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Bill Atkinson's psychedelic user interface


How an Apple legend approached the world’s most powerful psychedelic as a user-experience problem to be solved.

At Apple, he developed QuickDraw, the graphics engine behind the Mac’s interface; invented MacPaint, the first widely adopted digital drawing tool; and created HyperCard, the groundbreaking software that anticipated the interactive, hyperlinked structure of today’s web. Members of OneLight knew Bill Atkinson by his pseudonym, “Grace Within.” He was a joyful, generous presence who spent his final years refining and openly sharing the technology behind the LightWand, a vape pen for administering the psychedelic Jaguar (5-MeO-DMT). There he wrote: “My intention with this article is to assist people in having safe, beautiful, and healing experiences with this amazing medicine.” His open-source approach democratized psychedelic exploration, shifting power away from costly retreats and elite gatekeepers toward broader accessibility.

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