MacDraw

MacDraw was a vector 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.