PenDraw™
Programmable Web Graphics

About Us

We Are Programmers

We are programmers who want to make graphics programming easy and productive, and to open up a whole new bunch of software possibilities, for providing customers with solutions.

As graphics programmers, we got fed up with 2-D graphics programming utilities. A shed-load of effort and money has gone into 3-D graphics, but no-one seemed to care about 2-D problems:

• Low Productivity
• Too easy to write buggy programs
• Graphics meant matrix math
• Complex and involved facilities

Everyone seemed to think that 2-D is just a special case of 3-D.

2-D is about getting things on paper, or a screen, and positioning them there - sometimes moving things apart, say 30mm, because it looks better. It is about representations of things, not trying to make things like real-life.

In representational graphics there are many, many communities of people who agree on their own graphics shorthand. To a concrete engineer, a long thin rectangle might 'be' a beam that holds a floor up (s/he does not need to see a beautifully textured gray surface). To a carpenter the same rectangle might 'be' a piece of wood. To a business exec, it might 'be' sales on a bar-chart. To a soldier it might 'be' the quantity of fuel at a fuel dump.

And all of this kind of shorthand is susceptible of representing data - so we need a reliable way of drawing data.

To solve the problems of the representational realm of computer graphics. We started many years ago. At first, we tried to do it through a better add-on to an existing language. We hit a real conundrum. We found that it was impossible to solve all the problems. So we designed a complete graphics language, that solved all the problems: we intended to learn from it, and then crack the 'better add-on' problem. It was after we designed the language, and tried using it, that we came to the key piece of knowledge. Add-ons are not part of the solution -- they are part of the problem. Add-ons simply can not deliver simplicity, directness, or reliability. Consequently they can not deliver programming speed.

So we went back to our language. We wrote an interpreter. It proved the concept. It was much quicker for development of graphics programs, and the programs were much more reliable, too. We called it PenDraw.

Back in those days it was a lot of work, because every output device needed a device driver to interface to PenDraw. There was no compatibility, no common output definition. Everything was proprietory. Then when the WWW came about, we saw that PenDraw had much more potential on the Web. Finally came SVG - Yay! SVG solves the output device driver interface. So we re-wrote the interpreter from scratch (aren't all programs written at least twice?).

That's it. That's where we have come from, and something about our journey. We are ready to take PenDraw forward, and help open up opportunities for Web — and other — systems providers.