GLPaint

GLpaint was an improved version of PCPaint and Pictor Paint, and was the last in a series of paint programs that descended from the first IBM PC-based mouse driven GUI paint program (PCPaint). All three were written by John Bridges.

By 1994, GRASP development had stopped and so had development of Pictor Paint. John Bridges terminated his GRASP publishing contract with Paul Mace Software, and went off to create GLPro (the next generation of GRASP) with Jason Gibbs at G-media, a division of IMS Communications Ltd.

In 1995, GLpaint was released.

Bundled with GLPro, GLpaint saved its files in a compressed format with the file extension PIC , which was the same format used by PCPaint and Pictor Paint.

By 1998 version 7.0 provided support for TrueColor images and the Pictor PIC format was expanded to handles these.

GLPro was moved into a separate company, GMedia, in early 2000, which closed their doors in February 2001 just as the Macintosh and Linux support was entering public beta testing. The GLPro codebase was sold to Interactive Homes, a GLPro user, by the bankruptcy liquidators and taken private. Bridges is no longer involved in its development, and as of February 2002 is working on a new multimedia authoring system called AfterGRASP designed to be backwards compatible with GLPro with less emphasis on built-in media playback support.

John Bridges has not announced any plans to create a successor to GLpaint, and the Pictor PIC file format has all but vanished. IMS Communications Ltd is still around.

References

Encyclopedia of Graphics File Formats, 2nd Editionby Murray, James D. , Van Ryper, WilliamISBN 1-56592-161-5http://www.fileformat.info/resource/book/1565921615/index.htm

Pictor PC Paint File Format Summaryhttp://www.fileformat.info/format/pictor/

GRASP File Format Summaryhttp://www.fileformat.info/format/grasp/

GLPROhttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GLPro

Mouse Systemshttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mouse_Systems

PCPAINT/Pictor Page Format DescriptionFormat by John Bridges.Document by Microtex Industries, Inc.Revision Date: 2/9/88http://netghost.narod.ru/gff/vendspec/pictor/pictor.txt

The Graphics File Formats Page GL - Another animation formatDr. Martin ReddyTechnical Lead, R & D, Pixar Animation Studioshttp://www.martinreddy.net/gfx/2d/GL.txt

The formats of GRASP animation filesBy George Phillips http://www.programmersheaven.com/download/2157/Zipfilelist.aspx

The History of GLPROby Jason Gibbs (G-media/IMS)GLPro Mailing List Archive http://www.concept-usa.us/glpro/glprolist/glprolist.asp?as_q=History+of+GLPRO&R2=V2&R1=V2&num=20&btnSub=Submit+Query

originally at http://www.gmedia.com/glpro/press/history.html

Pmace is still aroundhttp://www.mail-archive.com/search?l=[e-mail]&q=pmace