Light Blue Software announces Light Blue: Retro

Hi all,

Light Blue: Retro - the past is our future

We just wanted to let you know that we’ve released Light Blue: Retro. In the photography world, the biggest thing to hit both photography and cameras in the last few years is retro styling. We wanted to jump on the bandwagon with our software, and we’ve taken the 30th anniversary of the introduction of the original Apple Macintosh as a sign that we should take inspiration from that icon of software design: Apple’s original system software.

Light Blue: Retro is completely designed in Xojo, and it’s been the toughest project we’ve ever worked on. We’re used to building software for photographers with high-resolution, perfectly calibrated screens, so scaling the interface down to black and white and just 512 x 342 pixels was a challenge. But that was a cinch compared to the work it’s taken to make Light Blue: Retro run with just 128KB of RAM.

Whilst we think we’ve been true to our desire to take inspiration from classic software, we’ve had to make some compromises along the way. The Internet didn’t really take off until the 1990s, so to be really authentic we’d need to implement syncing simply by telling you to phone up any of your other members of staff and tell them what you’d changed. However, we know that lots of our customers rely on our online services, so we’ve given ourselves a bit of leeway and optimised our remarkable data sync system to work over a 14.4Kbps modem.

We’re banking on Light Blue: Retro being a hit, so we’ve halted all development on Light Blue 5 to really improve the Retro version. Future improvements include a Windows version (compatible with Windows 3.1, of course), support for 28.8k modems, a load time of less than five minutes, and the possibility of shipping Light Blue: Retro on laserdisc.

Light Blue: Retro is available today, 1 April 2014, and is supplied on twenty-seven 3.5" floppy disks. See www.lightbluesoftware.com/retro for full details.

With all best wishes,
Tom and Hamish
Light Blue Software

Laserdisc :slight_smile:
Clever. Good laugh at 4 in the morning.

Grin. We’ve found in the past few years that our April Fool is, by a significant margin, our most-viewed marketing email of the year…

i like the part about 27 3.5" floppy disk…

Nice to get a fun reminder of what day it is !

I do miss those days where every new hardware advancement or piece of software amazed me (and emptied my wallet) :slight_smile:

If it weren’t for having installed office way back when from floppies (I think it came on 25) you’d never know how serious that is :stuck_out_tongue:

Windows 386, packed in tenths of 5,25” floppies :smiley:

I still have those floppies in a box somewhere…

Brings back memories. Really bad memories.

broken paper tapes and trying to splice the damn things back together

awesome stuff

I was disappointed to find out it was an April Fool Joke.

I think it is forbidden to use screenshots of Mac OS 11, codename “Rasterplan”, just to make an April fool joke out of it. Apple is probably not amused. Just trying to save you from trouble…

Awesome job Hamish! Very creative and well done!

Thanks for the warning, Christian. I’ll get our extensive team of lawyers onto the case…

Cheers, Mike. It’s amazing what you can come up with when you’re bored in an airport lounge