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Digging into PlantStudio, a bit late
- bbo8 2y agoJust looking at this UI makes my eyes relax.
- buescher 2y agoThe article covers everything I miss about desktop applications in a nutshell. Mostly that wild sense of discovering what you can do with a computer that you might not have tried to do at all or left to experts. But also not least that you can still run it decades later.
- wobfan 2y agoExactly this. This is what got me into computers when I was about 6. Way too early to understand stuff, but I just loved (and it evolved around this until about 14 I guess, when I started to use computers increasingly to get some stuff done) to poke around with colorful icons, spaces, expert settings, finding hidden options and panels - not initially understanding what they do but finding it out in the process. I am increasingly put off by the current user interfaces which are based on modern, flat, designs, and tailored for users that don't need a lot of settings. All these exciting stuff from earlier days is omitted. I get that it looks better and works better for most of the people, but software just lost the excitement it once had for me. (back in the day, everything was better, haha)
- rufus_foreman 2y agoRuns fine for me with Wine.
- msephton 2y agoWhisky, the software mentioned in the post, is a front end to Wine
- rufus_foreman 2y agoHow can I get it to work on Linux?
- andai 2y agoWhisky is for Mac only. Just use Wine. I don't know if there's any comfy GUI frontends for it on Linux, but back in the day I just ran `wine installer.exe` and it ended up in my distro's app launcher.
- adhamsalama 2y agoBottles is a good one.
- bbor 2y agoBeautiful, thanks for sharing! Looks like I've found side project number 301: Three.js PlantStudio. Combined with the botany-focused image segmentation / mapping models they've got now, you could even work off people's real plants...
- msephton 2y agoIf you do it please include bonsai :)
- AlienRobot 2y agoI think I've this a screenshot of this on Tumblr! I was impressed it was real as well. I love that this silly app had a "Plant Wizard" with 10 steps and a progress bar with icons. That's really good UI design.
- pketh 2y agohah ya i found it on are.na originally and thought it was a concept too
- greenavocado 2y agoI desperately need more aesthetic Win32 applications in my life
- sleepydog 2y ago> Because the last release of the app was in 2002, and it was for Windows 95/98/2000/NT4, we’ve got a little bit of work to do to get it running on macOS Much of today's software is going to be nothing more than a memory 22 years from now, after their authors run out of funding and they turn down the saas infrastructure that they shoehorned into it for that sweet, sweet recurring income. And more likely than not, we'll still be able to run this program from 2002, in 2046.
- outofpaper 2y agoThis is why I always say we need to create federated and open source solutions. At the minimum we need apps that are not locked down to SaaS providers.
- warkdarrior 2y agoAre there any federated and open source solutions from 2002 that are still running today?
- haileys 2y agoemail, IRC, BitTorrent, DNS, BGP
- buescher 2y agoAll but one (arguably two) of those predate the web, incidentally.
- warkdarrior 2y agoI’m a bit lost here. How does one implement this PlantStudio software in email (or the other communication protocols you mentioned)?
- stavros 2y agoYou don't, but that wasn't the question.
- type_enthusiast 2y agoA really interesting read. From the discontinuation notice[1] that the article links to: > Perhaps it comes down to this: indirectly, our own personal benefit for writing PlantStudio software and our other projects includes all the other wonderful free stuff on the internet, and it would cost us trillions of dollars if we had to pay for the creation of all that diversity ourselves. We don't mind using guilt to effect change :-) but this time, with products under free license, it will be guilt to go do something positive in the world to pass on the gift, rather than a one-for-one exchange with us. That's a wonderful sentiment from the humans who put a lot of effort into building this software (and eventually decided to give it away). [1] https://www.kurtz-fernhout.com/press.htm https://www.kurtz-fernhout.com/press.htm
- msephton 2y agoLove this. Nice work documenting it. I looked long and hard for something like this for Bonsai. I eventually found a Japanese app, but I'm yet to put in the effort to get it running. I don't think it worked in Whisky so I need to go deeper. https://www.jfp.co.jp/bonsai_dl/ https://www.jfp.co.jp/bonsai_dl/
- sirjaz 2y agoWe need to kill SaaS. We can thank Salesforce for pushing it.
- andai 2y agoThis is wonderful. Just a few hours ago I was inspired to install ancient versions of Office and Photoshop. Word 97 is 5MB and it starts instantly. I mean there is no perceptible delay whatsoever. And it starts fully rendered and fully interactive. Same goes for Excel. They do everything I need, and they do it better than the new ones. The strangest thing is that while new software continues to get worse, old software continues to get better (it runs faster and faster).
- samplatt 2y agoIf it (Excel) could only work with >64k rows, I'd never need to upgrade.
- kevin_thibedeau 2y agoSounds like you need a database and not a spreadsheet.
- samplatt 2y agoIf you can point me at a database that I can dynamically redimension at the drop of a hat for whatever different flavour of bullshit gets thrown at me this week, including the ability to easily identify content issues by sight, I'm all ears.
- dominicrose 2y agoThe newest Excel is really fine on many points to be fair. Startup performance is not the priority, but it's fine on a good machine. It's true that software in general have grown in complexity. Some software pull giant trees of dependencies, because they can. As teams grow and time passes, mistakes are made...
- ninalanyon 2y agoI wish that old versions of successful software were automatically open sourced.
- hello_computer 2y agosomeone should notify https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=pdfernhout https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=pdfernhout that he’s made the front page
- pdfernhout 2y agoThanks for the mention! Glad to see people are still finding enjoyment with PlantStudio. Still hoping to bring it to the web someday.
- amake 2y ago> This aesthetic screenshot What does "aesthetic" mean to you?
- rodiger 2y agohttps://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/aesthetic https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/aesthetic Definition 1-c: > pleasing in appearance : attractive
- amake 2y agohttps://nassauweekly.com/the-problem-with-calling-something-aesthetic/ https://nassauweekly.com/the-problem-with-calling-something-...
- umlaut 2y agoOne of the authors commented that the source is GPL'd and on GitHub... and here it is! https://github.com/pdfernhout/PlantStudio https://github.com/pdfernhout/PlantStudio
- layer8 2y agoSuch a clear and structured UI! Why has modern UI design gone so wrong? (It’s a rhetorical question.)
- treyd 2y agoNominative determinism proven again, someone named Fernhout became an ecologist.