There's a sequence in the police station where they are trying to create a mugshot on a computer.
I'm looking for informations on what the program would be and where to find it, if anyone has it. As far as I can tell it runs on a Macintosh and has cool old-school dithered graphics... Looking for it.
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I'm not really sure about that... Maybe you have knowledge of something I don't know or can back up your sayings, but as far as I know, why wouldn't there have been mugshot programs in 1993 that simply could have been used in the film? I do have a couple mugshot programs, and as realistic as the Dan Ayckroyd figure looks when materialized on the program in the film, good mugshot programs can do that (it's what they're made for, actually).
As I zoomed onto the frozen image of the DVD, I noticed that the icons of the palette, the tools icons, were the same ones used at the time on regular Macintosh, the ones designed by Susan Kare
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Susan_kare
and I believe there would have been legal issues in using her icons in a "Hollywood made computer program".
In films where computers are not portrayed very seriously like "Electric Dreams", I believe most of what you see on the computer screen is rubbish.
But I know there were mugshot programs in 1993, and I believe they are using one in the film - unless I'm wrong. There are zillions of great computer programs that have been completely forgotten or relinquished, but that had simple yet interesting graphic abilities.
Thank you for your answer I am taking account of it. I'll just wait and see if someone thinks like you or has knowledge about it... Thanks!
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Thank you very much for giving your opinion twice, since I'm completely brain damaged, I had not understood the first time.
When I said "I'll just wait and see whether someone thinks like you OR has knowledge about it", it clearly meant that: now that you brought your opinion into the discussion, thank you very much, now move on with your life, you've done all you could to help on this board, and now allow me to keep searching if I feel like it, as I have the right to without necessarily it being insulting to you, or if I feel like more people also have an idea about the question that they can give (and that they don't need to say twice and waste everyone's time).
And even IF it was, indeed, a "Hollywood made (phoney) program", then it has a name, a programmer, which informations I am (obviously) looking for and you are (obviously) unable to provide, and even IF it's just an image file or an animation made to look LIKE a program, then it has a name and exists somewhere on a computer or disk, where all the phoney programs are stored, and I am (obviously) looking for informations about these for reasons known only to me.
I believe that you, "db_1053", have said more than enough on this board, both about your absence of knowledge on the point and about your great knowledge of Bill Gates quotes, PLEASE do not reply to this board one more time (unless you find something constructive and interesting to say about the subject, backed with clear evidence), and let everyone see you have better to do with your life than argue endlessly about things you don't really care about, when you have obviously no element to bring to prove either case. I will be very grateful.
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Its just MacPaint, with some fake buttons added on the left to make it look like a program.
shareI don't know if it is exactly MacPaint, though it does show some MacPaint or MacPaint-inspired elements.
I'd bet what we see is just a series of still graphic images made to look like a MacPaint-inspired program desktop, shown one at a time. Here are the clues which lead me to believe so:
* No keyboard or mouse activity is actually visible on-screen; though buttons and, at one point, a scroll-bar are shown, no pointer actually clicks them.
* The standard Mac menu bar along the top is not there as it would be when any off-the-shelf program is running.
* The body-part button labels along the left are inconsistently centered, which is much more likely if they were pasted into an image rather than generated by an actual program interface.
* With the shift of each image, the buttons and interface elements which are supposed to be static flicker slightly, consistent with a full-screen image refresh.
* When the popup window shows, the interface says "Use scrollbar to select," "Current selection: (2)" and cancel/ok buttons. Even though the head image in the popup flips between the different head choices, the "current selection" and scrollbar don't change at all. All this happens again without any clicking of "ok;" there is neither a mouse pointer nor the outlined highlight which would indicate tabbing between buttons with the keyboard.
* It'd just be plain easier and cheaper to have the art department put together a half-dozen screenshots of a realistic-looking desktop at various stages of work for a ten-second shot than it would be to write or buy an actual program, especially in 1992 or 1993 when this film was made.
Apologies for putting way to much thought into this, but I'm a huge nerd and fictional computer interfaces in films are something of a hobby of mine.
-- Rob
http://robvincent.net