PaintBuster Review

PaintBuster - Busted and Gone! (an app you won't be missing)

Submitted by balance on Tue, 2010-07-06 21:20.
Author's Product Rating:
Ease of Use: 
Effectiveness: 
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The lowest price: 35$
You can buy it at RegNow for that price.
Pros:
it exports OK, the trial allows full functionality for 30 days
Cons:
everything else: counter-intuitive interface, slow application, limited undo (even more limited redo), odd functionality
Review:

Let's start off the review by saying that PaintBuster is dead, as in no longer being developped, updated, etc. and the developing company having shut down for good.

PaintBuster is, or rather was, an application that tried to replace Microsoft Paint. The purpose was to offer users an alternative, but also to expand the feature set that the standard paint had to offer.

One thing that PaintBuster did well (and we'll start with the positive aspect) was the file export. It could export to many formats and in very high quality which was one of its major pluses.

Aside from that, actually creating the content is a whole different issue. Creating content in PaintBuster is a dreadful experience. The paintbrushes look bad, have no soothing and you cannot choose from at least a couple of different brush types. All you get besides a standard brush is a blend, smudge and lighten brush. You can create rectangle outlines and rectangles (filled with color), straight-angled lines and a very strange button tool that allows you to create two old-looking and outdated types of buttons.

Aside from the very awkward user interface which, is a bit counter-intuitive, when using the application, it's not only the Paint that's busted, it's also the user's RAM and computer performance. In fact, the application is so slow, that you likely won't be doing any undo's (as they take about 10-30 seconds to perform).

Finally, when you decide you want to paint the outlines of your picture - you're in for another jaw-busting surprise: it doesn't paint straight. By that, I mean that the application paints only subsets of the actual region contained between the outlines you wish to paint (supposedly to allow the user more control over painted regions).

Conclusion:

Well, PaintBuster was busted from the get-go. An application in it's 11th version, it still failed to optimize for lightweight, feature-filled functionality.