so I click “Yes” and then wonder why I lost 2 hours work!
Peter: Have a look at VirtuaWin (http://virtuawin.sourceforge.net/). I have used it a lot over the years and it is a solid bit of software.
But open source projects don’t – so they
often have no provision for payment of any
kind. That is a mistake
Why? As a member in a small open source project, I can say that we find it truly hard to find out what to do with donations. None of us has the intention to quit his job and live by the donations. Donations are nice because they show the user’s gratitude and are thus a very good kind of feedback. But what do you imagine we should buy?
If I want to vote with my wallet, make it
easy for me to give you my money.
Why? Why should an open source project do everything somebody wants? How about a blog post like this one? Much better than money in my book.
I totally agree with this cause. I’ve been thinking the same thing recently after trying out Enso from humanized.com
I also thought it’d be a good idea to make a few donations to my favorite podcasts (thisweekintech.com for example)
Why don’t you start some sort of cause, call it “Support a small vendor” and then have people become members of it. We can then add a button (that you can design in Paint.NET :P) to our websites that shows our support for this cause, and if clicked on, would direct to a site that explains in full detail what it is all about?
Rob Janssen, the site is kiva.org (Kiva - Loans that change lives).
It’s a very active site with loans to people third world (instead of donations) to help them with their (nano) business.
There’s a work in progress wich you may find interesting. It’s very rough right now, maybe more a proof of concept than a working project but it may grow fast and bring us a new way to donate money to deserving works!
I’m talking about Kaaaki, actually in alfa stage and under heavy development. You can’t rely on it yet but if you’re courious you can have a look at www.kaaaki.com
And in the spirit of kaaaki, if you liked this post, you can kaaaki me by clicking on: http://www.kaaaki.com/use/pay/13
Ciao!
Mich!
Good point- I actually read this and went ahead and added a donation button to my site.
I initially had reservations about it, because a few people had contacted me saying “I’d happily pay a donation if you implement feature x”, and while most of the stuff I implement is based off user suggestions, I was a little worried about the encouraging that sort of energy (e.g people trying to buy my time as opposed to expressing appreciation)- Like I said, I pay a lot of attention to what people ask for… But my project is ultimately a free-time one, and I want to spend the development time available to me on what will be the most useful to the most people, not necessarily on what people who donate are asking for.
However, your post changed my mind a little on that- I think it’s important to give people an avenue to express their appreciation for a project. It’s awesome that free, high quality software is available on the internet, but I think it’s also important to help out the developers and make it easier for them to keep on providing great software. They do have hosting costs, the occasional financial mishap (I had to send my hard drive to a recovery service to get my source coe back, once. Lemme tell you, not doing regular backups is a mistake you only make once), etc, and covering that goes a long way in making sure the developers can keep on developing, even if it IS in their free time.
For my part, I’m throwing a couple bucks towards Launchy SlickRun- I use them both, and they both shave at least a few minutes off my workflow every single day. That’s my favorite kind of software.
Cheers, and thanks for changing my mind:D
-Alex
try CLCL as alternative to ClipX
http://www.nakka.com/soft/clcl/index_eng.html
It is far more advanced
I also thought it’d be a good idea to make a few donations to my favorite podcasts (thisweekintech.com for example)
Why don’t you start some sort of cause, call it “Support a small vendor” and then have people become members of it. We can then add a button (that you can design in Paint.NET :P) to our websites that shows our support for this cause, and if clicked on, would direct to a site that explains in full detail what it is all about?
I could be wrong, but I think snap to grid is patented functionality,
which may be why they didn’t include it.
That IsNot a suprise to me, although I’ve not heard it before. But that’s why having the source is important!