This is how dithering tool should work. Congrats. Many popular pixel art tools have cumbersome workflows when it comes to dithering. Grafx2 is another tool that gets it right, with the sieve tool.

Not really, because it lacks core features that made MacPaint amazing and Atkinson a genius, being able to: draw rectangles, ovals, and rounded rechts with patterned fills in real time; draw filled polys and arbitrary regions; lasso arbitrary regions and move, copy, or resize them; etc.

This is a pretty basic paint program in a browser, which is great, but it’s a long way from what MacPaint could do 35+ years ago.

Welcome to Hacker News. This project was written by a fellow HN user for fun. I think it's pretty clear, based on the quality we've seen so far, that the author is capable of making it do all those things. I like to judge projects and startups by envisioning their completed state, rather than worrying about details of how they exist today. I think DitherPaint is a cool project and worth encouraging.

Wait, do you actually know the author? I only ask because he's a good friend of mine, and another friend was just showing me your APE code. Small world. :)

Not to my knowledge. I just saw a random comment in a different thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27410662 I noticed he had submitted it as a link that no one upvoted. I thought the work merited further attention, so I posted this link.