Welcome back, QuickDraw GX, it’s nice to see you again.

I got my start working in tech as the founder of the QuickDraw GX Fan Club, a web site devoted to all things QuickDraw GX. I started the site in 1995 while in college and, in addition to featuring a blog with the latest news, I wrote a FAQ, maintained a directory of supporting apps, fonts, and utilities. In addition to hosting all of this on MacHTTP on a Power Macintosh 6100 in my dorm room, I hosted a mail server and a mailing list server with lists for users (~300)and developers (~190, including almost 2 dozen from Apple).

One of the many iterations of the home page. This was an image map.

My efforts to create a virtuous cycle between developers and users got me an invite to WWDC 1996 where I met many of those developers face to face, including some from PaceWorks of Palo Alto (as well as David Opstad and the late Tom Dowdy from Apple). The PaceWorks guys showed me their Adobe AfterEffects-like tool, Object Dancer, that could animate QuickDraw GX type in all its glory and export via QuickTime. I was invited to join PaceWorks later that fall to do marketing. In the meantime, Frankie Fu, Apple’s QuickDraw GX evangelist, paid for a formal domain name, gxfanclub.com. I was promised a Power Macintosh 8100 as well but that never happened. Oh well. 😒

Unfortunately, someone has hoovered the graphics from the Internet Wayback Machine and placed them at the top of a spam site. The rest of the site is functional though. Only spam on the home page.

Working at PaceWorks got me booth stints at Comdex Las Vegas 1996 in the PowerPC Pavilion, 1996 Seybold NYC, 1997 MacWorld SF, etc. After I worked at PaceWorks, I joined Adrenaline Software, a company that developed on OpenDoc and QuickDraw 3D. I can lay claim to working on some of the most high-profile technologies ever killed by Apple. (Adrenaline launched its product soon after Steve Jobs killed QD3D and OD.)

And the rest is history. I have been working in technology ever since. QuickDraw GX is the reason that I got my marketing chops.

PS: I still have copies of some of the animated fonts that Apple commissioned. 😁