Windows 8 brings a lot of snazzy new features to the PC, but there still aren’t many apps — never mind good apps — that take advantage of everything Microsoft’s new operating system has to offer.
A handful of small gems, though, have emerged from Microsoft’s Windows Store store, including one particular standout: Fresh Paint.
On the surface, Fresh Paint is a straightforward finger-painting app that lets users “draw” on the screen with four different brushes and a color palette. Once you start to play around, though, it becomes clear that this is much more than an updated MSPaint. Fresh Paint actually makes your “brushstrokes” appear as though you’re painting with oil on a textured canvas.
That level of detail took some serious feats of science and engineering.
Fresh Paint’s origins are in Microsoft Research, where five computer scientists worked several years ago on giving PCs the ability to simulate complex brushstrokes. Painting involves a significant amount of physics: just imagine how thousands of bristles, liquid paint and a rough-surfaced canvas interact. The team needed to create complex algorithms to match each touch and gesture on the screen to real-life paint.
Feedback on the Windows 8 app store has been overwhelmingly positive, with the app drawing a four-star (out of five) rating. Most critiques focus on the fact that Fresh Paint isn’t a professional-grade app that can replace Adobe Photoshop. Ira Snyder, a veteran of Microsoft’s startup business team, says that was never the point, noting that MSPaint continues to ship with Windows 8 for people who need to do basic cropping, resizing and photo editing.
“We were looking to create something that was simple, magic and fun,” Snyder says. “We’re not competing with Photoshop.”
He calls Fresh Paint “the coolest thing I’ve worked on at in Microsoft.” In an app store that desperately needs “cool,” Fresh Paint glistens.
Texto adaptado. Fonte: disponível em: http://money.cnn.com/2012/12/20/technology/innovation/windows-8-fresh-paint/index.html. Acesso em: 23 de dezembro de 2012.
Englishing on the WEB 