KidPix

[Nition]

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]

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!

[fergie]

I think that the background colour for anti-aliasing is called "matte" in designer-speak.

[TechDebtDevin]

.....

[jnaina]

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]

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]

You might enjoy this, then:

http://red-green-blue.com/kid-pix-the-early-years

[ascorbic]

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]

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]

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.

[DonHopkins]

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.

[makmanalp]

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.

[leokennis]

The "Moving Van" is just fantastic. Vrooom and then a break screech when you let it go.

[rlt]

Ooops. Oh No. Boing. Ooops. Oh No. Oh No. Boing.

[metadat]

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]

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.

[gjsman-1000]

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]

There is an iOS/iPad OS version! It’s a killer app for kids.

[gaurangagg]

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 :)

[doctorhandshake]

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!!”

[ChrisArchitect]

Some previous discussion in 2021:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28073383

[dang]

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)

[softgrow]

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]

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.

[pewu]

Does anyone else remember the clone Art for Kids for Atari [1], or more specifically, it's Polish version for Windows, Zostań Małym 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....

[jacobgkau]

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 Brøderbund, 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.)

[odysseus]

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!

[odysseus]

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.

[erkt]

These sounds effects are unlocking DEEEP memories. Thank you for sharing!

[gnatman]

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]

I always wondered how I knew what a line sounded like.

[nickpeterson]

This is the kind of app I want on an iPad for my kid.

[foenix]

You're in luck! I my kiddo loves the kidpix iPad app and it's just a single purchase.

[Neywiny]

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]

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).

[Gigachad]

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.

[keithnz]

This is pretty cool! My kids are past this now, but they used to enjoy TuxPaint, that's pretty good also.

[holtkam2]

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]

you can look at the project's github and understand

https://github.com/vikrum/kidpix