What’s in a name? Some names describe exactly what the app does. Word is a word processor. Mail is email. Contacts is a list of contacts.
Going back a few decades, Apple popularized Mac apps with MacPaint and MacWrite. There was no mistake about what each app did. If an app’s name is important, maybe this new Mac app is paying homage to the past.
Jobs’ MacPaint Beget JobsPainter
Frankly, it’s difficult to imagine the stir that MacPaint caused the world way back in the day. It didn’t do much. It was black and white and not that many shades of gray.
Here we are, well into the 21st century, and Mac graphic applications like Photoshop have become wildly popular and wondrous tools of the design trade.
At the other end of the scale is JobsPainter, a delightfully clever graphics app for the Mac which seems to follow MacPaint’s genealogy.
Even the name– JobsPainter– carries a certain historic cache, as it was Apple’s co-founder, Steve Jobs, who led the Mac team back in the early 1980s, which also launched MacPaint and MacWrite.
JobsPainter is, well, a paint app; an image editor with floating palettes of familiar graphic tools.
It’s simple, instantly familiar and very good for creating drawings, sketches, or teaching young Mac users the basics of digital design.
Does this look familiar?
How about this?
Doesn’t it have the visual smell of MacPaint?
Unlike MacPaint, JobsPainter is full on Mac of the 21st century, complete with options to print drawings, zoom in or out of images, even open multiple images at the same time.
JobsPainter has drawing and paint brushes, undo, transparency, and options to change the canvas or image size.
Multiple images can be combined to form a single image. And, it comes with basic shape tools, including rectangle, ellipse, and rounded rectangle.
Colors can be inverted and images can be flipped horizontal or vertical.
You’re not likely to win many graphic design awards with JobsPainter, but for a few dollars it’s good enough to keep my pre-schooler, kindergartener, and elementary school curtain climbers busy learning the tools of tomorrow.
