Hot Draw Clone

I'd spent my last months at Tektronix perfecting Hot Draw as an application platform. Now at Knowledge Systems I set out to build a better one.

I had struggled getting object identity right in my previous drawing programs. Programs like SIL were too remote from objects making every instance independent. By contrast MacDraw was too quick to duplicate objects and lost any common structure between copies of objects.

I wrote a varient of deepCopy that fed one serializing-stream into another deserializing-stream. The serializing delegated the shallow/deep question to the objects involved and thereby found the middle ground that was just right.

I worked remotely from the office in Cary, North Carolina and the client site in Palo Alto. I remember that the client was suspicious of my confidence in Hot Draw but that my colleagues in Cary loved it and were especially pleased to find my virtuoso implementation of copy.

I integrated draw into a writing tool that anticipated several more I would make including wiki. I wrote about Baker Space as a chaotic system mostly to exercise my new tools.