Tux Paint

Tux Paint is a painting and drawing application for Windows PC.

Tux Paint is compatible with almost every version of Windows for PC including Windows 95, Windows 98, and Windows ME. This is ideal if a family's children are using an older computer for games and school work. Tux Paint is very kid-friendly, although grownups like it too. It has a simple yet colourful interface which is marketed to appeal even to very young children.

One kid-friendly feature in Tux Paint is the autosave/recover option; things are never truly gone should the program be closed by accident. Children who are too young to read may use the program, and can come back to their art project by picking it out of the saved picture's thumbnail. Another feature of note to parents is the settings display - configuration is accessed apart from the drawing interface to prevent accidental setting changes. In this panel lies the ability to pick language, sound effects, and even what shows up in the drawing interface.

Features for Tux Paint are numerous. There are Tux Paint stamps, designs, effects, colours and brushes of all types. It is geared toward child users exploring to find all the cool tools. In the recent past, 100 new stamps have been added, and there are now separate Tux Paint Stamps, which adds yet more options to unleash a child's creative side.

That all said, Tux Paint is a bitmap type of graphics program. It was introduced to the consumer in 2002 and designed by Bill Kendrick. It still has updates available, although software volunteers do the work so updates may not always come in a timely manner. The software was written in C programming language.

More advanced features include blurring, fading, and a filter which makes the picture appear to be chalk drawn on pavement. Free art and photos are available with a license for free distribution inside later versions of Tux Paint.

June 15, 2002 was the first release, which occurred just two days from the date the programmers began working on Tux Paint.

June 30, 2002 added magic tools such as blocks, blur, and negative.

July 31, 2002 support for local areas and languages was added.

October 12, 2004 saw the release of the configuration tool and starter image support.

October 21, 2006 slide show was added along with animated brushes as well as directional brushes.

July 1, 2007 screen size and orientation support as well as SVG and input method support were added.

Pros

• Good for all ages
• Has colouring and drawing templates
• Slide Show

Cons

• It's older, may not suit more sophisticated children
• Slow at times depending on processor speed