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

[Gregory Casamento]

See below...

On Fri, Jun 7, 2013 at 1:23 PM, Riccardo Mottola <riccardo.mottola@libero.it> wrote:

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...

Bite your tongue!!  Gimp is useful once you get used to it.   Seashore, an excellent graphics editor for Mac OS X is based on Gimp and it's very useful.  The problem I suspect most people have with Gimp is that they actually have to read a user manual or spend some time getting proficient at it since it has a huge number of functions.

 

&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.

Actually, it's not unlikely because of me, but because of Andrew Stone.  I worked with him briefly at TestPlant, so he's aware of GNUstep.  I asked him directly regarding porting any of his old OpenStep/Mac apps to GNUstep and his answer was no simply because he's left that part of his life behind and is now doing much better with iOS apps than he ever did with Mac apps.

 

Later,

--
Gregory Casamento
Open Logic Corporation, Principal Consultant
yahoo/skype: greg_casamento, aol: gjcasa
(240)274-9630 (Cell)
http://www.gnustep.org
http://heronsperch.blogspot.com