
An Ode to Kai's Power Goo - bado
http://www.macworld.com/article/3005783/software-graphics/an-ode-to-kais-power-goo.html#tk.rss_all
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drglitch
I almost got suspended from high school for using PowerGoo on a photo of my
friend. Result was a trip to principal's office, a call to parents, and a day
of detention. Apparently another student was "afraid i may create something
horrible out of his yearbook photo" and reported me. Later, he admitted that
he just used that as an excuse to try to get me suspended as a way of bullying
me (i was a nerd).

This was in 2000. Today, given the insanity about political correctness, i
would expect nothing less of a SWAT team, 3 months of required psych
counseling, and getting expelled as minimum punishment.

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m_st
Cool flashback to the nineties. I remember spending hours at school in '97 or
'98 obscuring class pictures of everyone as a gag. Approved by the teacher who
also loved this kind of stuff.

Here's a link to the wikipedia article about the developer, Kai Krause.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kai_Krause](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kai_Krause)

He sold the software to Corel (remember them?) and bought a castle in Germany.
[https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bad_Breisig](https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bad_Breisig)
(the German article has more pictures).

Would be fun to have these tools back on an iPad to play around with my kids.

~~~
insensible
Perhaps you're in the market for the fractal app he helped create.

[http://fract.al/](http://fract.al/)

~~~
m_st
Instant purchase. Thank you very much!

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insensible
Just looked him up and learned that Kai lived next door to Douglas Adams and
collaborated with him on book covers.

[http://kai.sub.blue/en/42spheres.html](http://kai.sub.blue/en/42spheres.html)

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spdustin
Don't forget Alien Skin's Eye Candy, still going strong for all your _burning_
text needs! (see what I did there?)

[http://www.alienskin.com/eyecandy/](http://www.alienskin.com/eyecandy/)

I loved the hell out of those days.

~~~
jonah
Somewhere I have an Alien Skin button I picked up at a trade show.

"Computers = Ticket to Hell"

I think a lot of (especially graphics) companies were more irreverent back
then.

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webwielder2
Apple continued some of this UI tradition for quite a while, with Aqua and
stuff like QuickTime Player, then their skeuomorphic phase on both iOS and OS
X. And of course, using painstakingly rendered, depthful interface elements in
general is part of the same spirit.

I will now list some Kai/MetaTools/MetaCreations products that were also
awesome in part because of their crazy UIs.

Kai's Power Soap Bryce Poser Carrara Camino

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th0ma5
I made student council campaign posters with stereograms back in 1995 using
KPT ... and I won! Great next-level stuff for home computers back then.

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TheOtherHobbes
I loved KPT. It looked like alien software from the mid 21st century that
somehow landed in the late 1990s.

The UI was gloriously white and 3D way before skeuomorphism was even a word.

Is there an open source version of goo? Or a description of the algorithm?

It doesn't look impossibly difficult to work out, but it would be useful to
know how other people approached it.

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jonah
The team from these MetaTools and related companies has gone on to permeate
the industry - and others. From CoreImage to f.lux, from Sonos to Google -
always interesting to see how people move through the industry.

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ddmf
Very interesting. I was actually trying to remember this piece of software
just the other day because I recognised a similar effect on a tv show and
wanted to replicate it...

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noonespecial
Even to this day, when I'm standing over someone's shoulder "helping" them
photoshop, I often say "use the Kai thingy" when I mean liquify.

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kazinator
In 1996 I started using GIMP. It was on a Sun SparcStation 20 running RedHat 2
Linux. Can't remember whether IWarp was a feature or not yet; probably not.

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VOYD
Bring back the power tools.

