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Re: Quasado (developer of StageStack, a FreeHand replacement) considerin


From: Riccardo Mottola
Subject: Re: Quasado (developer of StageStack, a FreeHand replacement) considering opensource
Date: Fri, 07 Jun 2013 19:23:04 +0200
User-agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; NetBSD i386; rv:17.0) Gecko/20130221 Thunderbird/17.0.2

On 06/07/13 16:28, William F. Adams wrote:
  - The interface is Byzantine and awful compared to FreeHand.
  - It's limited to what SVG allows, as opposed to empowered by having
Display PostScript for imaging as Altsys Virtuoso did
  - It's not written in Cocoa, so no Services support in Mac OS X.
  - lack of inspector palettes makes the interface less efficient
Never tried it myself, but the screenshots look awful, almost gimp-like. HOwever teh drawings are good. People who know to draw, draw with everything...


&c. while I can muddle through using pretty much any vector tool (like
the guy in Japan who draws images using the drawing tools in Excel),
no other tools is as optimal or elegant or efficient or productive or
profitable as FreeHand or Altsys Virtuoso for me.
Drwaing in excel? I must see that....

I Liked old versions of Freehnad, I still have the original Aldus floppies! I met one of the Aldus guys personally, he worked at HP back then. I was more interested in pageMaker actually and used FreeHand for drawings.
I remember MacDraw and SuperDraw II !

The last good thing was FreeHand from Macromedia, 6 or 7 I think. I used it on Mac 8 on 68k :)

But I've been reading through the code for xasy (Python front-end for
Asymptote) and have downloaded the code for METAGRAF and Cenon in the
past --- I made suggestions re: the Cenon interface previously, but
never got a dialog started.
Well, I think Cenon is good, but is some sort of CAD oriented.
On Mac I like an older version of Stone Design. I don't know how the new ones are, but the one that did run on PPC and 10.3 mac, is very open-step-ish, I love it. Not so powerful, but it replaced FreeHand for most DTP-like work I do, not as much as free drawing

I spoke with Gregory about a port, but is unlikable.

You could scour for older OpenStep (or even NeXT) software and try to get the sources, if you can. In case we then may port it. Or even old mac stuff, abandoned. But it must not be Carbon, but real AppKit.

I really do appreciate your work on GraphOS and am currently working
on a paper for TUGboat which will hopefully be of interest to you as
regards features and interface.
Honestly, I don't think Graphos will be ever a FreeHand replacement. It essentially gathers the capability of our BezierPath engine (it doesn't use DPS for mac compatibility, but the transition lost really minimal functionality that is certain fonts magic it could do).

However, i already know of several bugs (on the bug-tracker assigned to the only active developer, me) I want to fix and of some features I want to implement. The point is that up to now, Almost all features were there, but more or less broken, it was years of code-reorganization more than invention. Although some stuff had to be done ground up, likle circles and squars.. and object ordering, which appeared to be there, but was totally broken :)

To make copy-paste work +really+ a lot of stuff had to be improved.

Although it still looks the same.. and still has missing tools! So implementing those will be harder :( Especially the bezier path editor needs some care, I miss some functionality about handles from the times of Freehand or Illustrator, i don't remember.

So, don't hold your breath, but test for new releases or follow my blog when it announces new stuff :)

Riccardo



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