[6] Early development versions of MacPaint were called MacSketch, still retaining part of the name of its roots, LisaSketch.

[8] MacPaint was written by Bill Atkinson, a member of Apple's original Macintosh development team.

[9] MacPaint's user interface was designed by Susan Kare, also a member of the Macintosh team.

A occupies most of the screen real estate, offering a viewport into a portion of the bitmap, with toolbars and pattern palettes around it.

[citation needed] MacPaint uses two offscreen memory buffers to avoid flicker when dragging shapes or images across the screen.

For a special post-election edition of Newsweek in November 1984, Apple spent more than US$2.5 million to buy all 39 of the advertising pages in the issue.

The Newsweek advertisement included many pages dedicated to explaining how MacWrite and MacPaint worked together.

MacPaint 2.0 eliminated this limitation, introducing a fully functioning document window, which could be sized up to 8 x 10".

[24] MacPaint inspired other companies to release similar products for other platforms;[25] within a year a half-dozen clones existed for the Apple II and IBM PC.