Updates
To be notified of the latest updates to all of the Drawshield suite of programs subscribe to www.karlwilcox.com/blog/rss. A consolidated list of
all the release notes for each program can be found on the Google Code Wiki (see below).
Source Code
Drawshield is released under an Open Source, Apache License 2.0. The project is hosted by Google Code
and can be found at http://code.google.com/p/drawshield/. This site holds all of the source code (currently 10,000+ lines), the issues list at http://code.google.com/p/drawshield/issues/list and program documentation. The documentation can be accessed from the google code wiki, or is also available
within this website (the information is identical from both sources, only the formatting differs).
Input and feedback to the project is gratefully received, see the Help Wanted pages if you would like to contribute.
Image Sources
Some of the images used in these shields are based on other sources, listed
below. Their use, and the work of the original artists is gratefully
acknowledged.
-
Wikimedia Commons, used under a - The online version of
James Parker’s
Glossary of Heraldry, used under an
OpenContent License. - The Society for Creative Anachronism’s
Heraldic Primer. (No
images were used directly but some content is based on those designs).
Inspiration
In 1984 Dr. David C Wood of the University of Kent at Canterbury proposed
that Heraldic Blazons could be parsed and drawn using a computer. This was
undertaken as a final year group project by Karl Wilcox, Lucy Haptas, Paul Davies and
Nigel (whose surname may come back to me eventually).
We developed a program in UCSD Pascal on a Apple ][ computer that could parse
and depict in colour some simple shield designs. Dr. Wood’s original
inspiration is gratefully acknowledged, as are the contributions of my fellow
project members.