In software, like with art and fashion, sometimes what’s old is new again. When it comes to playful creative software, Kid Pix is a kind of software product we don’t see much anymore.

In 1989, Craig Hickman released Kid Pix for his infant son who enjoyed Mac Paint on the original Macintosh, but because he wasn’t able to read yet, struggled with the menus and traditional art tool (brushes, paints, pens) based UI metaphors. Kid Pix is charming and engaging in a way that’s aged remarkably well.

The first time I used Kid Pix it had color and I was a wee tyke in grade 4. It definitely made an impact, probably for no other reason than because it was fun, and had wacky sound effects. Kids are easy that way.

Looking back on it, Hickman was the rarest of people who type things for a living. Both a talented programmer and an ace designer who used empathy and observation to build a creation tool with a real sense of fun, whimsy and imagination.

According to his handy retrospective, Hickman designed Kid Pix around some interesting principles:

• Every feature should either be obvious or should explain itself through use.
• Be satisfying to use by making the process of drawing as important as the picture created.
• The program would include tools that would be surprising and visually unusual. Things like like effect filters, stickers and stamps that weren’t based on traditional art tools.
• The eraser should be whimsical. Because reasons. And because destruction should be as fun as creation.
• Uses system standard UI conventions to help users new to computers learn basic principles.

I’ve learned in the last couple months how important laying-out and describing your product principles upfront can be. It’s work that pays for itself over and over again – especially when you add teammates.

Good principles force you to make tough, sometimes moral, choices upfront based on what personally feels right. They may not be perfect from the start, but just like life, changing as you grow and learn new things is totally cool.

In grade 4, Kid Pix was simply a good time with colors.

20 or so years later, it still is. But now it’s obvious how good Hickman really was. His process was timeless, so was the result.

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You should read this. Maciej Cegłowski is the man.

There’s a reason we still fly Boeing 747s designed in the 60s. The internet of 2060 may well be, more or less, kind of the same. Hopefully, It’ll still be doing the same job – connecting people to people, information and cats.

Our job is basically to not fuck this up.

🔮

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Submitted for the approval of the Midnight Society, ”The tale of the 90s that were and are again”.

Fellow 90s kids may well remember our dreams of the future; robots, jet-packs, hover-cars, and other things that fly. Our internet with it’s telephonic hisses and beeps was a neon <table> and gif-laden monument to laissez-faire individualism and liberty. Both free of borders and more American than Coke™.

It was a nerd-party. Inverse to real-life parties in that the hip and the mainstream didn’t really have a place until social networks became a thing. We have all kinds of party parades now: high-school reunions, singles mixers, baby showers for multiple babies, and cat appreciation societies.

👙🐱🎉

Parades are great, but there’s something to be said for the neighborhood bar, or local cafe. Intimate, small places where you can be whoever you want and get to know a small group of friends.

As people who weave the language of machines, there’s magic in what we can do even if we can no longer see it. Since moving to NYC, I’ve met more than a handful of people who’ve created their own close-knit social places on the internet. Seems obvious, also very cool – why don’t more of us do this?

Stuff Cool People Say is something I cobbled together in a few hours. Comparably, it’s the broke-ass corner bodega. Probably the only place you could find a freezie in Manhattan.

To make it, I spun something up with the lightest http thing I know (Sinatra, Express, etc.). Rendered a <textarea> that posts to a database and we’ve got the seed of something social. (Before I drop the mic, I’d ideally add some auth - but y’know whatever.)

The hard part wasn’t actually writing it, but finding a simple place to host/run it. What would the internet be like with a Geocities for web-apps?

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In an old issue of PAPER mag, —- writes about art school and music:

“I’d have an assignment to do an ink drawing that took me two weeks, three weeks, and I’d show it to my friends and they’d say, ‘Cool. My friend can draw. Now let’s go play ball. Let’s go downtown and talk to some girls.’ But when I’d work on a track, I’d work on it for just that afternoon — chop up a sample, put some drums to it. And if my friends liked it, we’d make a tape of it and play it all the way downtown. We’d listen to it all night, keep rewinding it. I made a decision at that point to focus on painting with sound instead of painting visually.”

The point, for those of us that make tools, is that every time you make something a little bit easier to do, the number of people who do it explodes. Then a bunch of really amazing things happen…

People use this new nicer thing to express themselves in new ways. People from diverse backgrounds see this as something interesting worth trying out. These people are young, hungry to leave a mark and innately cool. So now this newly accessible thing is cool, and soon after, it’s officially art.

Pay attention to the awkwardly held smiles of normals at a party where software design or development is being passionately discussed. I’ve been bored to tears at these things myself.

It’s not that designing and writing software isn’t inherently interesting, it’s that our tools are still so opaque and inaccessible to outsiders we’re pushed to consider the challenges and puzzles (languages, frameworks, etc.), before the cool things we could be expressing and sharing with them. —- doesn’t talk about how empowering it is to mix multi-track sessions in Logic Pro – he talks about how satisfying it is to be able to quickly make a thing that your friends think is cool.

Here’s to a future with great tools in it. 🌌

“I believe awesome is possible and I believe that beauty is important.” – —-

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