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Created by: Mihai Parparita Published by: Mscape Software General History
As the summer vacation was starting I picked up the Iconographer source code and realized that it wasn't quite ready for release. Arlo also came back into the picture, and due to him Iconographer has Windows icon import and export support and a reasonably polished interface. As the summer vacation was ending I realized that I should release Iconographer very soon, because I would have no time to work on it later. This was a fundamentally sound idea (the next major update did not come until February of the next year), but the actually release was too rushed. Version 1.0.1 came the next day, but even that did not squash all bugs, so 1.0.2 followed it two days later. Iconographer then went into stasis while such matters as school and applying to college took over. As that wound down, I was able to add some features which I had wished to include in 1.0 but did not have the time: an improved icon browser and a floating colors palette. Other gimmicks, such as anti-aliasing and user interface improvements snuck in. Version 1.1 was also the first to be released in more than one language. Many thanks go to Yoshi Sakuma and Jean-Baptiste Leheup, who are responsible for the Japanese and French versions of Iconographer. Around this time, Mac OS X was making more and more waves, and one of it's more prominent features that affected me was the new icon size, a gargantuan 128 by 128 pixels. Initially Apple did not have an official editor planned for this, and Iconographer was slated to fill that slot. However, due to limited time on my side, this deal did not take place. However, when I learned that Apple was going to have an editor of their own, and the competition (hi David!) wasn't standing still either, I was even more determined to make Iconographer stand out as the premiere way to edit icons for Mac OS X. After examining the possibilities, I decided that I no choice but to redo the entire user interface, since accommodating the new icon sizes in the current one would have been prohibitive. Thus the current four palette layout was born (designed with the conscious intention of emulating Adobe Photoshop, where icon creators are spending increasing amounts of time). To further accommodate those who used other graphics applications to create the base artwork for their icons, support was added for an external editor. Many other tweaks were made, to ensure that Iconographer accommodated all manners of icon editing. Since the main feature of this release was support for 128 x 128 icons, it was obvious that the program needed one of it's own. Many thanks go to Rick Roe of icons.cx who helped me with its design. Finally, the self-imposed deadline of the release of the Mac OS X beta was approaching, so I started to think about releasing version 2.0. I believe that my decision to maintain Iconographer as a Classic application (running on all Power Macs with Mac OS 8.0 or higher, and in emulation on Mac OS X) was sound given the timing, since the installed base for Mac OS X was minimal at release time. However, a Carbonized version should follow as soon as possible (considering that college has just begun, this probably means "in time for the final release of Mac OS X").
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