The Story of BeadWizard

I started writing BeadWizard for three reasons. How I got to the point of finishing it is a long, winding tale. It starts with my wife, Chris. It wasn't long after I retired from the Air Force that she got tired of me hanging around the house. "Get a job, or go to school!" she said. I figured school was the lesser of two evils. Boy, was I wrong. While I was working on my graduate degree in computer science, she got reintroduced to beadwork. It wasn't long before graph paper and colored pencils were inadequate to her design needs.

We looked at many programs available for the PC at the time, and all seemed lacking in some significant way or another. So she started using high-tech graph paper--we set up grids of bead in CorelDraw. That's a very high-powered art program. Overkill for this purpose, but it filled the bill, for a time. "You're studying to be a computer scientist. Write me a bead design program." OK, I needed a project for my degree, this would involve graphics, image processing, user interface design--it fit the bill.

So in the summer of 2000 I started; drew up a schedule, did all the proper analysis and interviews with beaders, and started to work. And work, and work. All the pesky classes I had to take got in the way of BeadWizard, but some things you just gotta do. I finished enough of the program in the summer of 2001 to qualify for my graduation. But it wasn't really ready for public consumption. It was, however, useful enough that Chris was using it to create her patterns. You can see her work at A Muse Ink.

With a little more time on my hands (I now teach computer programming), I attacked the last parts of BeadWizard, doing my best to make it a commercial quality program. I hope I've created something that you will find useful, and easy to use.