Kid Pix
bitmap drawing program aimed at children
Kid Pix is a bitmap drawing program designed for children. Originally created by Craig Hickman, it was first released for the Macintosh in 1989 and subsequently published in 1991 by Broderbund. Hickman was inspired to create Kid Pix after watching his son Ben struggle with MacPaint, and thus the main idea behind its development was to create a drawing program that would be very simple to use.
The application is now owned by Software MacKiev, who had been involved in development of the Macintosh version of Kid Pix Deluxe 3 and has been the sole developer of the Kid Pix series since the initial release of Kid Pix Deluxe 3X prior to acquiring the brand from Houghton Mifflin Harcourt in October 2011. Sir Ringo Starr of The Beatles is an active fan of the program and has used it to produce art that he has since exhibited in art galleries.
History
Craig Hickman was studying photography at Evergreen State College in 1972 with the aim of taking a career in fine art photography when he encountered a friend entering code into a teletype in the college's terminal room. This impressed upon Hickman a desire to learn how to program. After leaving college, he continued to write programs for his own education. By 1988, he owned an Apple Macintosh and began distributing software in the public domain.
While using MacPaint that year, his then-three-year-old son expressed a desire to use the application.
The public source identifies “Kid Pix” as bitmap drawing program aimed at children. This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around bitmap, drawing and program.
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This entry incorporates text from “Kid Pix” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.