An ode to Kai's Power Goo<article>
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<p>If, like me, you remember Kai’s Power Goo with affection and delight, you’ll know that the image of me you see above has only been lightly manipulated. I really did look like that when I was using it again for this column.</p><p>Power Goo’s features—the ability to smear regions of an image around and paint bits of one photo onto another to create composites—seem unexceptional today, but in the ’90s, this was mind-meltingly exciting stuff, not in and of itself maybe, but in how easy and fun Power Goo made the process.</p><p>Just look at that interface! That’s the thing I remember about Power Goo at least as much as the images you could create with it. It really felt for a few years that this was how software might look in the future: not staid, rectilinear, essentially monochrome buttons and menus, but big, juicy, floating 3D buttons and big, exciting levers that you pull to change variables. It was a future that lots of people thought was horrendous, of course—silly Fisher Price exuberances getting in the way of your work—but after decades of the command line and the established modern GUI conventions, it was at the very least new, and I’d argue intoxicating too.</p><p class="jumpTag"><a href="/article/3005783/software-graphics/an-ode-to-kais-power-goo.html#jump">To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here[/url]</p></section></article>
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An ode to Kai's Power Goo
