Interview with Pieter Omvlee of Bohemian Coding

Recently we talked about Drawit, the drawing app with style. Well, this week we got a chance to talk with the developer of DrawIt (and an upcoming app), Pieter Omvlee.

MacApper: DrawIt is now one of the most popular vector apps for the Mac, so what drove you to create it?

Pieter: DrawIt started I think about four years ago, really as a project to get some basic experience with programming.

I had just switched from Windows to the Mac I noticed there was not a simple drawing application available for the Mac, and since I needed something like that, I decided to create it myself.

Looking back it wouldn’t have been the lack of drawing applications but rather my inability to use Google, but anyway, that’s what got me started with it.

MacApper: How long have you been programming and why did you start?

Pieter: Early in high school I had my first experience with programming and then a teacher gave a copy of Visual Basic for Windows, and I used that to learn the basic stuff. After that I forgot all about programming for the next few years until I bought my first Mac (one of the last iBook G3).

After that I met a friend (Jelle de Laender, now on CodingMammoth) and we both started to do some programming again, this time in RealBasic. We had a little “company” together and we released a number of very basic applications, one of which was DrawIt in fact.

A lot of those applications went away again, but DrawIt (together with an app called QuickScale) stayed and we would work on those. Almost two years ago we split up and divided our applications; I got DrawIt and he got QuickScale and a few other applications. Since then development of DrawIt went much faster. That’s where we are today.

MacApper: What drove you to start Fontcase?

Pieter: Quite soon after shipping DrawIt again under my own name, I got in contact with Laurent Baumann who initially just had a few feature requests but who ended up also doing an incredible amount of work on of graphics, UI design, and testing for the application.

He knew I was looking for ideas for other Mac apps, and he talked with me about an idea he had for a long time to create a better font manager. And since I liked the idea very much we decided to do this together.
Development started I think early in the summer and we’re finally approaching version 1.0 now.

MacApper: What hardware do you currently use?

Pieter: My main working machine is a 24″ iMac but I also have a Macbook Air which I use when I’m on the road, but it’s also essential for testing the Shared Library-feature of Fontcase, which was the primary reason for buying it.

MacApper: Can we expect any other apps (iPhone or Mac) from you soon?

Pieter: Apart from Fontcase, I have been working a bit on a spin-off project of DrawIt, which currently goes by the name of DrawIt Batch. It’s an app for applying filters like shadow, stroke, scaling, and several CoreImage-filters on multiple images at once.

The app is not yet in beta, mainly because I’m now focusing 100% on Fontcase, and because there’s not yet an icon nor a website.

From the start, I’ve been very interested in doing iPhone development, but it has been a problem of coming up with a really good idea, and besides that, my current desktop projects ask a lot of time.

MacApper: Is there anything else you would like to tell us about? Upcoming features in DrawIt that you are excited about?

Pieter: When Fontcase is out I plan to work again on DrawIt and the main focus there will be on vector export. I’ve received a lot of feedback from people asking for SVG or PDF export and that’s what I hope to provide in the future. I’m also thinking about multiple-page support, but the most important thing will be true vector export.

Of course this presents some problems because almost none of the CoreImage effects make sense in Vector export, so it’ll be quite a challenge.

Thank you very much for giving me an opportunity to talk about my projects. This actually is my first interview, so thanks for giving me some time to talk about this.

MacApper: No problem. Thank you for taking the time to answer our questions.

As mentioned above, Pieter has a new app coming out soon, called FontCase. If you join the mailing list at their Website, you can download the beta today. In case you don’t want to join the mailing list, here is an exclusive preview that Pieter has given us:

Pieter: With Fontcase, Laurent and I have really tried to come up with a user-interface that is perfectly logical for a first-time user, flexible enough for a power-user, and of course packs all the features one would expect from any decent font manager. The UI has changed a lot since we first started. This means that any screenshots I provide at this point might be outdated by the time the application ships.

The website still provides a fairly adequate preview of the application, with the main features highlighted. One I personally quite like is the Compare tool. As the name suggests, it’s designed to be of help when you want to compare a few fonts; you can compare individual glyphs, header text, or paragraph text.

The screenshot below shows the Header Text:

Fontcase tries to be strong on metadata and we made it very easy to edit this. For each variation you can apply Tags, Genres, Foundries, and Designers which will also show up in the sidebar as can be seen in the first screenshot.

The website already shows the icon view, but the third tab, the preview list, is also a very nice one:

We’re very close to finishing the application and we’re very excited about it. There are of course many other features we haven’t mentioned so we hope you’ll all try the application once it’s released. And thanks to MacApper for giving us the opportunity to talk about Fontcase.

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