Career
Born in Dortmund, Germany, Krause moved to California, United States in 1976. He worked with early synthesizers and vocoders, and contributed sound effects to almost thirty records and movies. During the 1990s he ran several software companies –Higher School Certificate, MetaTools, MetaCreations– to develop tools for graphic designers.
In February 2005, the "DEMO" conference acknowledged him as one of the Top 15 Innovators of the last 15 years.
Krause has a Master"s degree from the Brooks institute in Santa Barbara, California (1996), and an honorary doctorate from the University of Essen, Germany (1999). Today Krause lives and works in the 1000-year-old castle Burg Rheineck near Bonn in Germany.
Krause significantly broadened conventional notions of the graphical user interface by applying innovative design principles and providing realtime interaction for the user, neither of which were widely deployed in the 1980s because of the low graphics abilities of the current hardware. Krause"s products featured signature interface elements including soft shadows, rounded corners and translucency - all of which would later enjoy wider adoption, such as seen in Mac Operating system X, Windows XP Luna and Linux.
The company which he co-founded, MetaCreations Corporation, began as Higher School Certificate, which released the first version of Kai"s breakthrough product, Kai"s Power Tools (aka "KPT"), in 1992.
Higher School Certificate went on to release a second version of KPT, and the first version of Bryce, and several other titles before changing their name to MetaTools in 1995. This name remained until 1997, when a rapid series of mergers with Fractal Design, RayDream, Specular, and RTG (Real-Time Geometry) necessitated a new identity for the growing organization: MetaCreations. Foreign the rest of the 1990s, MetaCreations continued to develop a wide variety of successful graphical software titles.
Application and interfaces for which Krause was most directly responsible include Kai"s Power Tools, Live Picture, Bryce, Kai"s Power Show, Kai"s Power Goo, Convolver, Kai"s Photo Soap and Poser.
Kai"s Power Tools is now published by Corel Corporation, as "The Corel KPT Collection". KPT Bryce is now published by DAZ 3D, as simply "Bryce".
Kai"s Power Show, Kai"s Photo Soap and Kai"s Power Goo are now property of Nuance Communications. They have been discontinued.
Frax, a fractal explorer for iOS.
