Dead software

[elia925-6]

I have some good memories of Kai's Power Tools and associated software (Bryce, Goo, Soap, MetaSquares, etc.). I guess these products are probably mostly remembered today for Kai Krause's wacky ideas about UI design.

I wish we had the ability to design crazy UI like in old times. Adobe should release a software for designing UI since it's untapped market.

 

[Collision]

I wish we had the ability to design crazy UI like in old times. Adobe should release a software for designing UI since it's untapped market.

There is plenty of WYSIWYG software for building GUIs, I think we can live without another junky RAD tool from Adobe.

Nothing is stopping anyone from making weird UIs. It's probably easier to go crazy today because you could have all kinds of insane hardware-accelerated 3D interface elements. If you wanted, you could make an entire application based around petting ray-traced 3D cats.

 

[MisterSeen]

3D Movie Maker was this silly little children's program made by Microsoft Home's Kids division that let you make animated movies by dropping a selection of characters and props onto pre-rendered 3D backdrops.

It was a very, very limited program, as you couldn't import models and couldn't even properly animate the ones that were there, instead only using already built in animations, and there was no camera at all due to the nature of the scenes. However, it still has a surprisingly dedicated community to this day, who have managed to mod it to run smoothly on modern machines and allow for use of custom models with custom animations. Even with the vanilla assets, people have managed to work past the program's crude nature over the years and create some genuinely stunning works with it.

View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PGJKeESLBpQ

I never used it back in the day, but I've toyed with it since and I actually find it quite entertaining to use. The limitations are a bit annoying at times, but they're also part of the fun, since you have to be creative with what you're given. It certainly has a charm that more capable software doesn't.

 

[jaedaen]

Back in the early 2000s, one of the most popular websites around (pre youtube era) was a flash site called homestarrunner.com (well what do you know, it's still up! Different but very spiritually similar to the original). Since the internet has gotten much larger, they are probably not known by people that don't remember them from that era.

They don't do as many cartoons as they once did, but they have an excellent newer series on youtube called Disk 4 of 12, where their most popular character Strong Bad does lets plays of very obscure DOS games. Familiarity with the homestar runner universe helps to get all of the in jokes. Not sure if it would be funny to you younger types, humor does age more quickly than most other media categories out there, but here are all of them at the moment:


View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yvscxQN1JlA


View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xh87dFlPt5A


View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IDUcMB68h64


View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C3-0vXrBwwE