- #To use deltagraph how to#
- #To use deltagraph software#
- #To use deltagraph code#
- #To use deltagraph mac#
#To use deltagraph code#
While working on the Postscript code (which I had to learn with no tools other than a printer and reams of paper) I saw that I might be able to reverse engineer Illustrator's file format, which was conveniently text and all in Postscript. At the time only a few apps went all the way including Pagemaker, Illustrator and Freehand.
MacOS would allow you to add Postscript comments to a picture to add some better resolution but it wasn't the same. So the killer feature would be Postscript output, in addition to screen, with a fully built Postscript driver. The Wall Street Journal for example used a mainframe to build their charts. People in the newspaper, magazine, scientific journals, etc, industries really needed Postscript quality charts so they could print at their normal resolution and quality. Cricket Graph and most other charting applications including Microsoft's (Excel did not have built in charts yet) used Quickdraw to output the charts, which was basically just screen resolution.
#To use deltagraph how to#
The key idea we came up with was figuring out how to build all the charts resolution independent. Deltapoint would continue to sell Trapeze and their other products and hoped the revenue was enough to get the new app done. We had 4 programmers and soon hired a QA person. Deltapoint agreed to pay us by the hour and we hoped to be able to get it done in a year. We had a lot of ideas about how to do a charting only app and we all agreed to start immediately. They had the idea that it was a ripe time to attack Cricket Graph, and wanted to know what we thought about doing it.
#To use deltagraph mac#
So the new guys at Deltapoint, who had split off from Access Technologies with all the Mac products including Trapeze, sat down with us in the exhibitor tent at Boston MacWorld where Persuasion has just been released.
#To use deltagraph software#
Cricket was so focused on new software that Graph was not being heavily updated in the absence of competition. They had been approached by Microsoft who tried to buy them but were rebuffed (I heard this secondhand so I don't remember the exact details).
Remember that in the late 80's Windows was not a viable platform and all new apps debuted on the Mac.Ĭricket Software had been selling Cricket Graph for a while, and it owned most of the chart market. It shipped in August of 1988 at Macworld Boston. He wanted built in charts and data handling (which Powerpoint didn't do) so this was our second app to do charts in. He wanted to turn it into a presentation application like Powerpoint, and like Cricket Presents which was in beta I think. After we sold it to a company called Access Technologies, we started a new company to just write software and our first customer was the author of Persuasion, which at the time was just a MacDraw clone. We had written Trapeze which was released in January of 1987, a spreadsheet like application, which had extensive charting functions. Given the popularity of my post What Writing - And Selling - Software Was Like In The 80's, I guess one more story is in order. There are likely few commercial apps still alive today that were first written in the late 80's and never had a rewrite.Įven though the timeframe is a long time ago, it's still an interesting tale. I shudder to think what the source code looks like today. You can still buy it today from the current owner RedRock. It's also still the original codebase, likely heavily modified (now at version 7, my last version was 3) but never rewritten. The Story Of DeltaGraph November 24, 2014ĭeltaGraph is the one Macintosh application I led the development of that is still alive today, 26 years after I wrote the first line of code.
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