Silicon Beach's best known "productivity software" product was
SuperPaint, a graphics program which combined features of Apple's
MacDraw and
MacPaint with several innovations of its own. SuperPaint2 and Digital Darkroom were the first programs on the Macintosh to offer a
plug-in architecture, allowing outside software developers to extend both programs' capabilities. Silicon Beach coined the term "plug-in". Silicon Beach was a pioneer in graphic tools for
desktop publishing. Not only was
SuperPaint a tool that had advanced graphic editing capabilities for its day, but
Digital Darkroom was also a pioneering photo editor. It was grayscale-only, not color (early Macintosh computers were black and white-only), but had a number of interface innovations, including the Magic Wand tool, which also appeared later in
Photoshop. It also had a proprietary option for printing grayscale content on
dot matrix printers. Digital Darkroom was used professionally to clean up scanned images for
clip art libraries. Another Silicon Beach product was
SuperCard which, like
SuperPaint, superseded the capabilities of an Apple-branded product (in this case,
HyperCard). SuperCard used a superset of the
HyperTalk programming language and addressed common complaints about HyperCard by adding native support for color, multiple windows, support for vector images, menus and other features. Silicon Beach Software produced video games for the Macintosh. The most well known is
Dark Castle released in
1986. It was
ported to several other
operating systems by other companies. Sequel
Beyond Dark Castle was Silicon Beach's last game, because productivity software was much more lucrative. Their 1985 release,
Airborne!, was the first Macintosh game to feature digitized sound. Silicon Beach Software is credited with coining the term
Silicon Beach to refer to
San Diego in the same way that the name
Silicon Valley refers to the
Santa Clara Valley and
San Jose area. Silicon Beach was acquired by
Aldus Corporation in 1990 and Aldus, in turn, by
Adobe Systems in 1994. ==Other products==