MacPaint uses two offscreen memory buffers to avoid flicker when dragging shapes or images across the screen. A occupies most of the screen real estate, offering a viewport into a portion of the bitmap, with toolbars and pattern palettes around it.

MacPaint allow users to edit a 576-by-720 pixel, 72dpi bitmap (slightly wider than the screen, and slightly more than twice as tall as the screen). Kare also beta-tested MacPaint before release. MacPaint's user interface was designed by Susan Kare, also a member of the Macintosh team. The original MacPaint consisted of 5,804 lines of Pascal computer code, augmented by another 2,738 lines of 68000 assembly language. MacPaint was written by Bill Atkinson, a member of Apple's original Macintosh development team. It was discontinued by Claris in 1998 because of diminishing sales. The last version of MacPaint was version 2.0, released in 1988.

It was later developed by Claris, the software subsidiary of Apple which was formed in 1987. Early development versions of MacPaint were called MacSketch, still retaining part of the name of its roots, LisaSketch. The original MacPaint was developed by Bill Atkinson, a member of Apple's original Macintosh development team. Using the mouse, and the clipboard and QuickDraw picture language, pictures could be cut from MacPaint and pasted into MacWrite documents.

MacPaint was notable because it could generate graphics that could be used by other applications. It was sold separately for US$195 with its word processing counterpart, MacWrite. MacPaint is a raster graphics editor developed by Apple Computer and released with the original Macintosh personal computer on January 24, 1984.

Sai paint mac