[HN Gopher] KidPix
___________________________________________________________________
KidPix
Author : wonger_
Score : 838 points
Date : 2024-06-18 23:38 UTC (23 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (kidpix.app)
(TXT) w3m dump (kidpix.app)
| relyks wrote:
| This is amazing and brings back good memories. I spent a good
| portion of my childhood playing with KidPix on a Performa 600 lol
| wildzzz wrote:
| We had a brand new lab filled with Performa 5400s loaded up
| with kidpix in elementary school
| cortesoft wrote:
| The LC for me
| georgel wrote:
| The dynamite brings back memories.
| beardedwizard wrote:
| that's what got me too
| jszymborski wrote:
| Same! Didn't realize this is what I played with as a kid until
| that moment.
| nickpeterson wrote:
| This is the kind of app I want on an iPad for my kid.
| foenix wrote:
| You're in luck! I my kiddo loves the kidpix iPad app and it's
| just a single purchase.
| dontdoxxme wrote:
| This web version supports adding to the home screen and you
| maybe won't even notice the difference.
| xiconfjs wrote:
| Can you provide a link to the iPad app, please?
| foenix wrote:
| Sure thing: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/kid-pix-5-the-
| steam-edition/id...
| mattkevan wrote:
| Wow, that's got a real Kai's Power Tools vibe to it.
| colinbartlett wrote:
| Huh, what am I missing? This looks absolutely nothing
| like the link from OP.
| crawsome wrote:
| Man, I used to spend hours on KidPix back on my old 68k mac. It's
| not quite the same, and a lot of the effects are not 1:1, but
| it's still a cool throwback.
| letmevoteplease wrote:
| I can't figure out how to clear the canvas.
| pcwalton wrote:
| Eraser tool, dynamite, click anywhere.
| Neywiny wrote:
| Maybe a few months ago I got a real hankering for the sounds of
| KidPix. The theme song is 100% pure lab grade nostalgia for me.
| Pretty sure I never used the program to its full extent but I
| loved the funny sound effects.
|
| [Editing because I commented before clicking the link. Seems this
| is some older version. I only used a newer one.]
| duskwuff wrote:
| I don't remember a theme song from the version of my childhood,
| but I vividly remember the _OH NO!_ of the undo button (which
| is, delightfully, included in the web version).
| Neywiny wrote:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KMCbnEGGL4E
|
| I remember the first part to this so well. Wondering if maybe
| I skipped the rest or I just forgot it. The "wow" is burned
| into my memory.
|
| But as I alluded to in my edit, this seems to be an entirely
| different generation of product I'm remembering vs this post.
| Gigachad wrote:
| I used to use kidpix 4 as a kid and recently went and set up a
| windows XP VM to try it again. Turns out I pretty much was
| using it to its full extent by just making a mess and blowing
| stuff up.
|
| It's pretty much impossible to create anything artistic in the
| program. The lack of layers, zoom, and only one level of undo
| make it extremely difficult. I have somewhat good drawing
| skills but wasn't able to do anything more than a very crude
| stick figure. Still had a lot of fun doing that though.
| Neywiny wrote:
| In a way I appreciate knowing that I didn't miss out on much.
| I vaguely recall something about animation though? Other than
| that, I guess that's what I remember too. Just splattering
| stuff on the screen to hear the funny noises and making
| nightmare drawings. I'm sure my parents still have some
| printouts. I recall a bowling ball and pin brush I liked.
| melaniecrissey wrote:
| The paint bucket sound makes my heart so happy!
| gjsman-1000 wrote:
| Believe it or not, there is a Kid Pix 5.0, and it even runs
| natively on Apple Silicon Macs. Inexplicably though, the company
| that develops it refuses to advertise it. Maybe it has something
| to do with their school contracts. You can grab a copy on
| Internet Archive though.
|
| https://youtu.be/ZbB1OuOxUr4?t=64
|
| https://www.mackiev.com/offers/kp5/upgrade_offer.html
| xattt wrote:
| There is an iOS/iPad OS version! It's a killer app for kids.
| fswd wrote:
| like something I'd use on my amiga 500 when I was a kid!
| keithnz wrote:
| This is pretty cool! My kids are past this now, but they used to
| enjoy TuxPaint, that's pretty good also.
| LarsDu88 wrote:
| What the hell? I grew up with this
| ChrisArchitect wrote:
| Some previous discussion in 2021:
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28073383
| dang wrote:
| Thanks! Macroexpanded:
|
| _Kid Pix as a JavaScript App_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28073383 - Aug 2021 (89
| comments)
|
| _Kid Pix in JavaScript /HTML_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28069588 - Aug 2021 (12
| comments)
|
| _Show HN: JS Kid Pix 1.0.2021_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28064606 - Aug 2021 (1
| comment)
|
| _Meeting Mr. Kid Pix (2019) [video]_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25108875 - Nov 2020 (16
| comments)
|
| _Meeting Mr. Kid Pix_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20296370 - June 2019 (2
| comments)
|
| _Kid Pix - The Early Years_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11438994 - April 2016 (1
| comment)
|
| _Kid Pix: The Early Years_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1298728 - April 2010 (3
| comments)
| SushiHippie wrote:
| Archive of the Kid Pix: The Early Years page
|
| https://web.archive.org/web/20120427215910/http://pixelpoppi.
| ..
| Nition wrote:
| Really cool, I remember using this on a friend's computer in the
| early 90s. My only complaint is this has a smoothing alpha edge
| on the pencil and line tools, which gives that unfortunate white
| outline when using the paint bucket. KidPix is great, but gimmie
| that classic Nearest Neighbour behaviour.
| yincrash wrote:
| https://github.com/vikrum/kidpix/issues/16
|
| It appears because the underlying HTML5 Canvas tools are being
| used, things like antialiasing are unavoidable without remaking
| certain API calls. I'm sure it could be done though!
| smusamashah wrote:
| I think that can be turned off. I tried that recently. There
| is a global flag we can set to turn of antialiasing.
|
| UPDATE: it's image-rendering: pixelated;
|
| https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS/image-
| rende...
| smusamashah wrote:
| This property is already applied if you inspect the canvas
| elements. Better solution could be context SVG filters
| https://stackoverflow.com/a/49357655/342095
| https://stackoverflow.com/a/68372384/342095
| whywhywhywhy wrote:
| This rabbit hole is a waste of time, as someone who's been
| down it, you'll find piles of resources claiming CSS and JS
| flags will give you what you want but it never really gets
| there.
|
| The only way to actually get true aliased brushes in canvas
| is implementing a line drawing algorithm manually and
| drawing down aliased circles like how https://gifpaint.com/
| & https://jspaint.app/ do it.
| endemic wrote:
| And doing it this way is slooowww in JS
| ralferoo wrote:
| I've never used the original so this might be a faithful
| reproduction of the original (it's kind of cool), but it
| looks like the line tool and the multicoloured tool interact
| weirdly, and it doesn't erase the previous line when you move
| the mouse, instead you get a cool fan of colour instead. I
| was expecting a single line, but had more fun with it as it
| is, which is why I suspect it might not actually be a bug
| after all.
| djxfade wrote:
| It's possible to avoid this issue. I implemented a Canvas
| based clone of the classic MS Paint back in the days. One of
| the tricks to avoid this, was to use decimal pixel
| coordinates, so instead of drawing a pixel at (100, 200), you
| would draw at (100.5, 200.5).
| recursive wrote:
| That's not a complete solution. For instance, it assumes
| that each canvas pixel corresponds to a single logical
| pixel, and that each logical pixel corresponds to a single
| physical pixel. There are a number of reasons that might
| not be true.
| TechDebtDevin wrote:
| .....
| fergie wrote:
| I think that the background colour for anti-aliasing is called
| "matte" in designer-speak.
| mechagodzilla wrote:
| My 6 year old loves kidpix 3 on an old PPC iMac. It was just a
| great piece of software.
| nhance wrote:
| Wish this had the fun pack
| ericd wrote:
| The original works great on dosbox, too, for all of you looking
| for the original experience.
| jnaina wrote:
| Craig Hickman was my Prof at UofO. Took his Digital Arts class in
| 1986 for one quarter and wrote an early proto color paint program
| inspired by MacPaint, on a Graphics Frame Store system that uses
| serial port to communicate with a Mac 128K.
|
| The system had basic graphics primitives built-in and the system
| drew the images based on the commands received. Forgot the name
| of said graphics frame store, which if I recall had 8-bit color
| and had "Vector" as part of it's name (though it uses raster CRT
| with bit maps and not vector displays).
|
| Craig was an early pioneer in using computer color graphics for
| Art.
| jnaina wrote:
| Found it. It was the Vectrix VX128 (the 8-bit colour model).
| The ad from Byte magazine below.
|
| http://bitsavers.trailing-edge.com/pdf/vectrix/Vectrix_Ad_By...
| Anon4Now wrote:
| You might enjoy this, then:
|
| http://red-green-blue.com/kid-pix-the-early-years
| jnaina wrote:
| Nice. Thank you. Craig is a wonderful and generous guy, and a
| great teacher/professor. He noticed that I was looking to
| learn as much as I can about graphics programming (I was
| doing Comp Sci) and gave me access to some neat toys,
| including an Apollo Domain.
| vikrum wrote:
| The web app somehow made its way to him! He sent me an
| extremely endearing message that it was fun to see his 2yo
| grandson using it! (Craig had originally made Kid Pix for
| his son who is now a graphic, ui, and ux designer). I let
| him know I made this port for my own daughter as a
| pandemic-project.
| sgwizdak wrote:
| Give me text boxes and arrow connects and I'll be happy to use
| this for system diagrams.
| slicktux wrote:
| This was so much fun in elementary school. I still remember going
| from Oregon trail on the old desktop towers to Kid Pix on the new
| Apple IMac G3...
| amatecha wrote:
| Nice, we had it on Color Classics and uhh, I guess SE's or
| something (hard to remember)... such small screens haha :'D
| makmanalp wrote:
| I don't know why but the sounds make it so much more satisfying
| :-) It's as fun as I remember it being as a kid.
| rlt wrote:
| Ooops. Oh No. Boing. Ooops. Oh No. Oh No. Boing.
| leokennis wrote:
| The "Moving Van" is just fantastic. Vrooom and then a break
| screech when you let it go.
| hedora wrote:
| It's a little confusing that it says Public Domain Version, but
| it's GPLv3.
| dankwizard wrote:
| I like how this gets "Wow, I grew up with this", or "I remember
| this!"
|
| Well... Yeah. If you're of the age, there wasn't an app store and
| 5000 different apps doing the same thing. There was kidpix. We
| all saw it.
|
| You're not special
|
| (Except me, I used KidPix the most! More than you guys!!)
| maxbond wrote:
| What I see is people enjoying that they all remember the same
| thing, not claiming they are atomic or special. (Not that I see
| why people feeling special would be a problem, anyway.)
| cjbgkagh wrote:
| I saw the comment as a tong-in-cheek reminder that culture
| used to be a lot less fragmented.
| maxbond wrote:
| Looks to me like they said both.
| nubinetwork wrote:
| Wooooooow!
| SK777 wrote:
| Cool app but not a great name
| smugma wrote:
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kid_Pix
| erkt wrote:
| These sounds effects are unlocking DEEEP memories. Thank you for
| sharing!
| gnatman wrote:
| It's incredible, really. I haven't heard these in 25+ years and
| yet recognize them immediately. Probably because I heard them
| repeated 50 million times!
| mlekoszek wrote:
| I always wondered how I knew what a line sounded like.
| holtkam2 wrote:
| Love it. I'm curious, anyone know how this was implemented? Is it
| a webassembly port of the original kidpix code or did he code it
| up from scratch via JS?
| SuperHeavy256 wrote:
| you can look at the project's github and understand
|
| https://github.com/vikrum/kidpix
| metadat wrote:
| Too bad it's totally fucked up on android mobile, I'm stuck in
| the top left quartile.
|
| This has all the 90s vibes which I absolutely ADORE! Awesome
| sounds and UX. The nostalgia is almost too much, it was a
| uniquely raw and badass time to be a kid in the 90s.
|
| _" 1999"_ by Charli XCX comes to mind.
|
| https://youtube.com/watch?v=6-v1b9waHWY
|
| Some things are invariably lost to time. <3
| maxbond wrote:
| The visual references in that video were great. The Steve Jobs
| took me by surprise, I thought of tech titans being culturally
| relevant was a distinctly recent phenomenon, but of course 99
| was the peak of the dot-com bubble and Apple was huge already.
| DonHopkins wrote:
| The Sims reference (https://youtu.be/6-v1b9waHWY?t=112) was
| slightly anachronistic since it was released in early 2000
| (and it's really weird to see the idealized hires vector
| graphics reto-re-rendering of a lores pixelated game), but
| the dancing baby was spot on.
|
| The dancing baby (https://youtu.be/6-v1b9waHWY?t=124) was
| from a demo that shipped with 3D Studio Max's "Character
| Studio / Bipid / Physique" character animation and skinning
| system, which we used to make the character animation in The
| Sims. The baby and its dancing animations were included with
| Character Studio as a canned demo, along with some other
| animations you could apply to any skeleton.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dancing_baby
| doctorhandshake wrote:
| I remember the sounds so much better than the tools. I still can
| hear perfectly every slice of the exquisite corpse 'draw me'
| feature: "I'm a ... beautiful fairy princess ... with a hundred
| toes and a pickle in my nose ... and ... I'm covered with
| feathers!!"
| dd367 wrote:
| Kid Pix seems like not an astute name.
| DANmode wrote:
| This software was named decades and decades ago - long before
| all of that was a mainstream topic.
| nicolas_t wrote:
| Sorry, what mainstream topic would make kid pix not astute?
| DANmode wrote:
| Pedophiles hiding in plain sight. Some incredibly powerful.
| irusensei wrote:
| Long before social media people looking for outrage in simple
| things.
| jjice wrote:
| The audio is the biggest memory blast for me. That low quality
| flash-style audio is just so nostalgic. Does anyone know what
| specifically causes that? Is that just due to audio codecs at the
| time?
| chefandy wrote:
| I don't know exactly how the kidpix sounds were programmed, but
| I'll bet flash was light-years beyond it. Flash used wav,
| QuickTime, real Media, and other audio files that were probably
| made using a DAW or real instruments like they are today,
| dropped into a wysiwyg Editor. They were usually highly
| compressed so they could be usable to people on slow dial-up
| connections which is where that crunchiness comes. In a lot of
| earlier applications with sound, such as games, the sounds were
| programmed in assembly using tone and noise generators. It was
| super fast and lightweight, but obviously one of the first
| older techniques to get left behind when it was feasible.
| ssl-3 wrote:
| AFAICT, Kid Pix was first released as public domain in 1989,
| and published a year or two later by Broderbund.
|
| We don't think much about it these days when buying and using a
| quarter-terabyte MicroSD card is rather passe, and when we can
| buy a complete USB sound card for ~$5 at Wal-Mart (we call it a
| "USB C headphone adapter" and it acts just like we'd expect a
| dumb adapter to act, but it's got the whole works integrated
| completely inside of the connector shell -- ADC, DAC, power
| amp, ...).
|
| Back then, audio was... problematic. It was unwieldy. At 16-bit
| stereo 44.1KHz ("CD quality"), a 5.25" double-density disk can
| hold less than two seconds of audio, and we didn't have the
| computational grunt for perceptive codecs like MP3.
|
| So we just used less of it: We sampled with fewer bits, and we
| did so less-often.
|
| A combination of low sample rate and primitive ADC
| implementations with not-so-good Nyquist filtering and other
| issues lead to both a chopped off top end, and a mess of
| sampling artifacts in an easily-audible range.
|
| A low sample depth lead to analog sounds being recorded as hot
| as possible -- often with deliberate clipping -- lest there be
| even fewer bits to contain the important parts of the sounds.
| Some of this could be mitigated with high-quality dynamic range
| compression, but good outboard compressors were _expensive_
| (and so were the 16-bit workflows that would allow that to be
| done digitally in software). It was a sea of tradeoffs.
|
| Further digital processing also had a bad effect on stuff
| (quantization errors, oh my!) -- somewhat akin to doing things
| like trying to scale the resolution of ASCII art.
|
| And even then, sometimes the audio was too big. So we'd
| truncate samples by just chopping off LSBs until the sounds
| were barely-useful even in a chonky fun drawing program (the
| original disksets from the SoundBlaster card came with
| "compression" software that did exactly this), just to make
| things a wee bit smaller because storage was relatively tiny.
|
| This was how we got the sounds of the early-ish days of PCM
| audio on home computers, and much of that carried on into the
| early flash days (due to bandwidth constraints, not so much
| storage; CD-ROMs had broadly fixed the storage problem for
| commercially-published software by then).
| elijahbenizzy wrote:
| Oh my god I barely even remembered this until the sound + the
| name popped right back. Wow!
| amatecha wrote:
| Recently I found one of my old elementary school projects from
| ~1995 or so, where we had to make our own magazine, and my
| friend/classmate and I made a computer gaming magazine. We used
| Kid Pix to draw a side view of our own imagined Command & Conquer
| scene to act as a "screenshot" in our article about the game.
| Since the Mac lab at school had a color printer (the ImageWriter
| II, I think), we were able to make some pretty neat pages for our
| magazine! Fun memories :)
|
| Oh, actually I think I found the floppy disk that had that very
| Kid Pix document on it, now that I think of it! Probably one of
| the oldest of my creations that I still have.
| gaurangagg wrote:
| So amazing. I remember we used to go to our school's computer lab
| in ~1999 when we used to draw on Kidpix. And I vividly remember
| the Firecracker feature with nice bomb sound. You have left me
| nostalgiac :)
| esalman wrote:
| My 3 yo just had a lot of fun with it, helped him draw robots and
| stuff.
| softgrow wrote:
| https://tuxpaint.org TuxPaint is an app that is very similar from
| 2002 onwards to current. I have been installing on many computers
| for small children since. Stamps and noises are the most loved
| features.
| bagful wrote:
| TuxPaint is just as fun for adult artists, especially using a
| stylus touchscreen. The Magic tools have unique digital-grunge
| effects that a more respectable paint program won't have (my
| favorite is Chalk). I only recommend replacing the stock colors
| with something like Dawnbringer's 16- or 32-color palette.
| darepublic wrote:
| as a kid, when we behaved well in computer lab, we got to play
| with this.
| BobFromEnzyte wrote:
| Ah heck yes! This was a great part of elementary school!
| alisinabh wrote:
| I was again 5 years old for a few minutes after clicking on this.
| Thanks OP. That brought back a lot of good memories.
| DonHopkins wrote:
| Holy plate of shrimp! I just ran across this recent blog post
| about the earlier interview yesterday:
|
| Inspiration: Meeting Mr. Kid Pix:
|
| https://garden.grantcuster.com/2024-06-16-19-33-19-Inspirati...
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=csalhuSixQU
|
| >Grant's garden
|
| >Sunday * Jun 16, 2024 * 7:33 PM
|
| >I really enjoyed Meeting Mr. Kid Pix by jeffrey aka Whistlegraph
| on Twitter. I appreciated the sincerity of both him and Craig
| Hickman. So nice to see people putting effort to understand + be
| understood.
|
| >This does touch on something I've tried to nail down before in
| regard to creative tools and video games.
|
| >If Kid Pix is so delightful (it is) what does it mean that it is
| a delightful paint program? Rather than a delightful video game?
|
| >Even if the produced image isn't the point, that you're
| manipulating an image is some part of it. That you see images all
| around you and now you're enjoying making them. It's got to be (I
| think) something to do with feeling agency. Video games give you
| agency too, but with a closed world (that's oversimplifying).
|
| >I can't fully articulate it! But it seems useful to keep
| returning to.
| ascorbic wrote:
| This isn't just good for nostalgia. My 10 year old has really
| enjoyed playing with it for years now. She hadn't even realised
| it was so old until I told her recently. Stuff like Stardew
| Valley means kids are used to the 8-bit style and don't think of
| it as a signifier of old games.
| boringg wrote:
| Goes to show how much graphics aren't the deciding factor in
| fun games for kids - or rather they aren't even that huge a
| deal.
| drowntoge wrote:
| Yeah. It's truly amazing how cleverly they designed these tools
| to encourage discovery and experimentation. It's made to make
| it basically impossible to create something that "doesn't look
| right", which makes it a fantastic creativity toy for children.
|
| It makes me a bit sad that it's not easy to find anything today
| that can compete with what I played with as a kid thirty years
| ago.
| indymike wrote:
| > It makes me a bit sad that it's not easy to find anything
| today that can compete with what I played with as a kid
| thirty years ago.
|
| My wife is a teacher. I came home from work and she was
| making Google slides and the stock art was just like KidPix.
| I suspect that Google slides is the spiritual successor, but
| it just isn't as fun.
|
| > It makes me a bit sad that it's not easy to find anything
| today that can compete with what I played with as a kid
| thirty years ago.
|
| My kids are always shocked when I dig up some old software
| that does X or Y that they would otherwise need the pro
| enterprise AI plus subscription to use through the browser.
| MoD411 wrote:
| not gonna lie, this title sounds a bit pedofilic
| krallja wrote:
| All my friend group chats have a #kidpix channel for sharing
| pics of our kids. It's named after the historic software.
| DonHopkins wrote:
| Not to diminish the groundbreaking originality KidPix (1989), but
| rather to highlight something from a few years later in the same
| vein that it might have inspired, I also love the Thinkin' Things
| series from Edmark (1993):
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thinkin%27_Things
|
| >Thinkin' Things is a series of educational video games by the
| Edmark Corporation and released for Windows and Mac in the 1990s.
| Entries in the series include Thinkin' Things Collection 1
| (Formerly Thinkin Things) (1993), Thinkin' Things Collection 2
| (1994), Thinkin' Things Collection 3 (1995), the adventure game
| Thinkin' Things: Sky Island Mysteries (1998), Thinkin' Things
| Galactic Brain Benders (1999), Thinkin' Things: All Around
| Frippletown (1999) and Thinkin' Things: Toony the Loon's Lagoon
| (1999).
|
| >The Thinkin' Things series allows players to experiment and
| explore with interactive objects in different ways and methods
| throughout the games. This can be in the form of playing with
| shapes, patterns, motions, sound effects and music tunes. Every
| game has its own preset designs and demonstrations to give the
| player an idea of how the game works before the player can
| customize a design of their own. Some games also permit the
| player to record their own sounds with a microphone.
|
| History of KidPix is interesting too:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kid_Pix
|
| Thinkin' Things Collection 1 Gameplay:
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rszh-Pq-mpw
|
| Especially the mesmerizing bouncing balls:
|
| https://youtu.be/Rszh-Pq-mpw?t=629
|
| Thinkin' Things Collection 2 Gameplay:
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G2Sh5pxLSlA
|
| Thinkin' Things Collection 3 Gameplay:
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gCFNUc10Vu8
|
| Alan Kay also loves Thinkin' Things (as well as Warren Robinett's
| "Rocky's Boots" and "Robot Odyssey", the same guy who made Atari
| Adventure), and cited one of its levels, a football halftime
| parade programming system, as a precursor to blocks-based visual
| programming:
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17423040
|
| DonHopkins on June 29, 2018 | parent | context | favorite | on:
| Classic 1984 video game Robot Odyssey available on...
|
| From: Alan Kay Date: Mon, 12 Nov 2007 13:55:27 -0800 (PST)
| Subject: Re: Just curious ... To: Samuel Klein, Don Hopkins,
| Chris Trottier, John Gilmore
|
| Hi SJ --
|
| Robot Odyssey is another game that would benefit from having a
| clean separation between the graphical/physical modeling
| simulation and the behavioral parts (both the games levels and
| the robot programming could be independently separated out) --
| this would make a great target for those who would like to try
| their hand at game play and at robot behavioral programming
| systems.
|
| This is a long undropped shoe for me. When I was the CS at Atari
| in 82-84, it was one of our goals to make a number of the very
| best games into frameworks for end-user (especially children's)
| creativity. Alas, Atari had quite a down turn towards the end of
| 83 ... We did get "the Aquarium" idea from Ann Marion to morph
| into the Vivarium project at Apple ... And some of the results
| there helped with the later Etoys design.
|
| Cheers,
|
| Alan
|
| ----
|
| From: Alan Kay Date: Mon, 12 Nov 2007 20:57:51 -0600 (CST)
| Subject: Re: Just curious ... To: Samuel Klein, Don Hopkins,
| Chris Trottier, John Gilmore
|
| Thanks SJ --
|
| We are benefiting here from Don Hopkins' generosity (and of the
| original designers and owners of these games).
|
| The basic notion is that there are many games that, if
| modularized with nice separable interfaces, would be great
| environments for exploring various kinds of "learning by doing".
| For example, there is a nice separation between the
| "rules/dynamics" of a games world and the "strategies/actions" of
| the characters. There could be a third separation to break out
| the graphics and sound routines as a media environment.
|
| For example, in SimCity, the first and most useful breakout for
| children would be to allow various UIs to be made that would let
| children find out about and try experiments with the "city
| dynamics rules". It's not clear what the best forms for this
| would be, so it would be great to have a variety of different
| designers supply modules that would try to bridge the gaps to the
| child users.
|
| This could work even for pretty young children (we helped the
| Open Magnet School set up Doreen Nelson's "City Building"
| curriculum in the third grade of the school and this was very
| successful -- a child controlled SimCity would have been
| wonderful to have).
|
| Maybe this separation could be set up via the D-bus so that
| separate processes written in any language the authors choose
| could be used. This would open this game up to different
| experiments by different researchers to explore different kinds
| of UIs and strategy languages for various ages of children. I
| think this would be really cool! We would all learn a lot from
| this and the children would benefit greatly.
|
| A trickier deal would be the world dynamics (I'm just guessing
| here, but Don would know). This is one of the really great things
| about SimCity -- it can really accommodate lots of different
| changes and stitch things together to make a pretty decent
| simulation without too many seams showing. (Given the machines
| this game originally ran on, many of the heuristics are likely to
| be a little patchy. Don has indicated as much.) I think doing a
| great world dynamics engine for games like SimCity would be
| really wonderful -- and could even be a thesis project or two.
|
| Don has talked about doing the separations so that many new games
| can be made in addition to the variations.
|
| Similarly, Robot Odyssey (one of the best games concepts ever)
| was marred by choosing a way to program the robots where the
| complexity of programming grew much faster than the functionality
| that could be given to the robots. This game was way ahead of its
| time.
|
| Again, the idea would be do make a game in which environment,
| levels of challenge, and how the robots are programmed would be
| broken out into separate processes that a variety of gamers and
| researchers could do experiments in language and UI.
|
| One of the most wonderful possibilities about this venture is
| that it will bring together very fluent designers from many
| worlds of computing (more worlds than usually combine to make a
| game) in the service of the children. We should really try to
| pull this off!
|
| Cheers,
|
| Alan
|
| pjungwir on June 29, 2018 | root | parent | next [-]
|
| Does anyone here remember ZZT? I loved building puzzles in that
| game with the scripting language. You didn't program to play, but
| you could make your own games and program the behavior of special
| objects. It's the closest realized example I can think of to what
| Alan described here.
|
| jasonjayr on June 29, 2018 | root | parent | next [-]
|
| I remember ZZT -- and the excitement when I found an archive of
| alternate worlds I could download from a BBS. Learning to program
| ZZT worlds was one of the first steps I took to programming.
|
| DonHopkins on June 29, 2018 | root | parent | prev | next [-]
|
| I'm not familiar with ZZT, but here's a reference to another game
| that inspired Alan Kay, called "Thinkin' Things", in a discussion
| about the Snap! visual programming language!
|
| https://snap.berkeley.edu
|
| ----
|
| From: Alan Kay Date: Thu, 3 May 2018 07:49:16 +0000 (UTC)
| Subject: Re: Blocky + Micropolis = Blockropolis! ;)
|
| Yes, all of these "blocks" editors sprouted from the original one
| I designed for Etoys* more than 20 years ago now -- most of the
| followup was by way of Jens Moenig -- who did SNAP. You can see
| Etoys demoed on the OLPC in my 2007 TED talk.
|
| I'd advise coming up with a special kid's oriented language for
| your SimCity/Metropolis system and then render it in "blocks".
|
| Cheers
|
| Alan
|
| ------------- * Two precursors for DnD programming were in my
| grad student's -- Mike Travers -- MIT thesis (not quite the same
| idea), and in the "Thinking Things" parade programming system
| (again, just individual symbol blocks rather than expressions).
|
| ----
|
| From: Don Hopkins Date: Fri, 4 May 2018 00:43:56 +0200 Subject:
| Re: Blocky + Micropolis = Blockropolis! ;)
|
| I love fondly remember and love Thinkin' Things 1, but I never
| saw the subsequent versions!
|
| But there's a great demo on youtube!
|
| https://youtu.be/gCFNUc10Vu8?t=24m58s
|
| That would be a great way to program SimCity builder "agents"
| like the bulldozer and road layer, as well as agents like PacMan
| who know how to follow roads and eat traffic!
|
| I am trying to get my head around Snap by playing around with it
| and watching Jens's youtube videos, and it's dawning on me that
| that it's full blown undiluted Scheme with continuations and
| visual macros plus the best ideas of Squeak! The concept of
| putting a "ring" around blocks to make them a first class
| function, and being able to define your own custom blocks that
| take bodies of block code as parameters like real Lisp macros is
| brilliant! That is what I've been dreaming about and wondering
| how to do for so long! Looks like he nailed it! ;)
|
| Here's something I found that you wrote about tile programming
| six years ago.
|
| -Don
|
| Squeak-dev:
|
| http://squeak-dev.squeakfoundation.narkive.com/7ZN0H3vt/etoy...
|
| Etoys, Alice and tile programming ajbn at cin.ufpe.br () 6 years
| ago
|
| Folks,
|
| I have been trying the new version of Alice <www.alice.org>. It
| also uses tile programming like Etoys. Just for curiosity, does
| anyone know the history of Tile Programming? TIA,
|
| Antonio Barros PhD Student Informatics Center Federal University
| of Pernambuco Brazil
|
| Alan Kay 6 years ago
|
| This particular strand starting with one of the projects I saw in
| the CDROM "Thinking Things" (I think it was the 3rd in the set).
| This project was basically about being able to march around a
| football field and the multiple marchers were controlled by a
| very simple tile based programming system. Also, a grad student
| from a number of years ago, Mike Travers, did a really excellent
| thesis at MIT about enduser programming of autonomous agents --
| the system was called AGAR -- and many of these ideas were used
| in the Vivarium project at Apple 15 years ago. The thesis version
| of AGAR used DnD tiles to make programs in Mike's very powerful
| system.
|
| The etoys originated as a design I did to make a nice
| constructive environment for the internet -- the Disney
| Family.com site -- in which small projects could make by parents
| and kids working together. SqC made the etoys ideas work, and Kim
| Rose and teacher BJ Conn decided to see how they would work in a
| classroom. I thought the etoys lacked too many features to be
| really good in a classroom, but I was wrong. The small number of
| features and the ease of use turned out to be real virtues.
|
| We've been friends with Randy Pausch for a long time and have had
| a number of outstanding interns from his group at CMU over the
| years. For example, Jeff Pierce (now a prof at GaTech) did
| SqueakAlice working with Andreas Raab to tie it to Andreas'
| Balloon3D. Randy's group got interested in the etoys tile
| scripting and did a very nice variant (it's rather different from
| etoys, and maybe better).
|
| Cheers,
|
| Alan
|
| Mike Travers Portfolio:
|
| AGAR Ant World:
|
| https://hyperphor.com/portfolio/ant-world-illo.gif
|
| Ant Agent Graph:
|
| https://hyperphor.com/portfolio/agent-graph-illo.gif
|
| Brainworks:
|
| https://hyperphor.com/portfolio/brainworks.jpg
|
| Agar: An Animal Construction Kid (Mike Travers' thesis,
| supervised by Marvin Minsky):
|
| https://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/78088
|
| https://dspace.mit.edu/bitstream/handle/1721.1/78088/2008424...
| makach wrote:
| The sound effects are everything!
| odysseus wrote:
| Just bought the iPad version. I am _so_ excited to show my kids
| this when I get home from work tomorrow. They are going to be
| ecstatic.
|
| The sounds bring back so many great memories.
| odysseus wrote:
| A couple of videos featuring Craig Hickman, creator of KidPix:
|
| https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Z9yIOJow7oo&pp=ygUUY3JhaWcgaGl...
|
| https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=LqVhK6JgbSU&pp=ygUUY3JhaWcgaGl...
|
| His enthusiasm is contagious!
| pewu wrote:
| Does anyone else remember the clone Art for Kids for Atari [1],
| or more specifically, it's Polish version for Windows, Zostan
| Malym Picasso? There's no screenshot I could find of the latter,
| but looked exactly like the Atari clone. Now, KidPix unlocked
| tons of memories, have never played it, but TIL it's the
| original.
|
| [1] https://www.atarimania.com/game-atari-st-art-for-
| kids_28718....
| iamtedd wrote:
| If this is a clean-room re implementation, why are the original
| sound and graphics assets included in this GPL-licensed software?
| vsgherzi wrote:
| my first "game" ever i had countless hours. Insane that we never
| got an equivalent for kids again
| jyooi93 wrote:
| Omg, this is the drawing tool I used in my primary school
| computer class; what a good old day!
| overflyer wrote:
| Really nice project thanks. But I really really would reconsider
| the naming :D
| Ylpertnodi wrote:
| Agree. That was not an easy click.
| medhir wrote:
| at first I was shocked by the noise, but then the whole
| experience brought me back to 90s era computer games I played as
| a kid. very cool
| furyg3 wrote:
| At my elementary / Jr high school we had one Apple II in each
| classroom, which was fun to play Oregon trail and number munchers
| on. The 'computer lab' had a bunch of IIgs (color! woo!) and
| Macs, allowing one class at a time to come in for an hour or so.
| Usually it was Mavis Beacon Teaches Typing, ClarisWorks (word),
| some LOGO programming application, and KidPix.
|
| KidPix was the big hit, it got everyone into the joy of
| computing, it tought kids how to save files, use disks, make
| copies, and it kept the ImageWriter color dot matrix printer
| buzzing for the whole hour.
|
| The "oh no" undo sound gives me so much joy. Thanks to whoever
| did this.
| vmfunction wrote:
| Wow! When will beautiful doreena be ported? It is one of those
| software need to run quite old MacOS to work.
| dangoodmanUT wrote:
| where's the music
| Liftyee wrote:
| Reminds me of the hours I spent messing around on Tux Paint. For
| some reason, the canvas is rendering to the right of the top
| toolbar instead of below it (Firefox stable).
| amaccuish wrote:
| Strong RM Colour Paint and RM Talking First Word from the UK
| vibes, love it.
|
| https://i.redd.it/0ivv3h2nkcj41.png
| TedDoesntTalk wrote:
| How I clear the screen to start new?
| knocknock wrote:
| I selected the Eraser from the left menu and then selected
| Firecracker from the top menu.
| kidpicked wrote:
| Is there a way to adjust the canvas size? The workable area
| stretches beyond my laptop screen and I have to scroll... some of
| the tools work slower doing their patterns when the canvas is
| this large.
|
| (I'm on Firefox's latest release, I've whitelisted their JS in
| noscript and even tried opening a private browsing window where
| uBlock is disabled in case some of the privacy stuff is
| interfering w/ rendering)
|
| But other than that cool work, it's really bringing me back to
| elementary/early middle school days... I wish I had some of the
| abstract art I'd create sitting waiting for the bus, but
| alongside sim cities and old essays it's gone with the (digital)
| wind...
| 3guk wrote:
| Wow what a trip down memory lane - I was obsessed with this as a
| child !
|
| The sounds of each tool instantly transport me back !
| jacobgkau wrote:
| That's neat! Although the first version was before my time. I had
| Kid Pix Deluxe 3 in elementary school, and eventually got my
| family to get it. Had to run it on our Windows ME computer since
| it crashed trying to run it on XP.
|
| (Crazy story how we even got a copy... I used to go and stare at
| the product page for Kid Pix Deluxe 3X, a remastered version for
| Mac, since it was the closest thing I could find to a source for
| the one I knew of. One day, my parents got an email from some
| company offering the original Deluxe 3 version for something like
| $40. Looking back on it, I have no clue how they got my parents'
| email address or if they were in any way associated with
| Broderbund, and it was probably unsafe to give them payment
| info... but we actually got the software and I don't think the
| credit card was ever abused, so all's well that ends well.)
| darajava wrote:
| Similar to: https://jspaint.app/
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