The Interface of Kai Krause's Software (2003) | Hacker News Reader

The Interface of Kai Krause's Software (2003)

mprove.de

319 pointsrbinv92 comments

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.

> 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.

The same. Now its all overpriced trade schools.

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???

This might have changed. There was a time when he wanted to create a startup hub in Germany and invited people. I remember an interview with him, which I cannot find anymore, where he expressed his frustration with German banks and their lack of openness to new ideas. I've never heard about his startup project and neither the software project he was working on back then (TimeDoubler IIRC) again, so I assume they didn't materialize and he retreated from public life.

I also once read in a thread that his home castle and the one he was receiving guests for the startup hup where separate ones. I could not find reliable source for this, so it may or may not be true.

EDIT: I just found that his website has something to say about it:

"This is not a case of Luddite but Peace'nQuiet."

http://kai.sub.blue

How sad, maybe he was ahead of his time. Nowadays it seems like the institutions (mainly governments at all levels) are slowly but intently waking up to the idea of supporting new companies being valuable for society.

Somewhat relatedly there's the german federal SPRIND initiative (https://www.sprind.org/en/) with a great podcast (https://pca.st/podcast/4c1e6440-67ad-0139-341a-0acc26574db2), which Kai would be great to hear on.

Agreed. At least in Germany it is totally feasible by now to get your seed funding from local community banks, e.g. Sparkassen. Federal and country banks are covering up to 80% of the lender's risk nowadays, so getting a 100k EUR to get started has become rather easy and fast. You need a business plan and a pitch and off you go. (For perspective, we are still talking a few months of paperwork, but it is a marked improvement over the get-out-of-my-office of only a decade ago.)

Sure, not all of the money is in grants, but you don't have to sign over half your company to some investor either just to get started.

that is the problem. you cannot get significant money to get anywhere. 100k is nothing to start a business. if you try to get 1MM you will personally be liable for 200k which is a huge deal in europe where salaries are low and it might ruin your finances for life and you cannot get rid of it. meanwhile banks play very risky in the market and when they screw up nobody is liable.

I never met him, but hat some good talks per mail with him. All that sounded not like he don't want to answer emails. But the talk started with 'Your website is really meh, are you serious with that?' and he answered with 'yeay, you are right, it's just a overstated placeholder, here is the link to the real website, it's nearby done'....and then came a link to a website looking like a book, really cool in 1999.

> i am surprised you could meet him [...]

That's yet another Kai Krause story.

I was just visiting Byteburg with a friend who was a big Krause/KPT/Bryce etc. fan and had told his partner about him, a few years before.

She was working as a journalist for German Max magazine at the time AFAIR. So she convinced her editor and they did a piece on Kai.

This friend and her flew to California and interviewed Kai in his villa. Max also booked a super hip local photographer to shoot him.

Now the photographer brought some perspex sheets or the like to do a setup where Kai would walk 'like Jesus' over the surface of his pool.

Kai told the guy he should do it in Photoshop instead, no setup required, no one getting wet. The photographer said it wouldn't be the same and one could always tell.

To which Kai replied that he could show him how and you wouldn't be able to tell.

This led to a discussion and the photographer loosing it and ultimately leaving in anger (he likely thought he was just shooting some unknown C-level celebrity geek but Kai was quite famous at the time).

So the shoot went sideways because of Kai having offered his superior Photoshop-Fu. :P

AFAIR my friend himself took the pictures that were ultimately used for the article. But I may misremember.

Kai and him became friends over that interview and that's how we ended up at Kai's castle, a year or so after.

In any case, months later, when the photographer found out whom he had been booked to shoot, he wanted to re-negotiate his compensation after the fact with Max magazine. They refused ofc. Go figure.

> To which Kai replied that he could show him how and you wouldn't be able to tell.

You would probably be able to tell. You know what else you would probably able to tell? Someone walking on ao perspex sheet :)

> In any case, months later, when the photographer found out whom he had been booked to shoot, he wanted to re-negotiate his compensation after the fact with Max magazine.

Lol :) after they have blown their own shoot? Mind you it is the photographer’s job to make their subjects comfortable with their ideas.

I don’t know about Kai but if it were me my first question would be “what made you think i want to project that image of myself publicly?”

one time a photographer came to my house to interview me about the hardware i developed.

he asked me to put it on my head because that would be cute or interesting. naturally i refused.

I strugle to imagine having the arrogance to tell Kai Krause what can and cannot be done in Photoshop.

i wonder what happened when the stores told the students to pay for the software after / before having it ordered.

Presumably they actually bought it and were reimbursed. It's a tiny price to get yourself on shelves everywhere!

That’s actually super illegal, at least in America. There’s a lot of very tight restrictions against buying your own product, as it can lead to false sales numbers, etc. Something tells me that if this story were true, it would be very much something he’d want to keep hidden at the time.

Are you sure about that? Presenting false sales numbers sounds like a regular false statement to me, which may be subject to SEC rules etc if you are listed.

But actually buying your own product ... I can't find any sources yet on the web.

IANAL (though I do read Matt Levine, and I stayed at a Holiday Inn Express last night) but my understanding is that yeah it's securities fraud if you are a public company because you are reporting sales numbers that are essentially fake, thereby defrauding the investing public.

Is it just regular fraud if you're not a public company? Or if you are a public company and do juke your sales stats this way, but are open about it in your public filings? Not sure.

> Is it just regular fraud if you're not a public company?

I don't think it is regular fraud in and of itself.

I think it is likely to become fraud when you use sales figures including undisclosed self-dealing to support any financial transaction or anything else from which you receive something of value from someone else, and where those sales figures are a material factor.

do you think retailers don’t do anything illegal? hahaha

None of these students hired to call-bomb bought any KPT seats.

This was about visibility/getting shelve space. Selling licenses was an effect of the former, afterwards.

again, not credible that retailers would not ask for prepayment for something they don’t stock (yet)

that is the more likely story. if you have the money to give all the retailers a bunch of markup more power to you.

No one ordered anything. The stores didn't know about KPT.

So they couldn't even take orders for it when the calls hit them.

The intention of the phone-bombing was that the stores would order a bunch of boxes each, of KPT, so that they hit the shelves.

KPT was one of those things that as a Photoshop user, you just had to have in your toolbox at the time.

I.e. even if you just did boring graphics design or classic compositing, there was always a moment when some filter from the plugin would come in handy.

After that KPT hit a critical installed base. I.e. word of mouth and piracy did the rest as far as marketing goes.

Shelve space for software was auctioned-off at the time. Microsoft was number one in buying shelve space ofc.

The closer to the entrance of a shop (or the software area of a department store) and the higher up the shelve your boxes would end up, the more you had to pay.

Now KPT wasn't on any shelve anywhere at all when Uwe pulled this one off.

That changed after.

so the retailers simply gave the prime shelf space to KPT because of the phone calls?

i have first hand retail experience trying to get a hw product into stores and could never pull that off.

i also highly doubt retailers would simply order a bunch of stuff without taking cash from customers first.

These kinds of guerrilla techniques can work, but they only work once or maybe a few times. I'm inclined to believe they worked at that time and in that context but you're right it wouldn't work today.

If you want to read about some things that wouldn't ever work today, but that absolutely worked when they were first tried, read about Marc Benioff's guerrilla marketing for Salesforce when they were just getting started.

Remember, immigration spam actually worked back in the day!

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.

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.

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.

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!).

I agree, with the luxury of hindsight, that it was a rather garish era in UI. But looking back now at his Kai Power Tools (the first I heard of him) it is clear to me he was more responsible than anyone for kicking off that whole era of wacky UI that culminated/ended with brushed metal and Apple's Aqua.

So kudos to Kai for having such an outsized influence on the UI of the time.

Back then we would talk about UI when we meant UX. The KPT plugins had a very odd visual design but the way that you could iterate patterns and processes on an image was unheard of.

People also look at the designs that the filters made and didn't think about how they could be used as selection channels and other ways of manipulating an image. Kai's original work was about using selection channels in Photoshop to create stunning effects and while you could use his tools to create a background or a texture they could also be used to manipulate the colour and tone in images in really incredible ways.

UI: the design of interface between software and users, with a significant body of research behind it.

UX: the design of interface between software and users as defined by self-proclaimed experts with no significant body of research behind it.

We most definitely did not mean UX when we talked about UI.

I think you're being quite dismissive about what really was incredibly innovative and groundbreaking technology at the time. I went to an Apple Expo in London around the time Kai's Power Goo was released and the show floor around the MetaCreations stand was one of the busiest parts of the whole show. I'm talking about large crowds of people watching live demos of someone using Kai's Power Goo with dropped jaws. It's hard to explain how amazed we were about this software at the time.

His UIs were what got me really into software as a child. Bryce and Power Goo were absolutely life-changing to me. There was NO other software out there which was so accessible and so powerful, especially to a child.

If you asked someone to make you a realistic looking 3D rendered image of an alien landscape or even just a regular earth-like landscape in 94/95, it would have been a hugely complex task requiring special skills and expensive, inaccessible software. I was around 12 at this time and I remember amazing my dad with my Bryce creations. A few years later I remember warezing Maya and having no idea how to do anything, I could barely make a single textured sphere in that program, it was so complex to use and the UI was not friendly to look at.

My point being that the UI may look "cute" but it was friendly and accessible and it got people being creative, unlike other 3D tools at the time which were intimidating, complex, and incredibly hard to learn. I still don't believe there is a better tool out there for making 3D landscape art than Bryce, if there is, I'd love to hear about it. I suppose young people these days will just ask Stable Diffusion "make me a cool alien landscape"

It is not only that. Kai's power goo had the best resize algorithm i have ever seen.

> 30 years later these look rather cute and twee.

This sounds like a classic example of "Seinfeld isn't funny" or "The Beatles aren't original".

Yes, Kai's look feels dated and overwrought. That's because when it came out, it was so radically innovative that it created a huge graphic design fad. It was emulating nothing, and it feels cute and twee because it was so successful that it's seared in everyone's consciousness.

> Definitely part of that late 90s bright-colours-and-glass OMG Internet aesthetic

It was one of the primary originators of that aesthetic. Our whole mental picture of the 90s would be very different without Kai Krause.

I’d still take it over almost every web “UI”.

I remembering getting into 3D Studio Max and then being told about Bryce for making pretty landscape art. I opened Bryce and it felt so playschool like and not in a good way for someone who was accustomed to 3D studio max interface and tools that allowed so much more. Bryce was geared towards particular used I guess.

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

KPT Bryce 1.0 with John Dvorak and Kai Krause: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MY8GPU5osx4

"The Program": https://youtu.be/ZGLjPYgs8bg

Kai Krause at TED8: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z0rw2LGHnCA

His website is worth a visit, too: http://kai.sub.blue/

Wow, TED was so different then!

I had no idea that Bryce was originally made by Kai!

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)

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-ho...

[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.

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.

They had merged with Fractal Design Corporation who created Painter and was based there.

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.

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/

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/xaosto... https://ohiostate.pressbooks.pub/graphicshistory/chapter/11-...

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.

Mind expanding on this a little bit?

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.

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.

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!

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.

Joel Spolsky was critical of Kai's UI:

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.

> 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_...

[2] http://bytepointer.com/resources/old_new_thing/20150508_096_...

[3] https://www.codeproject.com/Articles/12340/CImageButtonWithS...

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.

To really appreciate Kais ideas about UI design, I suggest comparing it to its contemporary Framemaker's "747 cockpit" UI for context.

Painmaker: It's riddled with features.

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.

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-travel...

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.

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.

LGR has a great review of Kai Power Goo:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xt06OSIQ0PE

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.

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.

The hover action will come back to touch interfaces once we have gaze tracking.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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."

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

MetaStream had a some really neat features like progressive enhancement too.

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 !

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?

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.

My earlier post about Kai Kraus:

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

>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_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

>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/

>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

>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/...

>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.'

Any idea what Kai is currently up to? I would love to know what has been happening behind the Byteburg walls.

Maybe let him know that there is a HN thread about him today:

http://kai.sub.blue/en/contact.html

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.

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.

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

No relation

I heard about some of these tools way back then, but didn't know what they were.

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

Ah Kai power tools, brings back memories

Really amazing interfaces!

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.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com