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.
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!
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
>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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 :)
Readit News
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!
UPDATE: it's
https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS/image-rende...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.
http://bitsavers.trailing-edge.com/pdf/vectrix/Vectrix_Ad_By...
http://red-green-blue.com/kid-pix-the-early-years
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.
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.
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
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
https://youtu.be/ZbB1OuOxUr4?t=64
https://www.mackiev.com/offers/kp5/upgrade_offer.html