"Other product teams do not have the time or resources to work with children as often. In the case of Kid Pix, when it was first released back in 1989, Borderbund sponsored their first Kid's Day. It was a weekend testing day for 20 children to try out Kid Pix. Developers offered their testers cookies for a break and a crafts table with paper, glue, glitter, etc.--just in case the testers got bored. According to Broderbund employees, few cookies were eaten and almost none of the crafts were used. It was determined that Kid Pix would be a hit (Druin and Solomon 1996)."
I must have been 6 years old. My dad came home with a computer that they were getting rid of at his work. He set it up that night and, having never seen a computer, I wanted to play with it. Well, for some reason, it had Kid Pix installed. I remember drawing something with a couple of green lines and a few rabbit stamps for good measure. As I recall, I then insisted that we had to print it and wouldn’t take no for an answer.
Really though, similar story here: my dad brought back an LC III and Color StyleWriter 2400, and before long I was drawing rocket ships and poo.
I realised that my pictures looked better in LogoWriter than drawn freehand in Kid Pix. And now I ended up writing software!
repo here: https://github.com/vikrum/kidpix
canvas.width = canvas.width;
canvas.height = canvas.height;
As far as I know, setting `canvas.height` is unnecessary.
Also as far as I know, using `ctx.clearRect` is faster, though it's possible the author wants to reset that other canvas state as well (which `clearRect` won't do), or it's possible there's some older browser incompatibility I don't know about that the author wants to avoid.
Edit: it looks like the author is also calling `clearRect`? Maybe there's some browser behavior I don't know about, but as far as I think this code is unnecessary. You don't need to do both things.
I love rollup, uglify-js, etc. for this kind of thing: just concatenate all the modules into one JS file and ship it as-is.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=csalhuSixQU
It's by Jeffrey Alan Scudder aka Whistlegraph aka HN's own justanothersys. His fantastic No Paint (very much in the spirit of Kid Pix) was discussed here a ~year ago:
But even more annoying is that it uses localStorage for what you've created. To completely start over, I had to run localStorage.clear(); in the console.
This is a lot of fun, but a couple of small tweaks would make it a lot better (or easier to figure out).
But I guess if you hadn't used kid pix you might not know that.
I remember everyone in the computer lab always never actually drawing stuff and mostly just clicking the dynamite to get as many explosions on the screen as possible.
I was the best at it, because I learned the tooling to make the most rainbow. I'm sad to say I don't remember my workflow.
function ziggurat() { return ((Math.random() + Math.random() + Math.random() + Math.random() + Math.random() + Math.random()) - 3) / 3; }
https://github.com/vikrum/kidpix/blob/9385acf5b3f57cdc8c5b3f...
Here's some other retrospective from recent:
The creative legacy of Kid Pix https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27563615
It was often the most fun application in an elementary school's computer lab. As far as I know it was never officially bundled or anything, but just a popular program. I also had it on my computers at home because both my parents were in graphic design and used Corel Draw for work, and my dad was a bit of a computer geek.
These days, I'd be wary of putting "kid pix" into google search to relive my memories.
What I really liked about Kid Pix was the ability to make animations through the slideshow mode. You could put together up to 100 pictures in a slideshow and set the time per slide to < 1 second to create animations.
Holding Shift doubles the stamp size. I think this is accurate to the original implementation.
> What I really liked about Kid Pix was the ability to make animations through the slideshow mode.
That must have been in a later version. I don't remember that existing.
On iOS.
I was determined to give my kids good exposure to computers growing up, something I missed out on because home microcomputers weren't a thing, and then when they were, they were too expensive.
Depends on the monitor; I think ones existed with anywhere from 1-8 bits.
Next do Spider-man Cartoon Maker ;)
https://archive.org/details/KID_PIX_DOS
They also host downloadable later versions of KidPix but AFAIK those are not playable in the browser.
https://github.com/vikrum/kiddopaint vs https://github.com/vikrum/kidpix
I hope everyone is having as much fun with it as I had in making it!
source: https://github.com/vikrum/kidpix