Creative Writer is one of the best pieces of software I've ever used. What's the state of kids software nowadays?

Pretty terrible in my experience. The good stuff for kids mostly moved to tablets and phones, but no keyboard and mouse is a limiting format, and you have to sift through a hundred bad apps to find the good one. Not much that runs easily on modern PCs comes close to the old magic. Though Tux Paint is actually very good, retaining the sense of whimsy that most modern software lacks.

It's hard to describe but it almost feels to me like media today - this applies to games and films and everything - is often created at a meta level, a simulacrum of the real thing. Like in the 80s and 90s people were trying to make things that were fun and interesting and probably based on their life experiences. And now they're trying to make things that are the best distillation of whatever was most successful before. But that makes it feel dishonest, corporate.

Even Microsoft in the 90s could still make stuff that felt fun and unique. There was a counterpart to Creative Writer called Fine Artist that was equally good.

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nogridbag 5 hours ago | parent | next [-]

This is a timely post. Just last night my 8 y/o asked if she could create a presentation on my laptop like they do at school. I have no idea what software they use at the elementary school.

I've let her play around with Google Docs before. But what I really wanted was something like Creative Writer that is more kid friendly. I used Gemini (sorry) to suggest some software and it suggested "Book Creator" which is intended for schools/teachers. I signed up as a fake teacher and added my kids as students and they did create some really creative books, importing images, and adding their own drawings. But it's still missing that kid-friendly vibe like Creative Writer.

	▲	Nition 5 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Check out Canva. It might even be what they're using at school already. It doesn't have the simplicity and fun of the old stuff, but it's intuitive to use even for kids. A lot of features where they're broken convention in ways that actually make more sense than the standard, for example resizing images keeps the aspect ratio by default instead of stretching.

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california-og 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

I made a paint app for toddlers recently, exactly because I couldn't find anything fun & useable & educational:

https://glyphdrawingclub.itch.io/mr-baby-paint