9 ms·

The Interface of Kai Krause's Software (2003)

319 points by rbinv 3y ago

iseanstevens 3y ago
I would love to see an AI update of all of these concepts. The ability to directly interact with realtime feedback makes creating feel like play.
Agingcoder 3y ago
Wow - 1.it’s one of these things you didn’t know you still remembered 2. I never realized that KPT Bryce was Kai’s Power Tools !
drbawb 3y ago
Holy crap. Seeing Kai's Super GOO sure takes me back. I used to vandalize the family scrapbook w/ that program. One of the edits (in which I made my little sister appear _very bald_) still stands as a sibling in-joke to this day.
DonHopkins 3y ago
My earlier post about Kai Kraus: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27288454 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27288454 DonHopkins on May 26, 2021 | parent | context | favorite | on: Use native context menus on Mac OS Love him or hate him (and I do both), Kai was all about cultivating his adulating cult of personality and dazzling everyone with his totally unique breathtakingly beautiful bespoke UIs! How can you possibly begrudge him and his fans of that simple pleasure? ;) In the modest liner notes of one of the KPT CDROMS, Kai wrote a charming rambling story about how he was once passing through airport security, and the guard immediately recognized him as the User Interface Rock Star that he was: the guy who made Kai Power Tools and Power Goo and Bryce! Kai's Power Goo - Classic '90s Funware! [LGR Retrospective]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xt06OSIQ0PE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xt06OSIQ0PE >Revisiting the mid 1990s to explore the world of gooey image manipulation from MetaTools! Kai Krause worked on some fantastically influential user interfaces too, so let's dive into all of it. >"Now if you're like me, you must be thinking, ok, this is all well and good, sure, but who the heck is Kai? His name's on everything, so he must be special. OH HE IS! Say hello to Kai Krause. Embrace his gaze! He is an absolute legend in certain circles, not just for his software contributions, but his overall life story." [...] >"... and now owns and resides in the 1000 year old tower near Rieneck Castle in Germany that he calls Byteburg. Oh, and along the way, he found time to work on software milestones like Poser, Bryce, Kai's Power Tools, and Kai's Super Goo, propagating what he called "Padded Cell" graphical interface design. "The interface is also, I call it the 'Padded Cell'. You just can't hurt yourself." -Kai But all in all, it's a good thing for humanity that Kai said "Nein!" to Apple's offer to help them redesign their UI: http://www.vintageapplemac.com/files/misc/MacWorld_UK_Feb_2000.pdf http://www.vintageapplemac.com/files/misc/MacWorld_UK_Feb_20... >read me first, Simon Jary, editor-in-chief, MacWorld, February 2000, page 5: >When graphics guru Kai Krause was in his heyday, he once revealed to me that Apple had asked him to help redesign the Mac's interface. It was one of old Apple's very few pieces of good luck that Kai said "nein" >At the time, Kai was king of the weird interface - Bryce, KPT and Goo were all decidedly odd, leaving users with lumps of spherical rock to swivel, and glowing orbs to fiddle with just to save a simple file. Kai's interface were fun, in a Crystal Maze kind of way. He did show me one possible interface, where the desktop metaphor was adapted to have more sophisticated layers - basically, it was the standard desktop but with no filing cabinet and all your folders and documents strewn over your screen as if you'd just turned on a fan to full blast and aimed it at your neatly stacked paperwork. The Interface of Kai Krause’s Software: https://mprove.de/script/99/kai/index.html https://mprove.de/script/99/kai/index.html >Bruce “Tog” Tognazzini writes about Kansei Engineering: >»Since the year A.D. 618 the Japanese have been creating beautiful Zen gardens, environments of harmony designed to instill in their users a sense of serenity and peace. […] Every rock and tree is thoughtfully placed in patterns that are at once random and yet teeming with order. Rocks are not just strewn about; they are carefully arranged in odd-numbered groupings and sunk into the ground to give the illusion of age and stability. Waterfalls are not simply lined with interesting rocks; they are tuned to create just the right burble and plop. […] >Kansei speakes to a totality of experience: colors, sounds, shapes, tactile sensations, and kinesthesia, as well as the personality and consistency of interactions.« [Tog96, pp. 171] >Then Tog comes to software design: >»Where does kansei start? Not with the hardware. Not with the software either. Kansei starts with attitude, as does quality. The original Xerox Star team had it. So did the Lisa team, and the Mac team after. All were dedicated to building a single, tightly integrated environment – a totality of experience. […] >KPT Convolver […] is a marvelous example of kansei design. It replaces the extensive lineup of filters that graphic designers traditionally grapple with when using such tools as Photoshop with a simple, integrated, harmonious environment. >In the past, designers have followed a process of picturing their desired end result in their mind, then applying a series of filters sequentially, without benefit of undo beyond the last-applied filter. Convolver lets users play, trying any combination of filters at will, either on their own or with the computer’s aid and advice. […] Both time and space lie at the user’s complete control.« [Tog96, pp. 174] METAMEMORIES: https://systemfolder.wordpress.com/2009/03/01/metamemories/ https://systemfolder.wordpress.com/2009/03/01/metamemories/ >Anyone who has been using Macs for at least the last ten years will surely remember Viewpoint Corporation’s products. No? Well, Viewpoint Corporation was previously MetaCreations. Still doesn’t ring a bell? Maybe MetaTools will. Or the name Kai Krause. Or, even better, the names of the software products themselves — Kai’s Power Tools, Kai’s Power Goo, Kai’s Photo Soap, Bryce, Painter, Poser… See? Now we’re talking. Macintosh Garden: KPT Bryce 1.0.1: https://macintoshgarden.org/apps/bryce-1 https://macintoshgarden.org/apps/bryce-1 >Experienced 3D professionals will appreciate the powerful controls that are included, such as surface contour definition, bumpiness, translucency, reflectivity, color, humidity, cloud attributes, alpha channels, texture generation and more. >KPT Bryce features easy point-and-click commands and an incredible user interface that includes the Sky & Fog Palette, which governs Bryce's virtual environment; the Create Palette, which contains all the objects needed to create grounds, seas and mountains; an Edit Palette, where users select and edit all the objects created; and the Render Palette, which has all the controls specific to rendering, such as setting the size and resolutions for the final image. MACFormat, Issue 23, April 1995, p. 28-29: https://macintoshgarden.org/sites/macintoshgarden.org/files/screenshots/MacFormat_23_028.jpg https://macintoshgarden.org/sites/macintoshgarden.org/files/... https://macintoshgarden.org/sites/macintoshgarden.org/files/screenshots/MacFormat_23_029_0.jpg https://macintoshgarden.org/sites/macintoshgarden.org/files/... >He intends to challenge everything you thought you knew about the way you use computers. 'I maintain that everything we now have will be thrown away. Every piece of software -- including my own -- will be complete and utter junk. Our children will laugh about us -- they'll be rolling on the floor in hysterics, pointing at these dinosaurs that we are using. >'Design is a very tricky thing. You don't jump from the Model T Fort straight to the latest Mercedes -- there's a million tiny things that have to be changed. And I'm not trying to come up with lots of little ideas where afterwards you go, "Yeah, of course! It's obvious!" >'Here's an easy one. For years we had eight character file-names on computers. Now that we have more characters, it seems ludicrous, am historical accident that it ever happened. >'What people don't realize is that we have hundreds more ideas that are equally stupid, buried throughout the structure of software design -- from the interface to the deeper levels of how it works inside.'
- jansan 3y ago
  Any idea what Kai is currently up to? I would love to know what has been happening behind the Byteburg walls.
  - quitit 3y ago
    Maybe let him know that there is a HN thread about him today: http://kai.sub.blue/en/contact.html http://kai.sub.blue/en/contact.html
- bloopernova 3y ago
  Tog is a name I had forgotten. Their metaphor for personal privacy and security has stuck with me for a long time. Not to say that I think this metaphor is perfect, just that it has stuck with me. They described a medieval city as your personal information. Untrusted traders have to hawk their wares outside the city walls. More trustworthy apps and services are allowed inside the city walls, but have no access to the castle keep. Family and highly trusted entities are permitted entry to the castle keep. I've always liked the way that fairly neatly illustrated layers of security and privacy.
silviot 3y ago
I remember spending a lot of time on these tools in my teen years. I'd love to revive them in some emulator.
- pavlov 3y ago
  My understanding is that Classic Mac OS emulation works very well and binaries aren’t difficult to find. Haven’t tried it myself though.
marban 3y ago
GOO was really fun, especially when you used a Logitech ScanMan the pictures were already smudged before you even loaded them in the actual app.
- DonHopkins 3y ago
  LGR has a great review of Kai Power Goo: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xt06OSIQ0PE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xt06OSIQ0PE
chewxy 3y ago
Oh what a trip down memory lane. Software of that era had really interesting UI and UX. I made a winamp skin that was a blob (of my face, or perhaps my dad's) after using Kai's Power Goo.
dark-star 3y ago
I remember using these tools, and I also remember the terrible user interface. It definitely felt more like a piece of art than something you are supposed to work/interact with. Nice to lok at and good for an initial "Wow!" effect, but not really usable for more than 5 minutes. I wasn't aware of all those design decisions that whent into Kai's tools, and quite frankly, I'm amazed because when you actually used it, it just felt clunky and badly put together. Similar to some of these "cool" MP3 players that existed back then (Sonique and whatever their names were)
- KineticLensman 3y ago
  The Poser figure creation and rendering software also had a bunch of unique / idiosyncratic UI elements including the horrendous memory dots concept (mentioned somewhere else here) and camera controls [0] that were unlike any other 3D modelling software. I still remember switching to Daz Studio for figure creation and 'getting it' almost instantly because it used a recognizable UI. [0] (slightly NSFW) https://www.posersoftware.com/article/509/poser-12-basics-how-to-use-the-camera-controls-in-poser-12 https://www.posersoftware.com/article/509/poser-12-basics-ho...
ur-whale 3y ago
I used these, or tried to. The UX was beautiful, but it was unusable. All form no function. A properly put together UX should solve the latter, and if the former can also be incorporate, all the better.
TheOtherHobbes 3y ago
Points for trying to do something different, but 30 years later these look rather cute and twee. Definitely part of that late 90s bright-colours-and-glass OMG Internet aesthetic, which was a kind of digital tie dye movement that eventually faded into Aqua on MacOS and the glass themes in Windows. There was a period in the mid 90s when the Kai Page Curl effect was everywhere. I spent some time with various versions of Bryce. It was good for entry-level 3D, but in the same way that everything made with KPT looked obviously KPT-ish, everything made with Bryce looked obviously Bryce-ish. It was all fractal mountains, planets, mysterious floating orbs, alien seascapes, lurid sunsets, and the occasional detailed tree if you had a couple of days of render time to spare. You were always clicking around in KaiSpace. There was no way out.
- mike_hock 3y ago
  You mean the era when UIs actually looked good, before the hardware was up to the task, only to regress to a style more primitive than the 90s[1] not a second later than the hardware had become capable enough. [1] The era you speak of was the early 00s.
  - oneeyedpigeon 3y ago
    I don't know what you mean by "looked good"; there's obviously a trade-off here between beauty and utility. To me, a UI "looks good" if I can immediately understand how it works, and if it presents the information in a meaningful way. To a layperson, that may look "not good"; they may prefer something with more color and detailed imagery that looks more like a real-world object, even if (possibly unbeknownst to them) it's harder to use. Of course, being able to understand how to use an interface is partly affected by what you're familiar with and, in turn, what you were exposed to in your formative years. For me, Windows 95 – early-OSX-era interfaces have 'the best' look.
    - rerdavies 3y ago
      Why must there be a tradeoff between beauty and utility? (Particularly when Kai's UIs are a perfect example of exceptional beauty and exceptional utility. All that while being extraordinarily intuitive!).
virtualritz 3y ago
I visited Kai in the castle he bought after moving back to Germany and renamed to the 'Byteburg'. I think this was around 2001. Kai was hosting pitch nights for startup ideas for young people; but really anyone was welcome. Apart from Kai there was his buddy, Uwe Maurer, and two 'staff' guys who were kinda running things in the castle. I.e. upkeep, cooking/food and beverages. Kai was just all over everyone, running around with a little tablet serving nibbles and making sure everyone always had a fresh beer. A kind, humble and deeply interesting person. There was chit-chat and board games (mostly strategy stuff like Go & co) before the night deteriorated and we went to the castle's cellar for pool and foosball; until the early morning hours. An untold story relayed to me first hand, that night, is how KPT got so popular. No one knew what a Photoshop plugin to make fancy procedural patterns etc. was useful for. Certainly there was the crowd of people doing flyers for techno clubs/parties; but that was a tiny minority. Sales were meh. The story goes that Uwe hired a bunch of students that phone-bombed all major US department stores and chains that were selling software at the time. They pretended they were all studying graphic design and needed KPT "for their assignments". After that sales started rolling in. This was relayed to me as more or less the "founding myth" of what later became Meta Creations.
- sen 3y ago
  > No one knew what a Photoshop plugin to make fancy procedural patterns etc. was useful for. Certainly there was the crowd of people doing flyers for techno clubs/parties; but that was a tiny minority. That was me. Kai's tools were invaluable to me learning graphic design (via doing flyers/posters for local raves), which then got me proper graphic/web design jobs and kickstarted my career. I look back on Kai's plugins/tools as iconic as Winamp, mIRC, etc for the era.
  - spacecadet 3y ago
    The same. Now its all overpriced trade schools.
- b20000 3y ago
  i am surprised you could meet him and people could pitch … his website made it seem like he did not want anyone to email him or talk to him???
Kye 3y ago
No relation I heard about some of these tools way back then, but didn't know what they were.
ChrisMarshallNY 3y ago
I always thought his stuff was awesome. However, it was damn near unusable, and ate resources like a starving wolf. I write about it, here: https://littlegreenviper.com/miscellany/the-road-most-traveled-by/#mistakes https://littlegreenviper.com/miscellany/the-road-most-travel...
- jonah 3y ago
  It was absolutely usable. It didn't use OS-standard UI controls or idioms so there was a learning curve, but many many people used it and created amazing stuff with it.
hermitcrab 3y ago
A graphic designer friend showed me Kai's Power Tools years ago. As a software engineer I found the GUI quite offensive in the way it seemed to gratuitiously ignore all the platform conventions. But my graphic designer friend loved it, and he was the intended customer, not me.
fareesh 3y ago
Ah Kai power tools, brings back memories
mwcampbell 3y ago
Joel Spolsky was critical of Kai's UI: https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/04/22/consistency-and-other-hobgoblins/ https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/04/22/consistency-and-ot... I'm reminded of that today because that article was the one place that I read about Kai's software before today.
- mananaysiempre 3y ago
  > https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/04/22/consistency-and-other-hobgoblins/ https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/04/22/consistency-and-ot... >> Netscape 6.0 goes so far as to reimplement every single common Windows control. Of course, there’s the part where IE[1], VB, and Access all implement(ed) their own common windows controls, they were just careful to make them behave (nearly) the same. Some of the things needed for that are deliberately available in the Win32 API, others are deliberately[2] undocumented, still others are just impressively obscure[3]. [1] http://bytepointer.com/resources/old_new_thing/20050211_035_windowless_controls_are_not_magic.htm http://bytepointer.com/resources/old_new_thing/20050211_035_... [2] http://bytepointer.com/resources/old_new_thing/20150508_096_documentation_creates_contract_which_is_why_you_need_to_be_very_careful_what_you.htm http://bytepointer.com/resources/old_new_thing/20150508_096_... [3] https://www.codeproject.com/Articles/12340/CImageButtonWithStyle-Buttons-using-Images-with-XP https://www.codeproject.com/Articles/12340/CImageButtonWithS...
- pixelgeek 3y ago
  Joel is not wrong. Sometimes using a tool that Kai had input into was troubling at first. The KPT and MetaCreations tools were always about creating an intuitive way to create and iterate and the UIs attempted to do that. The dialogs etc did look weird but then most UIs back then looked like hell to be honest. Or at least boring.
- anjel 3y ago
  To really appreciate Kais ideas about UI design, I suggest comparing it to its contemporary Framemaker's "747 cockpit" UI for context.
  - DonHopkins 3y ago
29athrowaway 3y ago
Reminds me of the UI of Sonique (media player).
solarkraft 3y ago
It feels weird that Kai was born where I live, but went elsewhere to pursue his software/entrepreneurial goals. Maybe he could've built up a (more vibrant) software scene here, but it was probably easier to join an already-in-place one in the US. Access to capital, market and partners are definitely good arguments. I wonder how tilted the situation is nowadays, it feels to me like it has gotten a lot better.
jfb 3y ago
I wish I could load Bryce up on a modern machine. I wasted so many hours on building and rendering crazy landscapes, just because.
- omgmajk 3y ago
  Not sure if it's changed that much since I can't really remember a lot from Bryce but it seems to look about the same (?) https://www.daz3d.com/bryce-7-pro https://www.daz3d.com/bryce-7-pro
rbinv 3y ago
Here are a few 90s videos with/about Kai Krause that I feel captured the zeitgeist of the time: Kai Krause Interview (1996): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U0Qie-kP3Lk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U0Qie-kP3Lk KPT Bryce 1.0 with John Dvorak and Kai Krause: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MY8GPU5osx4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MY8GPU5osx4 "The Program": https://youtu.be/ZGLjPYgs8bg https://youtu.be/ZGLjPYgs8bg Kai Krause at TED8: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z0rw2LGHnCA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z0rw2LGHnCA His website is worth a visit, too: http://kai.sub.blue/ http://kai.sub.blue/
- schoen 3y ago
  Wow, TED was so different then!
- codetrotter 3y ago
  I had no idea that Bryce was originally made by Kai!
zubairq 3y ago
Really amazing interfaces!
sreekotay 3y ago
Was a graphics and lead app engineer on many of the Kai line of products at the time. So much fun. And polarizing for sure - but more fans than detractors, and the business didn't fail because of lack of interest. Way more sordid/gossip-y and sad unfortunately.
- jonah 3y ago
  Hi Sree! I worked under Fegette and then Javier. Such an amazing place and time and group of people. I hope you're well. (And yes, the end was pretty sad - I was there until the end when the "dark side" was practically empty.
- raphman 3y ago
  Mind expanding on this a little bit?
- dylan604 3y ago
  I had a conversation with an individual in '96 while at Burning Man. He mentioned he worked on the Kai line of products, and was quite pleased when I told him I used and loved them. This person explained he liked to talk to people under the influence and have them describe the patterns that they saw, and would then go back later to try to recreate them. This wouldn't be some crazy lottery winning level of odds that you were that person type of chances would it? Either way, just want to express a bit of personal gratitude for your and co-workers' work.
  - jonah 3y ago
    I grew up in the Mid-South and when I was using the sky presets in Bryce, I thought: "man, these folks must have been on some good stuff when they came up with these." But after I moved to CA and started working at MetaCreations at their office on a bluff overlooking the Pacific Ocean, I realized they were just recreating what they saw out the window!
    - dylan604 3y ago
      I had the same experience with the original release of Lightwave on the Toaster. The default horizon/skyline had soooo many more colors in the gradient than I had ever seen where I grew up. It just didn't look real to me at all. Then I finally got to visit the west coast, and it made much more sense. It's crazy the effect that having (or not) has on the normality of one's view of the world.
pixelgeek 3y ago
I, showing my age, joined Compuserve for the sole purpose of getting to download all of the Kai's Power Tools documents. Our local group of pixelweasels had a few of them but not all of them. When the KPT plugins were released they were quite divisive. Most people just looked at the UI and thought that they were toys. Once you understood the way the plugins flowed you realised that they were "toys" but in a very critical sense. They allowed you to create visuals that were done through an iterative visual process. The Ui was a visual inspiration to let your mind out of the confines of a computer screen and just enjoy and play until you made something wonderful. His plugins also helped make a market for other companies like Alien Skin Software [1] (now called Exposure) and their Eye Candy series of plugins. I wish there were tools today that had the same sort of power and create the same visceral joy of creation while you used them. [1] https://exposure.software/eyecandy/ https://exposure.software/eyecandy/
gdubs 3y ago
Very fond memories for that particular moment in software. Another company in a similar space was Xaos Tools. I was too young to have access to an SGI, but I somehow or another got hold of a promotional VHS tape of theirs. Sadly, I can't find much online. But they were kind of a high-end version of the Kai tools geared towards film and TV animation. Kai's interfaces were on a different level from everyone else's, but Xaos had some similar vibes along the lines of surrealistic effects. Lawnmower Man apparently used a bunch of their apps. http://www.aaronjamesrogers.com/misc/hotmix16/vendors/xaostools/pan/pan.html http://www.aaronjamesrogers.com/misc/hotmix16/vendors/xaosto... https://ohiostate.pressbooks.pub/graphicshistory/chapter/11-6-rhythm-and-hues-xaos/ https://ohiostate.pressbooks.pub/graphicshistory/chapter/11-...
rffn 3y ago
Thanks for the memories. These were the cool tools in the nineties. Not a very practical UI, but good looking. :-)
harel 3y ago
KPT was a slice of my late teen years, and a staple of the psychedelic trance scene. From party flyers to pretty much anything psychedelic.
fullstop 3y ago
Thanks for this. I have used most of these in the 90s but had completely forgotten that they even existed until just now. You've unlocked a memory that I had long forgotten.
jonah 3y ago
[I worked at MetaCreations in the latter years.] They definitely did some amazing stuff and had world-class engineers. It's been fun to see where they've all gone since - you all are probably using some of their subsequent work in your day-to-day. ;) A couple first- and second-hand anecdotes: (Remember, this was back in the day of software being distributed on CD.) I was flying back a conference in the Bay Area and we took a detour over to the office in Scotts Valley to pick up the "Gold Master" CD-R for the latest release of one of our products to hand-carry back to Santa Barbara, there a co-worker met me at the airport and drove the CD to the pressing facility in Los Angeles so we could get them duplicated and packaged in time for the release. (For a junior employee at the time, that was pretty fun. Engineering was down to the wire on the next release of KPT and one of the algorithms folks came up with one more function and IM'd the code to the app team who dropped it in as another option in a list minutes before doing the final build. Intel sent us pre-release Pentium III hardware so we could optimize our apps for their new instruction set.
- momojo 3y ago
  Why did they have offices in SV? I've always seen it as just a sleepy little stop on the way to the beach haha.
  - jonah 3y ago
    They had merged with Fractal Design Corporation who created Painter and was based there.
jonah 3y ago
MetaCreations had product called MetaStream which was an early 3D technology for the web. It's logo (ca. 1999)[1] looks interestingly similar to another more recent Meta's logo. ;) [1] https://imgur.com/a/FnGz2Gl https://imgur.com/a/FnGz2Gl MetaStream had a some really neat features like progressive enhancement too.
jonah 3y ago
And if you want to see how graphics work was done in Photoshop "back in the day" before layers and all that fancy nonsense, be sure to peruse the Kai’s Power Tips & Tricks archive of his graphics posts on AOL: https://mprove.de/script/90/KPT/index.html https://mprove.de/script/90/KPT/index.html
neilk 3y ago
You may laugh at how weird this is, but there is one thing that came out of the Kai Krause aesthetic that is everywhere today: buttons that light up on mouseover. I have a distinct memory of him announcing this unfamiliar idea as "slightly ahead of the Mac UI". In the mid-90s, I think most of us working with tech still thought in terms of a monochrome bitmapped interface. To apply a transformation to an already highly styled button, just to indicate it was clickable? It seemed like a huge waste of computing resources. In Kai's UIs, light-up-on-mouseover was more of a necessity since nothing followed UI guidelines - you had to discover what was even clickable. For modern UIs it's more subtle; you may have already guessed what was clickable, but the UI feels a bit more alive and active, and it helps teach some UI paradigms. Now, of course, we have the opposite problem: the hover action doesn't exist on touch platforms so it's being slowly forgotten.
- krispyfi 3y ago
  The hover action will come back to touch interfaces once we have gaze tracking.
eloop 3y ago
I think his software was a work of art, distinct from a tool for making art. As Rich Hickey pointed out "Simple is often erroneously mistaken for easy."
irrational 3y ago
Wow this is taking me back. I loved using these tools in the late 90s. Especially Bryce. I kept planning on making a MYST like game using Bryce images, but never got around to it. What is the equivalent of Bryce today?
devin 3y ago
As a young kid I remember my dad in an AOL chat room chatting with Kai. We had KPT Bryce, Kai's Power Goo, etc. I loved those programs, but KPT Bryce is probably what I spent the most time with. I would just sit and stare at the antialiasing passes, making minor tweaks. As a kid it felt oddly intuitive in a way that I can't say I've experienced with most modern software. There was also a sense of discovery where you'd kind of dream about how the wireframes on the screen would be painted once you'd selected various textures and lighting effects to be applied. One piece of software that most may not be familiar with which I see as very related to Kai's work is U&I software's MetaSynth. The UI feels similar to Kai's UIs, and it is unlike any other sound design tool I've ever used. I believe Eric Wenger of U&I is a MetaCreations fellow and also worked on KPT Bryce way back in the early days.

319 points by rbinv 3y ago

I would love to see an AI update of all of these concepts. The ability to directly interact with realtime feedback makes creating feel like play.

Agingcoder 3y ago

Wow - 1.it’s one of these things you didn’t know you still remembered 2. I never realized that KPT Bryce was Kai’s Power Tools !

drbawb 3y ago

Holy crap. Seeing Kai's Super GOO sure takes me back. I used to vandalize the family scrapbook w/ that program. One of the edits (in which I made my little sister appear _very bald_) still stands as a sibling in-joke to this day.

DonHopkins 3y ago

My earlier post about Kai Kraus: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27288454 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27288454 DonHopkins on May 26, 2021 | parent | context | favorite | on: Use native context menus on Mac OS Love him or hate him (and I do both), Kai was all about cultivating his adulating cult of personality and dazzling everyone with his totally unique breathtakingly beautiful bespoke UIs! How can you possibly begrudge him and his fans of that simple pleasure? ;) In the modest liner notes of one of the KPT CDROMS, Kai wrote a charming rambling story about how he was once passing through airport security, and the guard immediately recognized him as the User Interface Rock Star that he was: the guy who made Kai Power Tools and Power Goo and Bryce! Kai's Power Goo - Classic '90s Funware! [LGR Retrospective]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xt06OSIQ0PE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xt06OSIQ0PE >Revisiting the mid 1990s to explore the world of gooey image manipulation from MetaTools! Kai Krause worked on some fantastically influential user interfaces too, so let's dive into all of it. >"Now if you're like me, you must be thinking, ok, this is all well and good, sure, but who the heck is Kai? His name's on everything, so he must be special. OH HE IS! Say hello to Kai Krause. Embrace his gaze! He is an absolute legend in certain circles, not just for his software contributions, but his overall life story." [...] >"... and now owns and resides in the 1000 year old tower near Rieneck Castle in Germany that he calls Byteburg. Oh, and along the way, he found time to work on software milestones like Poser, Bryce, Kai's Power Tools, and Kai's Super Goo, propagating what he called "Padded Cell" graphical interface design. "The interface is also, I call it the 'Padded Cell'. You just can't hurt yourself." -Kai But all in all, it's a good thing for humanity that Kai said "Nein!" to Apple's offer to help them redesign their UI: http://www.vintageapplemac.com/files/misc/MacWorld_UK_Feb_2000.pdf http://www.vintageapplemac.com/files/misc/MacWorld_UK_Feb_20... >read me first, Simon Jary, editor-in-chief, MacWorld, February 2000, page 5: >When graphics guru Kai Krause was in his heyday, he once revealed to me that Apple had asked him to help redesign the Mac's interface. It was one of old Apple's very few pieces of good luck that Kai said "nein" >At the time, Kai was king of the weird interface - Bryce, KPT and Goo were all decidedly odd, leaving users with lumps of spherical rock to swivel, and glowing orbs to fiddle with just to save a simple file. Kai's interface were fun, in a Crystal Maze kind of way. He did show me one possible interface, where the desktop metaphor was adapted to have more sophisticated layers - basically, it was the standard desktop but with no filing cabinet and all your folders and documents strewn over your screen as if you'd just turned on a fan to full blast and aimed it at your neatly stacked paperwork. The Interface of Kai Krause’s Software: https://mprove.de/script/99/kai/index.html https://mprove.de/script/99/kai/index.html >Bruce “Tog” Tognazzini writes about Kansei Engineering: >»Since the year A.D. 618 the Japanese have been creating beautiful Zen gardens, environments of harmony designed to instill in their users a sense of serenity and peace. […] Every rock and tree is thoughtfully placed in patterns that are at once random and yet teeming with order. Rocks are not just strewn about; they are carefully arranged in odd-numbered groupings and sunk into the ground to give the illusion of age and stability. Waterfalls are not simply lined with interesting rocks; they are tuned to create just the right burble and plop. […] >Kansei speakes to a totality of experience: colors, sounds, shapes, tactile sensations, and kinesthesia, as well as the personality and consistency of interactions.« [Tog96, pp. 171] >Then Tog comes to software design: >»Where does kansei start? Not with the hardware. Not with the software either. Kansei starts with attitude, as does quality. The original Xerox Star team had it. So did the Lisa team, and the Mac team after. All were dedicated to building a single, tightly integrated environment – a totality of experience. […] >KPT Convolver […] is a marvelous example of kansei design. It replaces the extensive lineup of filters that graphic designers traditionally grapple with when using such tools as Photoshop with a simple, integrated, harmonious environment. >In the past, designers have followed a process of picturing their desired end result in their mind, then applying a series of filters sequentially, without benefit of undo beyond the last-applied filter. Convolver lets users play, trying any combination of filters at will, either on their own or with the computer’s aid and advice. […] Both time and space lie at the user’s complete control.« [Tog96, pp. 174] METAMEMORIES: https://systemfolder.wordpress.com/2009/03/01/metamemories/ https://systemfolder.wordpress.com/2009/03/01/metamemories/ >Anyone who has been using Macs for at least the last ten years will surely remember Viewpoint Corporation’s products. No? Well, Viewpoint Corporation was previously MetaCreations. Still doesn’t ring a bell? Maybe MetaTools will. Or the name Kai Krause. Or, even better, the names of the software products themselves — Kai’s Power Tools, Kai’s Power Goo, Kai’s Photo Soap, Bryce, Painter, Poser… See? Now we’re talking. Macintosh Garden: KPT Bryce 1.0.1: https://macintoshgarden.org/apps/bryce-1 https://macintoshgarden.org/apps/bryce-1 >Experienced 3D professionals will appreciate the powerful controls that are included, such as surface contour definition, bumpiness, translucency, reflectivity, color, humidity, cloud attributes, alpha channels, texture generation and more. >KPT Bryce features easy point-and-click commands and an incredible user interface that includes the Sky & Fog Palette, which governs Bryce's virtual environment; the Create Palette, which contains all the objects needed to create grounds, seas and mountains; an Edit Palette, where users select and edit all the objects created; and the Render Palette, which has all the controls specific to rendering, such as setting the size and resolutions for the final image. MACFormat, Issue 23, April 1995, p. 28-29: https://macintoshgarden.org/sites/macintoshgarden.org/files/screenshots/MacFormat_23_028.jpg https://macintoshgarden.org/sites/macintoshgarden.org/files/... https://macintoshgarden.org/sites/macintoshgarden.org/files/screenshots/MacFormat_23_029_0.jpg https://macintoshgarden.org/sites/macintoshgarden.org/files/... >He intends to challenge everything you thought you knew about the way you use computers. 'I maintain that everything we now have will be thrown away. Every piece of software -- including my own -- will be complete and utter junk. Our children will laugh about us -- they'll be rolling on the floor in hysterics, pointing at these dinosaurs that we are using. >'Design is a very tricky thing. You don't jump from the Model T Fort straight to the latest Mercedes -- there's a million tiny things that have to be changed. And I'm not trying to come up with lots of little ideas where afterwards you go, "Yeah, of course! It's obvious!" >'Here's an easy one. For years we had eight character file-names on computers. Now that we have more characters, it seems ludicrous, am historical accident that it ever happened. >'What people don't realize is that we have hundreds more ideas that are equally stupid, buried throughout the structure of software design -- from the interface to the deeper levels of how it works inside.'

jansan 3y ago
Any idea what Kai is currently up to? I would love to know what has been happening behind the Byteburg walls.
- quitit 3y ago
  Maybe let him know that there is a HN thread about him today: http://kai.sub.blue/en/contact.html http://kai.sub.blue/en/contact.html
bloopernova 3y ago
Tog is a name I had forgotten. Their metaphor for personal privacy and security has stuck with me for a long time. Not to say that I think this metaphor is perfect, just that it has stuck with me. They described a medieval city as your personal information. Untrusted traders have to hawk their wares outside the city walls. More trustworthy apps and services are allowed inside the city walls, but have no access to the castle keep. Family and highly trusted entities are permitted entry to the castle keep. I've always liked the way that fairly neatly illustrated layers of security and privacy.

silviot 3y ago

I remember spending a lot of time on these tools in my teen years. I'd love to revive them in some emulator.

pavlov 3y ago
My understanding is that Classic Mac OS emulation works very well and binaries aren’t difficult to find. Haven’t tried it myself though.

marban 3y ago

GOO was really fun, especially when you used a Logitech ScanMan the pictures were already smudged before you even loaded them in the actual app.

DonHopkins 3y ago
LGR has a great review of Kai Power Goo: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xt06OSIQ0PE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xt06OSIQ0PE

chewxy 3y ago

Oh what a trip down memory lane. Software of that era had really interesting UI and UX. I made a winamp skin that was a blob (of my face, or perhaps my dad's) after using Kai's Power Goo.

dark-star 3y ago

I remember using these tools, and I also remember the terrible user interface. It definitely felt more like a piece of art than something you are supposed to work/interact with. Nice to lok at and good for an initial "Wow!" effect, but not really usable for more than 5 minutes. I wasn't aware of all those design decisions that whent into Kai's tools, and quite frankly, I'm amazed because when you actually used it, it just felt clunky and badly put together. Similar to some of these "cool" MP3 players that existed back then (Sonique and whatever their names were)

KineticLensman 3y ago
The Poser figure creation and rendering software also had a bunch of unique / idiosyncratic UI elements including the horrendous memory dots concept (mentioned somewhere else here) and camera controls [0] that were unlike any other 3D modelling software. I still remember switching to Daz Studio for figure creation and 'getting it' almost instantly because it used a recognizable UI. [0] (slightly NSFW) https://www.posersoftware.com/article/509/poser-12-basics-how-to-use-the-camera-controls-in-poser-12 https://www.posersoftware.com/article/509/poser-12-basics-ho...

ur-whale 3y ago

I used these, or tried to. The UX was beautiful, but it was unusable. All form no function. A properly put together UX should solve the latter, and if the former can also be incorporate, all the better.

TheOtherHobbes 3y ago

Points for trying to do something different, but 30 years later these look rather cute and twee. Definitely part of that late 90s bright-colours-and-glass OMG Internet aesthetic, which was a kind of digital tie dye movement that eventually faded into Aqua on MacOS and the glass themes in Windows. There was a period in the mid 90s when the Kai Page Curl effect was everywhere. I spent some time with various versions of Bryce. It was good for entry-level 3D, but in the same way that everything made with KPT looked obviously KPT-ish, everything made with Bryce looked obviously Bryce-ish. It was all fractal mountains, planets, mysterious floating orbs, alien seascapes, lurid sunsets, and the occasional detailed tree if you had a couple of days of render time to spare. You were always clicking around in KaiSpace. There was no way out.

mike_hock 3y ago
You mean the era when UIs actually looked good, before the hardware was up to the task, only to regress to a style more primitive than the 90s[1] not a second later than the hardware had become capable enough. [1] The era you speak of was the early 00s.
- oneeyedpigeon 3y ago
  I don't know what you mean by "looked good"; there's obviously a trade-off here between beauty and utility. To me, a UI "looks good" if I can immediately understand how it works, and if it presents the information in a meaningful way. To a layperson, that may look "not good"; they may prefer something with more color and detailed imagery that looks more like a real-world object, even if (possibly unbeknownst to them) it's harder to use. Of course, being able to understand how to use an interface is partly affected by what you're familiar with and, in turn, what you were exposed to in your formative years. For me, Windows 95 – early-OSX-era interfaces have 'the best' look.
  - rerdavies 3y ago
    Why must there be a tradeoff between beauty and utility? (Particularly when Kai's UIs are a perfect example of exceptional beauty and exceptional utility. All that while being extraordinarily intuitive!).

virtualritz 3y ago

I visited Kai in the castle he bought after moving back to Germany and renamed to the 'Byteburg'. I think this was around 2001. Kai was hosting pitch nights for startup ideas for young people; but really anyone was welcome. Apart from Kai there was his buddy, Uwe Maurer, and two 'staff' guys who were kinda running things in the castle. I.e. upkeep, cooking/food and beverages. Kai was just all over everyone, running around with a little tablet serving nibbles and making sure everyone always had a fresh beer. A kind, humble and deeply interesting person. There was chit-chat and board games (mostly strategy stuff like Go & co) before the night deteriorated and we went to the castle's cellar for pool and foosball; until the early morning hours. An untold story relayed to me first hand, that night, is how KPT got so popular. No one knew what a Photoshop plugin to make fancy procedural patterns etc. was useful for. Certainly there was the crowd of people doing flyers for techno clubs/parties; but that was a tiny minority. Sales were meh. The story goes that Uwe hired a bunch of students that phone-bombed all major US department stores and chains that were selling software at the time. They pretended they were all studying graphic design and needed KPT "for their assignments". After that sales started rolling in. This was relayed to me as more or less the "founding myth" of what later became Meta Creations.

sen 3y ago
> No one knew what a Photoshop plugin to make fancy procedural patterns etc. was useful for. Certainly there was the crowd of people doing flyers for techno clubs/parties; but that was a tiny minority. That was me. Kai's tools were invaluable to me learning graphic design (via doing flyers/posters for local raves), which then got me proper graphic/web design jobs and kickstarted my career. I look back on Kai's plugins/tools as iconic as Winamp, mIRC, etc for the era.
- spacecadet 3y ago
  The same. Now its all overpriced trade schools.
b20000 3y ago
i am surprised you could meet him and people could pitch … his website made it seem like he did not want anyone to email him or talk to him???

Kye 3y ago

No relation I heard about some of these tools way back then, but didn't know what they were.

ChrisMarshallNY 3y ago

I always thought his stuff was awesome. However, it was damn near unusable, and ate resources like a starving wolf. I write about it, here: https://littlegreenviper.com/miscellany/the-road-most-traveled-by/#mistakes https://littlegreenviper.com/miscellany/the-road-most-travel...

jonah 3y ago
It was absolutely usable. It didn't use OS-standard UI controls or idioms so there was a learning curve, but many many people used it and created amazing stuff with it.

hermitcrab 3y ago

A graphic designer friend showed me Kai's Power Tools years ago. As a software engineer I found the GUI quite offensive in the way it seemed to gratuitiously ignore all the platform conventions. But my graphic designer friend loved it, and he was the intended customer, not me.

fareesh 3y ago

Ah Kai power tools, brings back memories

mwcampbell 3y ago

Joel Spolsky was critical of Kai's UI: https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/04/22/consistency-and-other-hobgoblins/ https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/04/22/consistency-and-ot... I'm reminded of that today because that article was the one place that I read about Kai's software before today.

mananaysiempre 3y ago
> https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/04/22/consistency-and-other-hobgoblins/ https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/04/22/consistency-and-ot... >> Netscape 6.0 goes so far as to reimplement every single common Windows control. Of course, there’s the part where IE[1], VB, and Access all implement(ed) their own common windows controls, they were just careful to make them behave (nearly) the same. Some of the things needed for that are deliberately available in the Win32 API, others are deliberately[2] undocumented, still others are just impressively obscure[3]. [1] http://bytepointer.com/resources/old_new_thing/20050211_035_windowless_controls_are_not_magic.htm http://bytepointer.com/resources/old_new_thing/20050211_035_... [2] http://bytepointer.com/resources/old_new_thing/20150508_096_documentation_creates_contract_which_is_why_you_need_to_be_very_careful_what_you.htm http://bytepointer.com/resources/old_new_thing/20150508_096_... [3] https://www.codeproject.com/Articles/12340/CImageButtonWithStyle-Buttons-using-Images-with-XP https://www.codeproject.com/Articles/12340/CImageButtonWithS...
pixelgeek 3y ago
Joel is not wrong. Sometimes using a tool that Kai had input into was troubling at first. The KPT and MetaCreations tools were always about creating an intuitive way to create and iterate and the UIs attempted to do that. The dialogs etc did look weird but then most UIs back then looked like hell to be honest. Or at least boring.
anjel 3y ago
To really appreciate Kais ideas about UI design, I suggest comparing it to its contemporary Framemaker's "747 cockpit" UI for context.
- DonHopkins 3y ago

29athrowaway 3y ago

Reminds me of the UI of Sonique (media player).

solarkraft 3y ago

It feels weird that Kai was born where I live, but went elsewhere to pursue his software/entrepreneurial goals. Maybe he could've built up a (more vibrant) software scene here, but it was probably easier to join an already-in-place one in the US. Access to capital, market and partners are definitely good arguments. I wonder how tilted the situation is nowadays, it feels to me like it has gotten a lot better.

jfb 3y ago

I wish I could load Bryce up on a modern machine. I wasted so many hours on building and rendering crazy landscapes, just because.

omgmajk 3y ago
Not sure if it's changed that much since I can't really remember a lot from Bryce but it seems to look about the same (?) https://www.daz3d.com/bryce-7-pro https://www.daz3d.com/bryce-7-pro

rbinv 3y ago

Here are a few 90s videos with/about Kai Krause that I feel captured the zeitgeist of the time: Kai Krause Interview (1996): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U0Qie-kP3Lk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U0Qie-kP3Lk KPT Bryce 1.0 with John Dvorak and Kai Krause: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MY8GPU5osx4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MY8GPU5osx4 "The Program": https://youtu.be/ZGLjPYgs8bg https://youtu.be/ZGLjPYgs8bg Kai Krause at TED8: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z0rw2LGHnCA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z0rw2LGHnCA His website is worth a visit, too: http://kai.sub.blue/ http://kai.sub.blue/

schoen 3y ago
Wow, TED was so different then!
codetrotter 3y ago
I had no idea that Bryce was originally made by Kai!

zubairq 3y ago

Really amazing interfaces!

sreekotay 3y ago

Was a graphics and lead app engineer on many of the Kai line of products at the time. So much fun. And polarizing for sure - but more fans than detractors, and the business didn't fail because of lack of interest. Way more sordid/gossip-y and sad unfortunately.

jonah 3y ago
Hi Sree! I worked under Fegette and then Javier. Such an amazing place and time and group of people. I hope you're well. (And yes, the end was pretty sad - I was there until the end when the "dark side" was practically empty.
raphman 3y ago
Mind expanding on this a little bit?
dylan604 3y ago
I had a conversation with an individual in '96 while at Burning Man. He mentioned he worked on the Kai line of products, and was quite pleased when I told him I used and loved them. This person explained he liked to talk to people under the influence and have them describe the patterns that they saw, and would then go back later to try to recreate them. This wouldn't be some crazy lottery winning level of odds that you were that person type of chances would it? Either way, just want to express a bit of personal gratitude for your and co-workers' work.
- jonah 3y ago
  I grew up in the Mid-South and when I was using the sky presets in Bryce, I thought: "man, these folks must have been on some good stuff when they came up with these." But after I moved to CA and started working at MetaCreations at their office on a bluff overlooking the Pacific Ocean, I realized they were just recreating what they saw out the window!
  - dylan604 3y ago
    I had the same experience with the original release of Lightwave on the Toaster. The default horizon/skyline had soooo many more colors in the gradient than I had ever seen where I grew up. It just didn't look real to me at all. Then I finally got to visit the west coast, and it made much more sense. It's crazy the effect that having (or not) has on the normality of one's view of the world.

pixelgeek 3y ago

I, showing my age, joined Compuserve for the sole purpose of getting to download all of the Kai's Power Tools documents. Our local group of pixelweasels had a few of them but not all of them. When the KPT plugins were released they were quite divisive. Most people just looked at the UI and thought that they were toys. Once you understood the way the plugins flowed you realised that they were "toys" but in a very critical sense. They allowed you to create visuals that were done through an iterative visual process. The Ui was a visual inspiration to let your mind out of the confines of a computer screen and just enjoy and play until you made something wonderful. His plugins also helped make a market for other companies like Alien Skin Software [1] (now called Exposure) and their Eye Candy series of plugins. I wish there were tools today that had the same sort of power and create the same visceral joy of creation while you used them. [1] https://exposure.software/eyecandy/ https://exposure.software/eyecandy/

gdubs 3y ago

Very fond memories for that particular moment in software. Another company in a similar space was Xaos Tools. I was too young to have access to an SGI, but I somehow or another got hold of a promotional VHS tape of theirs. Sadly, I can't find much online. But they were kind of a high-end version of the Kai tools geared towards film and TV animation. Kai's interfaces were on a different level from everyone else's, but Xaos had some similar vibes along the lines of surrealistic effects. Lawnmower Man apparently used a bunch of their apps. http://www.aaronjamesrogers.com/misc/hotmix16/vendors/xaostools/pan/pan.html http://www.aaronjamesrogers.com/misc/hotmix16/vendors/xaosto... https://ohiostate.pressbooks.pub/graphicshistory/chapter/11-6-rhythm-and-hues-xaos/ https://ohiostate.pressbooks.pub/graphicshistory/chapter/11-...

rffn 3y ago

Thanks for the memories. These were the cool tools in the nineties. Not a very practical UI, but good looking. :-)

harel 3y ago

KPT was a slice of my late teen years, and a staple of the psychedelic trance scene. From party flyers to pretty much anything psychedelic.

fullstop 3y ago

Thanks for this. I have used most of these in the 90s but had completely forgotten that they even existed until just now. You've unlocked a memory that I had long forgotten.

jonah 3y ago

[I worked at MetaCreations in the latter years.] They definitely did some amazing stuff and had world-class engineers. It's been fun to see where they've all gone since - you all are probably using some of their subsequent work in your day-to-day. ;) A couple first- and second-hand anecdotes: (Remember, this was back in the day of software being distributed on CD.) I was flying back a conference in the Bay Area and we took a detour over to the office in Scotts Valley to pick up the "Gold Master" CD-R for the latest release of one of our products to hand-carry back to Santa Barbara, there a co-worker met me at the airport and drove the CD to the pressing facility in Los Angeles so we could get them duplicated and packaged in time for the release. (For a junior employee at the time, that was pretty fun. Engineering was down to the wire on the next release of KPT and one of the algorithms folks came up with one more function and IM'd the code to the app team who dropped it in as another option in a list minutes before doing the final build. Intel sent us pre-release Pentium III hardware so we could optimize our apps for their new instruction set.

momojo 3y ago
Why did they have offices in SV? I've always seen it as just a sleepy little stop on the way to the beach haha.
- jonah 3y ago
  They had merged with Fractal Design Corporation who created Painter and was based there.

jonah 3y ago

MetaCreations had product called MetaStream which was an early 3D technology for the web. It's logo (ca. 1999)[1] looks interestingly similar to another more recent Meta's logo. ;) [1] https://imgur.com/a/FnGz2Gl https://imgur.com/a/FnGz2Gl MetaStream had a some really neat features like progressive enhancement too.

jonah 3y ago

And if you want to see how graphics work was done in Photoshop "back in the day" before layers and all that fancy nonsense, be sure to peruse the Kai’s Power Tips & Tricks archive of his graphics posts on AOL: https://mprove.de/script/90/KPT/index.html https://mprove.de/script/90/KPT/index.html

neilk 3y ago

You may laugh at how weird this is, but there is one thing that came out of the Kai Krause aesthetic that is everywhere today: buttons that light up on mouseover. I have a distinct memory of him announcing this unfamiliar idea as "slightly ahead of the Mac UI". In the mid-90s, I think most of us working with tech still thought in terms of a monochrome bitmapped interface. To apply a transformation to an already highly styled button, just to indicate it was clickable? It seemed like a huge waste of computing resources. In Kai's UIs, light-up-on-mouseover was more of a necessity since nothing followed UI guidelines - you had to discover what was even clickable. For modern UIs it's more subtle; you may have already guessed what was clickable, but the UI feels a bit more alive and active, and it helps teach some UI paradigms. Now, of course, we have the opposite problem: the hover action doesn't exist on touch platforms so it's being slowly forgotten.

krispyfi 3y ago
The hover action will come back to touch interfaces once we have gaze tracking.

eloop 3y ago

I think his software was a work of art, distinct from a tool for making art. As Rich Hickey pointed out "Simple is often erroneously mistaken for easy."

irrational 3y ago

Wow this is taking me back. I loved using these tools in the late 90s. Especially Bryce. I kept planning on making a MYST like game using Bryce images, but never got around to it. What is the equivalent of Bryce today?

devin 3y ago

As a young kid I remember my dad in an AOL chat room chatting with Kai. We had KPT Bryce, Kai's Power Goo, etc. I loved those programs, but KPT Bryce is probably what I spent the most time with. I would just sit and stare at the antialiasing passes, making minor tweaks. As a kid it felt oddly intuitive in a way that I can't say I've experienced with most modern software. There was also a sense of discovery where you'd kind of dream about how the wireframes on the screen would be painted once you'd selected various textures and lighting effects to be applied. One piece of software that most may not be familiar with which I see as very related to Kai's work is U&I software's MetaSynth. The UI feels similar to Kai's UIs, and it is unlike any other sound design tool I've ever used. I believe Eric Wenger of U&I is a MetaCreations fellow and also worked on KPT Bryce way back in the early days.