AlphaMask is making AlphaMask Graphics Library (AGL), its portable 2D graphics engine, available immediately for Mac OS 9 and Mac OS X developers.
AGL is a high-end graphics library that sports such features as anti-alias text and graphics, gradients, matrix transformations and transparency. It ships in third party products on Mac OS, Windows, Linux, and embedded systems, according to MacTech magazine.
“Its like having a cross-platform version of Quartz,” AlphaMask CEO Mike Reed said. “AGL provides state of the art 2D graphics to OS X, and everywhere else.”
Reed was tech lead on Apple’s TrueType and font system before co-founding HeadSpin Technology, which focused on 2D and 3D graphics engines. In 1999 he founded AlphaMask to focus exclusively on 2D graphics and its applications to the new generation of consumer devices. AlphaMask Chief Technical Officer Oliver Steele was a member of the team that developed Apple Computer’s QuickDraw GX graphics engine, and the project lead for the development environment of Apple’s 4th generation programming language Dylan.
“Text drawing is our forte,” Steele said. “That’s why AGL supports all the major font formats and 3rd party font scalers: TrueType and Type-1 fonts, and, of course, all of our code is Unicode ready.”