An Ode to Kai's Power Goo (macworld.com)

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.

Here's a link to the wikipedia article about the developer, Kai Krause. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kai_Krause

He sold the software to Corel (remember them?) and bought a castle in Germany. https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bad_Breisig (the German article has more pictures).

Would be fun to have these tools back on an iPad to play around with my kids.

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...

Just looked him up and learned that Kai lived next door to Douglas Adams and collaborated with him on book covers.

http://kai.sub.blue/en/42spheres.html

I made student council campaign posters with stereograms back in 1995 using KPT ... and I won! Great next-level stuff for home computers back then.

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.

Kai's Power Soap Bryce Poser Carrara Camino

Even to this day, when I'm standing over someone's shoulder "helping" them photoshop, I often say "use the Kai thingy" when I mean liquify.

Don't forget Alien Skin's Eye Candy, still going strong for all your burning text needs! (see what I did there?)

http://www.alienskin.com/eyecandy/

I loved the hell out of those days.

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.

I loved KPT. It looked like alien software from the mid 21st century that somehow landed in the late 1990s.

The UI was gloriously white and 3D way before skeuomorphism was even a word.

Is there an open source version of goo? Or a description of the algorithm?

It doesn't look impossibly difficult to work out, but it would be useful to know how other people approached 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.

Bring back the power tools.