Next steps

Going through the issues, two unexpected, long-running kinds of features Loadstar published stick out to me.

The first is clip-art, in the form of Print Shop, and maybe Printmaster, images. In the ages before the internet, people actually bought collections of clipart to use in their small projects. Broderbund’s Print Shop came with lots of them, and Loadstar would sometimes include some images on their issues. When they did this, they’d usually republish one of their Print Shop viewing utilities, notably two programs called Print Shopping Bag and Printmeister.

There’s hundreds of these images scattered around Loadstar’s issues. I’ve written a small routine (easy to do in Python) that can export the images into PNG-format files. When I say “image,” I mean nearly the most primitive type: all of Loadstar’s Print Shop images are 1-bit bitmaps, of either size 44x44 or 88x52.

I’ve been working on creating a webpage with every Loadstar Print Shop image on it, for people to borrow from if they choose. I don’t know how useful it’ll be, but it’d be interesting, I think, to see them all in one place, on one page.

The other interesting Loadstar feature that I think could be drawn out into its own web page, or web pages, is its wide assortment of recipes. Loadstar published recipes! Lots of recipes! One of my favorite things about Loadstar is that, while it was a computer magazine and published programming tutorials, utilities, ML subroutines, games, productivity software and the like, they also published general-interest items like recipes.

Loadstar’s recipes were published through special programs that presented them to the user. This means, like Print Shop images and all of Loadstar’s other items, to access them you either had to know how to start the recipe presentation module directly from the disk, or to load Loadstar’s general Presenter and start the program through that. I’m thinking what could be done, at least, is writing a recipe browser that works through the Explorer menu. Maybe we could also do a webpage with the recipes on them. Wouldn’t it be great to go to a webpage with a recipe on it without the Google-facing preamble, explanation for what the recipe is, short anecdote from the author’s life, etc?

Those are my current thoughts. Let’s see how difficult they are to implement.