Well I just experienced one of the most frustrating things ever.
Funny, before I bought a MacBook everyone was telling me how great Macs were for creative stuff. Apparently, you can make all kinds of things with one. It's got all sorts of toys you can use to make stuff like music clips and home movies and all that jazz. It just doesn't seem to come with the bog standard features that you get on any Windows machine.
There's no real analogue for WordPad, (heck, the text editor is barely an analogue for Text), it doesn't come with lovely distracting card games (okay, there's chess – but, what the?), iTunes won't let you do half the stuff Windows Media does (unless you pay for an upgrade) and, as I discovered to my horror today, there's no analogue for Paint.
This thing which is supposed to be the creative's best friend does not have a drawing programme included in the basic set-up. Come on, people, if Windows can do it, it can't be that hard!
Oh, I'm sure you can buy a wonderful program that can do that sort of stuff, but a) Mac programs are hideously expensive, so I've been avoiding them, and b) it's 21.30 and I don't feel like shopping – I just want to draw something.
“Okay,” she says, thinking laterally, “You've got Open Office installed on this thing in order to avoid paying for a word processor. There's a thingy called 'Draw' as part of that package – that must surely be an adequate work around.”
Yeah, not so much. As drawing tools go, OO's Draw is soooo much less useful than Paint that I became almost entirely convinced I'd have an easier time if I just picked up my hand-drawn copy and tried to force it into the machine using my amazing mental powers. Then, by the time I had finally created something that looked absolutely terrible compared to what I could have done with Paint, I discovered you can't actually save it as anything other than an Open Office Draw file. No jpg, no gif, no tif. Well, there was the option of pdf, but I wanted an image, not a document.
Were I using a windows machine I would say to myself: “No problem, I'll just get the whole thing on my screen, press “Print Screen” and paste it into something like Irfanview. Only, a) there's no physical way I can get the whole thing on the screen given the less than useful ratios provided by this model of MacBook, and b) there's no printscreen button, so I'd have to go through some stupid time-wasting screen capture rigmarole. Oh, and c) I don't have a program like Irfanview installed on this machine, and I can't be bothered doing it now.
Quite frankly, I'm over it.
Especially since I've already had my share of annoyingly fruitless activities this afternoon. Do you know how difficult it is to find the Estonian word for “square” (as in “draw a square using Paint”)? Not one of my dictionaries was willing to admit that in English usage the word “square” can be a noun. I finally found the word for “quadrangle” (“nelinurk”), but each dictionary would only give me the nominative form. I needed the genative to make the sentences I wanted. So then I went ploughing through a few vocabulary lists to see if I could find a word with a similar spelling structure so I could guess what the genetive form might be. That proved to be about as useful as a cheeseburger to a drowning elephant. There were about six different things to choose from and no guides in sight.
Stupid Estonian and its stupid case forms. Why can't they just use prepositions like the rest of us?
So, yeah, if any one responsible for deciding what programs are included in your basic MacBook set-up is reading this: Paint rules, and you could at least try to match it, you misers. And make it available for us poor mugs who already have MacBooks to download for free. It's the only way I'm going to stop whinging about this.
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