I, showing my age, joined Compuserve for the sole purpose of getting to download all of the Kai's Power Tools documents. Our local group of pixelweasels had a few of them but not all of them.
When the KPT plugins were released they were quite divisive. Most people just looked at the UI and thought that they were toys. Once you understood the way the plugins flowed you realised that they were "toys" but in a very critical sense. They allowed you to create visuals that were done through an iterative visual process. The Ui was a visual inspiration to let your mind out of the confines of a computer screen and just enjoy and play until you made something wonderful.
His plugins also helped make a market for other companies like Alien Skin Software [1] (now called Exposure) and their Eye Candy series of plugins.
I wish there were tools today that had the same sort of power and create the same visceral joy of creation while you used them.
Joel is not wrong. Sometimes using a tool that Kai had input into was troubling at first. The KPT and MetaCreations tools were always about creating an intuitive way to create and iterate and the UIs attempted to do that. The dialogs etc did look weird but then most UIs back then looked like hell to be honest. Or at least boring.
Back then we would talk about UI when we meant UX. The KPT plugins had a very odd visual design but the way that you could iterate patterns and processes on an image was unheard of.
People also look at the designs that the filters made and didn't think about how they could be used as selection channels and other ways of manipulating an image. Kai's original work was about using selection channels in Photoshop to create stunning effects and while you could use his tools to create a background or a texture they could also be used to manipulate the colour and tone in images in really incredible ways.
I would hope that in some point in the future people would stop caring about how much/far their posts were shared. The "social graph" is a polluted concept that ad-fetishists at Facebook came up with to try to track and monetise all our contacts online. That we still get some sick thrill out of using it as an internal metric to gauge our self-worth is something that should be stamped out with all haste.
I think there is some overlap and so you are probably correct to chasten me.
The audience that I am discussing in that piece is a direct audience though. Clicking through to a blog post and reading it is a very different sort of interaction than clicking a "repost" button or clicking a "like" icon.
That post was also one of an early set of posts about the issues of trying to find content online in a sea of SEO generated bullshit. Something that I have written about quite a few times since.
My thinking on the topic has changed a bit since that post and I think that I have a) resigned myself to not being able to wind the clock back to the 00s before Google and SEO killed content discovery and b) to just posting content that I find interesting and not worrying about who reads it and what they think.
I wouldn't worry about the quality of the code. You get better by seeing other people's work and seeing alternative solutions to the problems you had.
Also, as I mentioned in another comment, this could easily be built into a quick trouble-checking app for POD work. Posting it would also let people fork it to make more task-specific apps.
So I don't know what your intended audience was but there are elements of this that would be handy for people trying to trouble check PDFs for Print on Demand projects. I'm going to repost the link to a few groups I am in that do this sort of work. Definitely not for everyone but it might be handy for some.
The devs haven't updated the app in quite some time and appear to be working on an AI based writing tool now. I'd look elsewhere for a Markdown editor.
I often am confused by people using it. Especially for groups that have long conversations, need good search or an ability to look through content based on threads.
When the KPT plugins were released they were quite divisive. Most people just looked at the UI and thought that they were toys. Once you understood the way the plugins flowed you realised that they were "toys" but in a very critical sense. They allowed you to create visuals that were done through an iterative visual process. The Ui was a visual inspiration to let your mind out of the confines of a computer screen and just enjoy and play until you made something wonderful.
His plugins also helped make a market for other companies like Alien Skin Software [1] (now called Exposure) and their Eye Candy series of plugins.
I wish there were tools today that had the same sort of power and create the same visceral joy of creation while you used them.
[1] https://exposure.software/eyecandy/