June 24, 2008

It's Done - BCED that is

Bead Crochet Element Designer is done and up for sale. You can find it at Bead Patterns or Sova Enterprises as a download, for $30. I'm so excited that this is finally a reality after more than a year's worth of hard work. In my wildest dreams, I never expected to find myself on the authoring end of a computer program at retirement age!



There is more information about the program and what it does at Bead Line Studios. It's not a fancy program with loads of bells and whistles. It does one thing, and does it very well. It allows you to graph bead crochet patterns and see what they actually look like on a rope. The colors are limited to only 9, and we've joked that the programmer is color-blind, but with the stringing table printout, it's easy to make bead substitutions.

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A design like this is difficult to see and graph on the traditional slanted flat graph. With BCED I had it completed in about five minutes. I could rotate the rope and see that it would work right away. I printed out the stringing table and was stringing it immediately. The design crocheted up without having to go back and make several sample pieces to get it all right. The hard part was not fiddling with the design to see what else I could come up with. One evaluator said that the program was better than Windows solitaire for plain play fun.
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Now that the software is over at Bead Patterns, I can finish getting some pattern sets completed to add. I'm doing sets of 8 to 9 patterns in a group that you will be able to purchase and import directly into the program. Then you can either use them directly or fiddle with them to make them your own patterns.

Did I say that I was excited?

4 comments:

  1. It's not often anymore that one can find a genuine, unfilled niche when it comes to beadwork tools and aids. But you two did it, and beautifully.

    Congratulations, Judith and Ken!

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  2. Congratulations Judith and Ken.
    I am looking foward to trying my hand at designing patterns with this software.

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  3. Anonymous7:57 AM

    Judith, that is fabulous! Any chance you'll be at Chain Link in NH?

    Yvonne, Brooklyn

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  4. Anonymous2:04 PM

    Gee, I was all excited about your application, but it's only for Windows! I'm a Mac person. Lots of creative types are. Any chance you will be writing a Mac version?

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