A really interesting read. From the discontinuation notice[1] that the article links to:
> Perhaps it comes down to this: indirectly, our own personal benefit for writing PlantStudio software and our other projects includes all the other wonderful free stuff on the internet, and it would cost us trillions of dollars if we had to pay for the creation of all that diversity ourselves. We don't mind using guilt to effect change :-) but this time, with products under free license, it will be guilt to go do something positive in the world to pass on the gift, rather than a one-for-one exchange with us.
That's a wonderful sentiment from the humans who put a lot of effort into building this software (and eventually decided to give it away).
Beautiful, thanks for sharing! Looks like I've found side project number 301: Three.js PlantStudio. Combined with the botany-focused image segmentation / mapping models they've got now, you could even work off people's real plants...
msephton 463 days ago [-]
If you do it please include bonsai :)
andai 462 days ago [-]
This is wonderful. Just a few hours ago I was inspired to install ancient versions of Office and Photoshop.
Word 97 is 5MB and it starts instantly. I mean there is no perceptible delay whatsoever. And it starts fully rendered and fully interactive. Same goes for Excel.
They do everything I need, and they do it better than the new ones.
The strangest thing is that while new software continues to get worse, old software continues to get better (it runs faster and faster).
samplatt 462 days ago [-]
If it (Excel) could only work with >64k rows, I'd never need to upgrade.
kevin_thibedeau 461 days ago [-]
Sounds like you need a database and not a spreadsheet.
samplatt 461 days ago [-]
If you can point me at a database that I can dynamically redimension at the drop of a hat for whatever different flavour of bullshit gets thrown at me this week, including the ability to easily identify content issues by sight, I'm all ears.
dominicrose 461 days ago [-]
The newest Excel is really fine on many points to be fair. Startup performance is not the priority, but it's fine on a good machine.
It's true that software in general have grown in complexity.
Some software pull giant trees of dependencies, because they can.
As teams grow and time passes, mistakes are made...
ninalanyon 461 days ago [-]
I wish that old versions of successful software were automatically open sourced.
buescher 463 days ago [-]
The article covers everything I miss about desktop applications in a nutshell. Mostly that wild sense of discovering what you can do with a computer that you might not have tried to do at all or left to experts. But also not least that you can still run it decades later.
wobfan 462 days ago [-]
Exactly this. This is what got me into computers when I was about 6. Way too early to understand stuff, but I just loved (and it evolved around this until about 14 I guess, when I started to use computers increasingly to get some stuff done) to poke around with colorful icons, spaces, expert settings, finding hidden options and panels - not initially understanding what they do but finding it out in the process.
I am increasingly put off by the current user interfaces which are based on modern, flat, designs, and tailored for users that don't need a lot of settings. All these exciting stuff from earlier days is omitted. I get that it looks better and works better for most of the people, but software just lost the excitement it once had for me. (back in the day, everything was better, haha)
bbo8 463 days ago [-]
Just looking at this UI makes my eyes relax.
msephton 463 days ago [-]
Love this. Nice work documenting it.
I looked long and hard for something like this for Bonsai. I eventually found a Japanese app, but I'm yet to put in the effort to get it running. I don't think it worked in Whisky so I need to go deeper. https://www.jfp.co.jp/bonsai_dl/
sirjaz 463 days ago [-]
We need to kill SaaS. We can thank Salesforce for pushing it.
Thanks for the mention! Glad to see people are still finding enjoyment with PlantStudio. Still hoping to bring it to the web someday.
greenavocado 463 days ago [-]
I desperately need more aesthetic Win32 applications in my life
layer8 461 days ago [-]
Such a clear and structured UI! Why has modern UI design gone so wrong? (It’s a rhetorical question.)
AlienRobot 463 days ago [-]
I think I've this a screenshot of this on Tumblr! I was impressed it was real as well.
I love that this silly app had a "Plant Wizard" with 10 steps and a progress bar with icons. That's really good UI design.
pketh 463 days ago [-]
hah ya i found it on are.na originally and thought it was a concept too
treyd 461 days ago [-]
Nominative determinism proven again, someone named Fernhout became an ecologist.
rufus_foreman 463 days ago [-]
Runs fine for me with Wine.
msephton 463 days ago [-]
Whisky, the software mentioned in the post, is a front end to Wine
rufus_foreman 463 days ago [-]
How can I get it to work on Linux?
andai 462 days ago [-]
Whisky is for Mac only. Just use Wine.
I don't know if there's any comfy GUI frontends for it on Linux, but back in the day I just ran `wine installer.exe` and it ended up in my distro's app launcher.
The author needs to get over themselves, it just means "cool" perhaps with an air of ironic intellectualism.
zokier 461 days ago [-]
notably in modern use the phrase "aesthetic" also has associations with vaporwave movement. and late-90s design fits very well with that.
sleepydog 463 days ago [-]
> Because the last release of the app was in 2002, and it was for Windows 95/98/2000/NT4, we’ve got a little bit of work to do to get it running on macOS
Much of today's software is going to be nothing more than a memory 22 years from now, after their authors run out of funding and they turn down the saas infrastructure that they shoehorned into it for that sweet, sweet recurring income. And more likely than not, we'll still be able to run this program from 2002, in 2046.
outofpaper 463 days ago [-]
This is why I always say we need to create federated and open source solutions. At the minimum we need apps that are not locked down to SaaS providers.
warkdarrior 463 days ago [-]
Are there any federated and open source solutions from 2002 that are still running today?
haileys 463 days ago [-]
email, IRC, BitTorrent, DNS, BGP
buescher 463 days ago [-]
All but one (arguably two) of those predate the web, incidentally.
warkdarrior 463 days ago [-]
I’m a bit lost here. How does one implement this PlantStudio software in email (or the other communication protocols you mentioned)?
stavros 461 days ago [-]
You don't, but that wasn't the question.
msephton 463 days ago [-]
Typo: 2022 -> 2002
sleepydog 463 days ago [-]
Fixed, thank you
462 days ago [-]
Rendered at 15:57:58 GMT+0000 (Coordinated Universal Time) with Vercel.
> Perhaps it comes down to this: indirectly, our own personal benefit for writing PlantStudio software and our other projects includes all the other wonderful free stuff on the internet, and it would cost us trillions of dollars if we had to pay for the creation of all that diversity ourselves. We don't mind using guilt to effect change :-) but this time, with products under free license, it will be guilt to go do something positive in the world to pass on the gift, rather than a one-for-one exchange with us.
That's a wonderful sentiment from the humans who put a lot of effort into building this software (and eventually decided to give it away).
[1] https://www.kurtz-fernhout.com/press.htm
Word 97 is 5MB and it starts instantly. I mean there is no perceptible delay whatsoever. And it starts fully rendered and fully interactive. Same goes for Excel.
They do everything I need, and they do it better than the new ones.
The strangest thing is that while new software continues to get worse, old software continues to get better (it runs faster and faster).
It's true that software in general have grown in complexity. Some software pull giant trees of dependencies, because they can. As teams grow and time passes, mistakes are made...
I am increasingly put off by the current user interfaces which are based on modern, flat, designs, and tailored for users that don't need a lot of settings. All these exciting stuff from earlier days is omitted. I get that it looks better and works better for most of the people, but software just lost the excitement it once had for me. (back in the day, everything was better, haha)
I looked long and hard for something like this for Bonsai. I eventually found a Japanese app, but I'm yet to put in the effort to get it running. I don't think it worked in Whisky so I need to go deeper. https://www.jfp.co.jp/bonsai_dl/
I love that this silly app had a "Plant Wizard" with 10 steps and a progress bar with icons. That's really good UI design.
I don't know if there's any comfy GUI frontends for it on Linux, but back in the day I just ran `wine installer.exe` and it ended up in my distro's app launcher.
What does "aesthetic" mean to you?
Definition 1-c:
> pleasing in appearance : attractive
Much of today's software is going to be nothing more than a memory 22 years from now, after their authors run out of funding and they turn down the saas infrastructure that they shoehorned into it for that sweet, sweet recurring income. And more likely than not, we'll still be able to run this program from 2002, in 2046.