MacDraw

MacDraw

Developer(s)	Apple Computer, Claris
Initial release	1984 (1984)
Operating system	System Software 6, System 7
Type	Raster-based drawing
License	Proprietary

MacDraw was a Raster-based drawing application released along with the first Apple Macintosh systems in 1984. MacDraw was one of the first WYSIWYG drawing programs that could be used in collaboration with MacWrite. MacDraw was useful for drawing technical diagrams and floorplans. It was eventually adapted by Claris and, in the early 1990s, MacDraw Pro was released with color support. MacDraw was the vector cousin of MacPaint.

A call to create a version of MacDraw for Intel machines was made in Introduction to Algorithms.

Early MacDraw

The first version of MacDraw was similar to that of MacPaint, featuring both the same tools and patterns. However MacDraw was vector-based, meaning that an object's properties and placement can be changed at any time. MacDraw included features for printing and also integrated into MacWrite via cut-and-paste. MacDraw was more advanced than MacPaint, featuring a grid and the ability to change the drawing dimensions. However MacDraw lacked support for using more than one document at a time, and also lacked zooming capabilities. MacDraw was especially useful in drawing flowcharts, diagrams and technical drawings.

MacDraw was based on Apple's earlier program, LisaDraw, which was developed for the Apple Lisa computer which was released in 1983. LisaDraw and MacDraw were developed by the same person, Mark Cutter.

Later MacDraw

MacDraw II (1988) released by Claris introduced many missing features and was also enhanced for the Macintosh II. MacDraw eventually evolved into MacDraw Pro (1991) and ultimately ClarisDraw (1993). The final version of ClarisDraw was 1.0v4 (1994). It ran without difficulties on PPC-based Macs under the Classic OS until the arrival of the Mac OS X 10.5 (Leopard) operating system, which dropped support for the Classic OS.