A tiny but significant moment of joy for Rijul and I: a Graphy creation published and live in an international journal, it’s nice to see someone finding Graphy useful enough for the tiny but essential task of drawing a complex graph to embed in a research paper.

It’s probably only a matter of time before we have some vicious Graphy creations taking over the traditional hand-drawn networks on graph theory exams; sorry, fellow students.

To give you the big picture: Graphy was conceived to help teach and learn graph algorithms by visualising them step by step. While further research led me to realise that the concept is not new (and that made me sad and give up hope), it was eventually picked up as a nice tool to draw graphs and export them as JPEG or EPS files to embed in research papers, test papers and the likes.

It’s important that credit be given where it’s due, and we must hence credit Microsoft: the blue blobs and their attached arrows are not by the then-very-alpha Graphy. This goes to show that not many really care about the hard work that goes into good software; why add complex, one-hit-wonder functionality when a quick job with MS Paint keeps everyone happy?