The Most Beautiful “Ugly” Gift in Tech: Happy Birthday Jean-Baptiste Kempf
Image source: Android Police
Happy Birthday to Jean-Baptiste Kempf, the man who looked at the flashy, over-designed world of media players and decided to give us a traffic cone instead.
As we celebrate the founder of VLC today, let’s address the elephant in the room: VLC is objectively ugly. As Android Police recently reminded us, the interface looks like a time capsule from 2001. It’s gray, it’s clunky, and the menus are a labyrinth of technical jargon. In an era of sleek “Glassmorphism” and “Material You,” VLC remains stubbornly, unapologetically bland.
But here’s the twist: We wouldn’t have it any other way.
While other players “look” premium but choke on a basic MKV file or demand a subscription for 4K playback, Jean-Baptiste’s creation just works. It doesn’t care about your aesthetic preferences; it only cares about your codecs. It is the rugged Swiss Army knife in a world of gold-plated butter knives.
We don’t open VLC to look at the UI. We open it to make the UI disappear so we can actually watch our content.
So, Jean-Baptiste, thank you for focusing on the engine rather than the paint job. Today, we’re raising a glass (and a traffic cone) to the greatest piece of “ugly” software ever written.
Photo by Axelle Manfrini, January 2021, Paris.