14 Facts About QuickDraw

1.

QuickDraw is the 2D graphics library and associated Application Programming Interface which is a core part of the classic Mac OS operating system.

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2.

QuickDraw still existed as part of the libraries of Mac OS X, but had been largely superseded by the more modern Quartz graphics system.

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3.

QuickDraw was grounded in the Apple Lisa's LisaGraf of the early 1980s and was designed to fit well with the Pascal-based interfaces and development environments of the early Apple systems.

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4.

QuickDraw defined a key data structure, the graphics port, or GrafPort.

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5.

In QuickDraw, this had a resolution of 16 bits, giving 65,536 unique vertical and horizontal locations.

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Quartz Apple Lisa
6.

QuickDraw coordinates referred to the infinitely thin lines between pixel locations.

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7.

QuickDraw maintained a number of global variables per process, chief among these being the current port.

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8.

An important feature of QuickDraw was support for transfer modes, which governed how a destination pixel value was related to its previous value and the color of the object being drawn.

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9.

Regions underpin the rest of QuickDraw, permitting clipping to arbitrary shapes, essential for the implementation of multiple overlapping windows.

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10.

QuickDraw provides a similar blitting function which is designed to implement scrolling within a GrafPort - the image in the port can be shifted to a new location without scaling.

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11.

QuickDraw started life as Lisa Graf as part of the Apple Lisa development.

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12.

Limited color was supported using a crude planar model, allowing QuickDraw to drive some types of dot-matrix printer that used multi-colored ribbons, but very few applications supported this feature.

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13.

QuickDraw took care of managing the resampling of colors to the available color depths of the actual video hardware, or transfer between offscreen image buffers, including optionally dithering images down to a lower depth to improve image quality.

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14.

Architecture of QuickDraw had always allowed the creation of GrafPorts and their associated BitMaps or PixMaps "offscreen", where graphics could be composed in memory without it being visible immediately on the screen.

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