SuperPaint is a graphics program capable of both bitmap painting and vector drawing. SuperPaint was one of the first programs of its kind, combining the features of MacPaint and MacDraw while adding many new features of its own. It was originally written by William Snider, published by Silicon Beach Software (which was acquired by Aldus Corporation in 1990), and released in 1986 for the Apple Macintosh. William Snider wrote and designed the program from his house on an Apple Lisa in Pascal. It was the only program that outsold Silicon Beach's Dark Castle games, but SuperPaint was much more lucrative for the company, representing about 70% of the revenue. The program and packaging was also localized into Japanese. As it requires Classic, SuperPaint is unsupported as of Mac OS X version 10.5, but can still be used with the assistance of emulators.

History

Later versions were published by Aldus after their 1990 acquisition of Silicon Beach Software. The application continued to be sold by Adobe after their 1994 takeover of Aldus.

Plug-ins

In 1988, alongside version 1.1, an SDK (software development kit) was released that allowed the creation of software plug-ins to add features and capabilities to SuperPaint. Many plugins were created and shared, including some that added support for pressure-sensitive pens such as those made by Wacom.

Later use

Artist Richard Bolam used images drawn using Aldus SuperPaint in the 1990s as part of his "Bolam at 50" exhibition in 2014. Naoki Yamamoto is seen using SuperPaint in the Documentary Urasawa Naoki no Manben in season 4, episode 3 (broadcast in 2017).