Metatools Returns from the Dead with iPhone App
Posted by: Stephen Wildstrom on July 28, 2009
MetaTools, a hot software company back in the early days of desktop computer graphics, has reappeared with Goo, an iPhone version of a once-popular desktop app that allows fun manipulation and distortion of photos.
MetaTools was best known for Kai’s Power Tools (KPT), a set of groundbreaking add-ons to Adobe Photoshop created by a brilliant and idiosyncratic developer named Kai Krause. Photoshop pros considered KPT indispensable, but its main features were eventually incorporated into Photoshop itself. Krause also developed Bryce, an early tool for the creation of synthetic landscapes.
Kai eventually retired to a castle in his native Germany and the company, renamed MetaCreations, drifted, like many other independent packaged software makers in the late 1990s, and was sold off in pieces. Former CEO John Wilczak bought back the rights to the MetaTools name and some of the old titles, and now it is back with Goo.
