The history of the graphical user interface, understood as the use of graphic icons and a pointing device to control a computer, covers a five-decade span of incremental refinements, built on some constant core principles. Several vendors have created their own windowing systems based on independent code, but with basic elements in common that define the WIMP "window, icon, menu and pointing device" paradigm.
Adobe Photoshop is a raster graphics editor developed and published by Adobe Inc. for Windows and macOS. It was originally created in 1987 by Thomas and John Knoll. Since then, the software has become the most used tool for professional digital art, especially in raster graphics editing. The software's name is often colloquially used as a verb although Adobe discourages such use.
The Macintosh Classic is a personal computer designed, manufactured and sold by Apple Computer from October 1990 to September 1992. It was the first Macintosh to sell for less than US$1,000.
Adobe Illustrator is a vector graphics editor and design program developed and marketed by Adobe Inc. Originally designed for the Apple Macintosh, development of Adobe Illustrator began in 1985. Along with Creative Cloud, Illustrator CC was released. The latest version, Illustrator 2023, was released on October 18, 2022, and is the 27th generation in the product line. Adobe Illustrator was reviewed as the best vector graphics editing program in 2021 by PC Magazine.
MacPaint is a raster graphics editor developed by Apple Computer and released with the original Macintosh personal computer on January 24, 1984. It was sold separately for US$195 with its word processing counterpart, MacWrite. MacPaint was notable because it could generate graphics that could be used by other applications. It taught consumers what a graphics-based system could do by using the mouse, the clipboard, and QuickDraw picture language. Pictures could be cut from MacPaint and pasted into MacWrite documents.
The Apple IIGS, the fifth and most powerful of the Apple II family, is a 16-bit personal computer produced by Apple Computer. While featuring the Macintosh look and feel, and resolution and color similar to the Amiga and Atari ST, it remains compatible with earlier Apple II models. The "GS" in the name stands for "Graphics and Sound", referring to its enhanced multimedia hardware, especially its state-of-the-art audio.
QuickDraw is the 2D graphics library and associated Application Programming Interface (API) which is a core part of the classic Mac OS operating system. It was initially written by Bill Atkinson and Andy Hertzfeld. QuickDraw still existed as part of the libraries of Mac OS X, but had been largely superseded by the more modern Quartz graphics system. In Mac OS X v10.4, QuickDraw has been officially deprecated. In Mac OS X v10.5 applications using QuickDraw cannot make use of the added 64-bit support. In Mac OS X v10.8, QuickDraw header support was removed from the operating system. Applications using QuickDraw will still run under OS X 10.8 through macOS 10.13; however, the current versions of Xcode and the macOS SDK do not contain the header files to compile such programs.
In computing, an icon is a pictogram or ideogram displayed on a computer screen in order to help the user navigate a computer system. The icon itself is a quickly comprehensible symbol of a software tool, function, or a data file, accessible on the system and is more like a traffic sign than a detailed illustration of the actual entity it represents. It can serve as an electronic hyperlink or file shortcut to access the program or data. The user can activate an icon using a mouse, pointer, finger, or voice commands. Their placement on the screen, also in relation to other icons, may provide further information to the user about their usage. In activating an icon, the user can move directly into and out of the identified function without knowing anything further about the location or requirements of the file or code.
Susan Kare is an American artist and graphic designer, who contributed interface elements and typefaces for the first Apple Macintosh personal computer from 1983 to 1986. She was employee #10 and Creative Director at NeXT, the company formed by Steve Jobs after he left Apple in 1985. She was a design consultant for Microsoft, IBM, Sony Pictures, and Facebook, Pinterest. As of 2007 Kare was an employee of Niantic Labs. As a pioneer of pixel art and of the graphical computer interface, she has been celebrated as one of the most significant designers of modern technology.
CodeWarrior is an integrated development environment (IDE) published by NXP Semiconductors for editing, compiling, and debugging software for several microcontrollers and microprocessors and digital signal controllers used in embedded systems.
Digital painting is an established art medium that typically combines a computer, a graphics tablet, and software of choice. The artist uses painting and drawing with the stylus that comes with the graphics tablet to create 2D paintings within a digital art software. Digital artists utilize multiple techniques and tools, the main one being digital brushes. These come standard with all digital art programs, but users can create their own by altering their shape, texture, size, and transfer. Many of these brushes are created to represent traditional styles like oils, acrylics, pastels, charcoal, and airbrushing, but not all. Other effective tools include layers, lasso tools, shapes, and masks. Digital painting has evolved to not just mimic traditional art styles but fully become its technique.
A window manager is system software that controls the placement and appearance of windows within a windowing system in a graphical user interface. Most window managers are designed to help provide a desktop environment. They work in conjunction with the underlying graphical system that provides required functionality—support for graphics hardware, pointing devices, and a keyboard—and are often written and created using a widget toolkit.
Tux Paint is a free and open source raster graphics editor geared towards young children. The project was started in 2002 by Bill Kendrick who continues to maintain and improve it, with help from numerous volunteers. Tux Paint is seen by many as a free software alternative to Kid Pix, a similar proprietary educational software product.
Canvas X is a drawing, imaging, and publishing computer program from Canvas GFX for personal computers.
Silicon Beach Software, Inc., was an early American developer of software products for the Macintosh personal computer. It was founded in San Diego, California in 1984 by Charlie Jackson and his wife Hallie. Jackson later co-founded FutureWave Software with Jonathan Gay. FutureWave produced the first version of what is now Adobe Flash. Although Silicon Beach Software began as a publisher of game software, it also published what was called "productivity software" at the time.
SuperPaint is a graphics program capable of both bitmap painting and vector drawing. SuperPaint was one of the first programs of its kind, combining the features of MacPaint and MacDraw whilst adding many new features of its own.
Cricket Paint was a second generation 1-bit painting software program for the Apple Macintosh by Cricket Software. It followed MacPaint and was a competitor to Silicon Beach Software's SuperPaint. Like SuperPaint it was an early attempt to combine the separate graphic methods of bitmap and vector graphics.
Cricket Software already had a vector-only package called CricketDraw. The way it achieved this dualism was with a feature called WetPaint. This allowed the user to draw vector graphics and modify them in an object-oriented way like in Apple's MacDraw, for example, changing the size, stroke and fill. When satisfied, the user could click outside the object and Cricket Paint would convert the vector graphic into a bitmap and place it on the canvas, in a destructive edit. This package had some extra tools not found in MacPaint or MacDraw, such as the Spiral and Starburst, which drew radial lines.
