PaintFroth

PaintFroth is OG Paint for your Mac. One canvas, sixteen tools down the left, a strip of colours along the bottom, and nothing at all between you and the pixels. If you learned to draw on a computer by dragging a pencil around a grey window, this is the window.

No account, no cloud, no subscription meter running while you doodle. It opens instantly, it draws the moment you press the mouse, and every picture stays on your machine.

Highlights

1. The tool box you remember - pencil, brush, airbrush, eraser, fill, colour picker, magnifier, text, line, curve, rectangle, polygon, ellipse and rounded rectangle, plus free-form and rectangular select.
2. Pixels you can actually see - zoom to 8x, turn the grid on, and place single pixels by hand the way pixel art is meant to be made.
3. A real 28 colour palette - the classic two rows, with a full colour editor behind them when you want something that is not on the strip.
4. Flip, rotate, stretch, skew, invert - the image menu that taught a generation what those words mean, all still one click away.
5. Opens and saves the old formats - PNG, GIF, JPEG, TIFF, WebP, icons, and BMP in monochrome, 16 colour, 256 colour and 24-bit.
6. Save cannot overwrite your original - editing a photo writes a -painted copy next to it, in the same format, and leaves the file you opened exactly as it was.
7. Watch your own drawing back - every stroke is kept, so you can scrub the history or export the whole session as an animated GIF.
8. Set it as your desktop picture - finish a drawing and put it straight on the desktop, exactly as you used to.
9. Themes for whichever era you miss - the original grey and teal, a dark version of it, a flatter modern look, and a few that are pure fun.
10. Nothing phones home - no telemetry, no uploads, no account. The only thing it ever fetches is an address you type in yourself.

How it works

Open PaintFroth and there is a blank canvas waiting. Pick a tool, pick a colour, and draw. Double-click a picture in Finder and it opens here. Undo goes back as far as you like, and the drawing is autosaved as you go, so closing the window never loses anything. If there is unsaved work when you close, it asks first.

Save never touches the picture you opened. Edit a photo, hit Save, and PaintFroth writes a new file beside it with -painted on the end, in the same format. The original is still there, untouched, however many times you save. Save As is still there when you want to choose the name and the place yourself. There is no project file, no library to import into, and no step between finishing a picture and having a file.

Perfect for

1. Anyone who misses the original - the same tools, the same grey window, running properly on a modern Mac.
2. Pixel artists and sprite makers - a grid, an 8x zoom and a hard one-pixel pencil, with none of the ceremony of a big art app.
3. Quick edits and annotations - crop a screenshot, scribble an arrow, drop in a caption and save, in about ten seconds.
4. Kids learning to draw on a computer - the simplest possible drawing program, with nothing to accidentally subscribe to.
5. Anyone tired of heavyweight editors - for the times you want a canvas and a pencil, not layers and a workspace.