Many of us have been using the art program of Microsoft i.e. Paint for creating images and painting them with the help of a mouse. The program has been used by beginners as well as experienced. The easy to use program offers you to select from a wide variety of colors, select images, make changes in the size of images, crop them, use spray paint, pencils, erasers, make shapes, make changes in existing photos and many more exciting things. It has been used by artists to create high quality designs using the tools available. As Microsoft has launched its new version of Operating System i.e. Windows 7 in the market, comparisons have started to pop out.
Paint has been included in almost every Microsoft operating system. Microsoft has revamped Ms Paint in new Windows 7 by making it undergo a major facelift. Rather than being hidden in the menu, all of the tools are neatly placed at the upper part of the window. Microsoft has extended its ribbon interface form Office 2007 to new Windows 7 Paint. All the grouped controls are positioned on the header rather than being positioned on the left side. Although, this version uses the PNG file format by default for saving pictures, users can save their images as bitmap files, as well as GIF, PNG, TIFF, and JPEG. Transparency and artistic brushes are helpful in bestowing a truly realistic result. The brushes can only paint for a short span of time and after that user will have to re-click. The idea is to give a feel that the brush has run out of paint. Anti-aliased shapes provided can be resized freely.

Apart from ribbon interface, the following new changes have been introduced by Microsoft in Paint of Windows 7:

Brush stroke types now have better and exciting choices More shape selections are now added The image menu had been restructured to manage functions like image selection, cropping, resizing and rotation Canvas size is 800*400 pixels by default, which can be changed using property menu. Now rulers and gridlines can be used to assist you in drawing Although many changes have been made but there are certain things that have been kept intact by Microsoft; for instance the colors palette is absolutely unaffected.

The following options are available in the tool box:
* Free-Form Select
* Select
* Eraser/Color Eraser
* Fill With Color
* Pick Color
* Magnifier
* Pencil
* Brush
* Airbrush
* Text * Line * Curve
* Rectangle * Polygon * Ellipse
* Rounded Rectangle

Hence, overall if we see ribbon interface is a major new improvement being made in Windows 7 Paint. Besides better appearance, it provides better usability too. People using older versions of MS Paint will not find it difficult to adjust to the new Windows 7 version.

Certainly even the new version of Ms Paint is aimed to fulfill basic painting needs, the improvements to the interface is a clear enhancement from the older Vista and XP versions to provide better user experience.

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