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.
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.
It has a nice picture at https://de.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burg_Rheineck#/media/Datei%3.... That definitely has everything you want in a castle (tower, walls, courtyard, situated on top of a hill), but also seems liveable, with something resembling a house built next to the back wall.
I remember being awed by a demo of KPT/Convolver at the Toronto Macworld in 1994 or 1995.
Kai was showing off how you could take a blurry satellite image of a parking lot and do a "spy movie" style zoom and enhance to reveal a car's license plate, which was impressive back then.
The UI was just plain crazy, especially by today's standards.
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.
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.
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...
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.
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.