Kid Pix - The Early Years — Dry reading

BLOG OXIDE Table of Contents OXIDE: Introduction and The Heart of the City OXIDE - Lovers' Lane OXIDE: The Academy OXIDE: The Art Scene OXIDE - Old City OXIDE - Hard Science OXIDE: The Other Side of the Tracks OXIDE: The Outskirts OXIDE - 183 Pictures That Didn't Make in the Book Somplace Else Table of Contents Someplace Else: Group 1 Someplace Else: Group 2 Somplace Else: Group 3 Somplace Else: Group 4 Deep Archive Part 1 Table of Contents Deep Archive 1 : Introduction and Wall Pictures Deep Archive 1: Protest Deep Archive 1: Politics and the Famous Deep Archive 1: Elevator Pictures Deep Archive 1: Portraits of a Sort Deep Archive 1: The Photographers Deep Archive 1: People Doing Things Deep Archive 1: Automobile Pictures Deep Archive 1: More People Doing Things etc. Deep Archive 1: The Viking Way Deep Archive 1: Cleveland High School Part 2 Table of Contents Deep Archive 2: Mid Deep Archive 2: Early Deep Archive 2: Late Deep Archive 2: Trying Out the Studio Deep Archive 2: The Photographers Deep Archive 2: Let the Good Times Roll More Proposals Drawings Short Stories Kid Pix - The Early Years Apparatus Buckman Portraits Negative Copying Cartesians Loose Leaf The Lamp Posts of Alton Baker Park Animals and Insects Character Composites CHS1966 Dry Reading Store About Contact By Craig HickmanBen: Dad, what have you been doing upstairs? Dad: Writing a short history of Kid Pix. Ben: Do you really think anyone is going to want to read that?Maynard and JoeSome people believe that humans are either analytical, rational and sensible or spontaneous, creative and intuitive. Having watched too much TV as a kid in the 50’s, I thought people were supposed to be Sergeant Joe Friday (from Dragnet) or Maynard G. Krebs (Dobie Gillis). My problem was I always felt a little like both of these guys. Sargent Joe Friday Maynard G. Krebs In college I decided to be a fine art photographer. But in 1972, when I was working in photography at The Evergreen State College, I heard a clattering noise coming from what was labeled the "Terminal Room." Inside, a friend was sitting at what looked like a large typewriter. He said he was programming and asked if I would like to see how it was done. I said "yes" and have never been the same since. Me next to the computer terminal shortly after I was introduced to programming, 1972. I bought a book explaining each command and how it was used. I started writing little programs that would use each of the commands. None of my programs tried to do anything useful, but they tended to be fun and surprising. In 1974 I left Evergreen along with access to a computer and moved to Portland where some good friends and I started the non-profit photography Blue Sky Gallery. Later I went to graduate school in photography at the University of Washington, where Paul Berger, a professor of mine, had just gotten an Apple II computer. Microcomputers were new then and he explained what it could do. Suddenly my craving to program came back. I had to have a computer of my own. My Atari in the darkroom A couple of months later I was busy programming at home with my own computer, an Atari 400. This was a joyous experience. (My wife says that the day it arrived was the happiest she's ever seen me.) Despite its membrane keyboard and TV set monitor, it was loaded with graphics, sound capability, and programming challenges. I came up with endless projects. I can remember the thrill when I discovered how to input and output signals from the joystick ports. At one point I designed a home surveillance system for our apartment in Seattle that used little magnetic switches from Radio Shack. It displayed a representation of our apartment on the screen and showed when a door or window was open. It worked so well I expanded the system to include little tilt switches placed on bushes outside the windows. This also worked fine until one windy night when I was away from home and it set off the alarm every few minutes. The next day my wife told me to dismantle it.I began to be very interested in user interface and program design. Articles that influenced me the most were ones by Chris Crawford in Byte Magazine and by Alan Kay in Scientific American. I wanted to discover the simplest and most effective way to perform any task on the computer. This is when I began my quest for software design beauty.My interest in photography began to wane at this time. The computer was just more interesting. I got one of those "Electronics Made Simple" books, figured out how to use the computer to control the enlarger, and made a rather nice program to control most of my darkroom timing and record-keeping tasks. I ended up using a "card" metaphor for this project that was sort of HyperCard-like even though it predated HyperCard by several years.In 1984 Apple released the Macintosh. Up to this point I saw no reason to stop using my Atari (except for the fact that hardly anyone else used them and there was practically no audience for the software I was writing). For its day, it had great graphics and sound, and I knew a lot about programming it. Other computers had more serious reputations but they didn't seem as much fun to program.The Macintosh was different. It was totally graphical so the visual possibilities were much greater. Most of all, the Mac seemed to have people with a consistent and enlightened vision behind it. The user interface was intelligent and beautiful. I got a Mac and began teaching myself to program on it. Originally I programmed in Rascal, a language developed at Reed College which was sort of a cross between C and Pascal. Later I switched to Pascal. Screen snapshot of Camera, 1988 My first Mac programs, which were given away, were designed to help me learn the Mac QuickDraw routines. They did nothing useful but were mildly entertaining. Company was a desk accessory that displayed an animated face and a game to keep you company. Fidowas an animated dog that talked in graphics. I also created two artist's books, Signal to Noise and Dry Reading (Available on this site) , that shared some of the graphics and aesthetics my software has. My most successful program from this time wasCamera, an educational title that interactively demonstrated the relationship between f. stop and shutter speed. I put Camera in public domain and it was distributed widely on computer bulletin boards.One day in 1988 while I was using MacPaint, the wonderful paint program that came with the Macintosh, my 3-year-old son Ben asked to try using the program. I was surprised at how quickly he got the knack of using the mouse and how easily he was able to select tools. The problem was that he didn't have total control of the mouse and would occasionally (like every five minutes or so) pull down a menu and bring up a dialog box that he couldn't dismiss without being able to read. Everything was fine as long as I was in the room, but if I stepped out for a few minutes I would come back and find Ben kicking on the floor in frustration. This was not what I had in mind for his introduction to the computer. As it turned out I was looking for a good programming project. I decided to write a simple paint program for Ben to use. I also decided that I would probably give it away for free. A few years earlier I had written what I thought was a rather nice darkroom timer program for the Atari computer and signed an agreement with a company to sell it. But few people used the Atari computer and almost no copies were sold. I always wished I had just given the program away so people could use it and I could have some satisfaction for the great deal of time I had spent writing it.Since I was going to give the program away I decided I could design it exactly the way I wanted. These were its guiding principles: Screen snapshot of the original Kid Pix 1. (The Prime Directive) The program should be extremely easy to use. No manual should be needed and program features should "explain themselves" through use. All tasks should be able to be performed in the simplest, most straightforward way. The program should go out of its way to meet the user.2. As long as The Prime Directive is not violated, every opportunity should be taken to make the program surprising and satisfying to use. No opportunity should be missed. The process of making a picture should be as important as the picture produced.3. The program should, in some way, expand the concept of what computer paint programs are, as well as what mark making can be.4. The program should be open ended. Premade graphics should be modifiable by the user.5. I wanted each tool to have a large number of options but I didn't want the user to be overwhelmed with options. I didn't want to use pull-down menus for this because, among other reasons, Ben had trouble with them. The system I developed involved displaying a selection of 14 options for each tool in a window at the bottom of the screen. As the tool selection changed, the options changed.6. The first Kid Pix was designed to run on the original Macintoshwith a 9-inch, black and white screen (512 X 342 pixels). All paint programs made for the Mac at that time displayed a virtual page showing only a portion of the potential drawing area at one time. I decided this was a bad idea for my program because it is essential to see your whole picture at the same time. So I made the drawing area on the screen as large as possible but did not have the contents of the screen scroll. "What you saw is what you got." The Undo Guy