Digging into PlantStudio, a bit late

225 points
1/21/1970
8 months ago
by bentsai

Comments


type_enthusiast

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).

[1] https://www.kurtz-fernhout.com/press.htm

8 months ago

umlaut

One of the authors commented that the source is GPL'd and on GitHub... and here it is! https://github.com/pdfernhout/PlantStudio

7 months ago

bbor

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...

8 months ago

msephton

If you do it please include bonsai :)

8 months ago

andai

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).

7 months ago

samplatt

If it (Excel) could only work with >64k rows, I'd never need to upgrade.

7 months ago

kevin_thibedeau

Sounds like you need a database and not a spreadsheet.

7 months ago

samplatt

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.

7 months ago

dominicrose

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...

7 months ago

ninalanyon

I wish that old versions of successful software were automatically open sourced.

7 months ago

buescher

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.

8 months ago

wobfan

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)

7 months ago

bbo8

Just looking at this UI makes my eyes relax.

8 months ago

msephton

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/

8 months ago

sirjaz

We need to kill SaaS. We can thank Salesforce for pushing it.

8 months ago

hello_computer

someone should notify https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=pdfernhout that he’s made the front page

7 months ago

pdfernhout

Thanks for the mention! Glad to see people are still finding enjoyment with PlantStudio. Still hoping to bring it to the web someday.

7 months ago

greenavocado

I desperately need more aesthetic Win32 applications in my life

8 months ago

layer8

Such a clear and structured UI! Why has modern UI design gone so wrong? (It’s a rhetorical question.)

7 months ago

AlienRobot

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.

8 months ago

pketh

hah ya i found it on are.na originally and thought it was a concept too

8 months ago

treyd

Nominative determinism proven again, someone named Fernhout became an ecologist.

7 months ago

rufus_foreman

Runs fine for me with Wine.

8 months ago

msephton

Whisky, the software mentioned in the post, is a front end to Wine

8 months ago

rufus_foreman

How can I get it to work on Linux?

8 months ago

andai

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.

7 months ago

adhamsalama

Bottles is a good one.

7 months ago

amake

> This aesthetic screenshot

What does "aesthetic" mean to you?

7 months ago

rodiger

https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/aesthetic

Definition 1-c:

> pleasing in appearance : attractive

7 months ago

skulk

The author needs to get over themselves, it just means "cool" perhaps with an air of ironic intellectualism.

7 months ago

zokier

notably in modern use the phrase "aesthetic" also has associations with vaporwave movement. and late-90s design fits very well with that.

7 months ago

sleepydog

> 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.

8 months ago

outofpaper

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.

8 months ago

warkdarrior

Are there any federated and open source solutions from 2002 that are still running today?

8 months ago

haileys

email, IRC, BitTorrent, DNS, BGP

8 months ago

buescher

All but one (arguably two) of those predate the web, incidentally.

8 months ago

warkdarrior

I’m a bit lost here. How does one implement this PlantStudio software in email (or the other communication protocols you mentioned)?

7 months ago

stavros

You don't, but that wasn't the question.

7 months ago

msephton

Typo: 2022 -> 2002

8 months ago

sleepydog

Fixed, thank you

8 months ago

[deleted]
7 months ago