After graduating I started working for Hemel Hempstead based Computer Concepts in June 1993. During my first year I worked on various versions of the Impression “Document Processor” application. In particular I worked on parts of the User Interface for Impression Publisher, Impression Publisher Plus and Impression Style. The “Smart Quotes” and “Swap Case” features mentioned in the first linked article were written by me.
Impression ran on the Acorn Archimedes home computers. Development work had begun before a C compiler was available so the entire program was written in ARM assembler. By the time that I joined the Impression team a large amount of low level library code had been written. I found that developing for Impression was largely a matter of stringing together library calls. The trick was to know what was available in the libraries!
In August 1994 the Impression team moved over to working on Camelot, the project code for the application that was briefly known as Xara Studio and then CorelXARA. We started by learning C++ using a beta of Visual C++ 2 running on a beta of Windows NT 3.5. We liked to live dangerously back then!
I developed the QuickShape drawing tool and worked on the UI of the Béizer path tool. The Impression team came back together to work on the Text tool. The original plan was that the application would have a fully featured word processor, blending together a drawing program with a desktop publishing system. However, time was too tight and the program was released with a rather rudimentary tool that hasn’t progressed far since.
Although Gaddesden Place was a nice working environment the pressure to release Xara Studio wasn’t pleasant. Programmer moral was further dented by the deal with Corel. We couldn’t see the logic in having our major competitor having an exclusive right to sell “our” application. The development team started to break up with programmers moving on to fresh challenges. A number went to work at The Digital Village developing software devised by Douglas Adams. In February 1997 I moved to Xitec Software.