A Not-So-Brief History of K-Pad

My first "version" of K-Pad was actually called NotePad+. I coded it in VB in ~1998. It was basically NotePad plus the tree on the left-hand-side.

These days, there are a lot of NotePad Pluses. Naming becomes tricky. I thought I might call it KrakenPad, after my company, Kraken Designs (which years ago I set up to do web design work, but that never really took off). Then I discovered there are a lot of Krakens out there too. I therefore settled for K-Pad.

For the last four-or-so years I've been doing my own projects, living meagrely off past earnings. I fell in love with c++, and began coding my own libraries for it. I'm a "from scratch" programmer. I don't like using other people's code. I have my own formatting and "English-GB" spelling.

One of my greatest passions is scriptwriting, and I wanted something to help me do it *my way*. I found MS Word et al to be rather clunky. I wanted the ability to shuffle scene orders with one drag of the mouse. This brought me back to my old NotePad+. Yet that didn't have spell-check, and it didn't have a whole host of other things I wanted, e.g. the ability to do a cover page with an image, and, especially, the ability to print out a double-sided A5 booklet. So I began work on K-Pad. v1.0 isn't quite there as a proper script-editor... but soon I hope it will be.

One of my other projects was a Teletext-type program called TelePad. I liked the clunky text and simplistic graphics of Teletext - which will soon, sadly, be a thing of the past, when TV here goes fully digital. I decided to meld TelePad into K-Pad.

One more thing I wanted - needed - was a "preview" window. Especially because K-Pad was to cater specifically for double-sided booklet (and mini-booklet) printing, it became very important to have a visual (pseudo-3D) booklet for users to look at during editing. To the best of my knowledge, this sort of thumbnail-view is unique to K-Pad.

Fast-forward through a lot of bug-fixing, and thread-related problem-solving. v1.0 is ready, it seems pretty stable, so here I am, writing this article... And here's where I'll leave it, for now! :-)