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New cross-platform Vector app [looking for your support]

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tomos:
This looks pretty serious :D

http://www.stagestack.com/ (http://www.goexpressive.com/)




First a small bit of history:

Apparently, for professionals that had to deal with pre-press, the choice was always between Illustrator & FreeHand.
FreeHand was developed originally by Aldus, and then Macromedia. Macromedia was taken over by Adobe a few years back. They were happy to let Illustrator's main competitor die a slow death. At the time nothing was done about this anti-competitive behaviour. The Free Freehand group recently had a go at taking them to court, but in spite of a lot of support from individuals, it was always a David vs. Goliath thing.
After concluding the attempt to make Adobe change their ways (or at the very least improve Illustrator to the standards they were used to), they have decided to support the development of Quasado's Stagestack/Expressive.

As you can see from the above screenshot, Stagestack/Expressive have raised over 37,000 euros (almost $50,000).
They've been on the go for 2.5 years.
First nightly builds will be available to donaters of 25 euros or more as of mid-August. A 25 euro donation will get you 15% off the price of a license.

I'll probably give it a go myself, having used FreeHand since the year 2000. I tried Illustrator once or twice, but it was so slow I always went back to FreeHand (this may have improved with recent hardware improvements). I have to have (another) go at installing CS5 in the next while (support for opening/importing FreeHand documents has been removed from the latest Illustrator, CS6). Like me, there are lots of people out there with years worth of FreeHand files. Hopefully Expressive will make an app with a good workflow, as well as being able to open FreeHand files.

edit 2013-01-09
Quasado are looking for support for this project. Simply following or liking will be of benefit - impress the investors :-)
Donations are also welcome though ;-)

Follow on twitter http://twitter.com/quasado
Like on Facebook http://www.facebook.com/quasado
or donate http://www.stagestack.com/

other links
FreeHand forum / Expressive board
FreeHand Forum / Vector app alternatives

Renegade:
It's good to see competition for Illustrator. I remember trying Freehand years ago, and it really was much nicer to use.

eleman:
uh... Inkscape?

tomos:
uh... Inkscape?
-eleman (July 22, 2012, 01:30 AM)
--- End quote ---

For just web work, inkscape could be fine. But for pre-press work, CMYK ability is a necessity.

Add to that an interface that allows a smooth and speedy workflow. To be honest I've no idea how Inkscape or other apps fare at that level. Illustrator was too slow for me - I'd sometimes have to open and work on dozens of files per day. With illustrator you'd be talking at least double the time consumed as with using FreeHand.

There are many vector apps on the market already (on the Mac side they all are cocoa/quartz based) who can not support CMYK color mode. Some promising projects mainly on Linux have the same problem. Inkscape and Skencil are still RGB based, sK1 is a fork of Skencil which will make it prepress ready including CMYK but all are far from the user experience you know from FreeHand.

We have asked some developers of existing apps if they would make it more FreeHand'ish, and nevertheless they are interested in such input, they can only go small steps into our direction.

Expressive is the only project which has specifically a FreeHand experience as goal and aims for this from the very beginning.-FFH Thü
--- End quote ---
link

As you can see there is a FreeHand bias here - but there's a reason for that ;-)
For me personally, what I care about is: ease of use, speed, and that it works. I dont care if it's inspired by FreeHand or not.


Edit/ this post responds more positively to using Inkscape. It seems what's actually missing is the abilty to export CMYK. But for professional use, the interface gets a bit of a slating in terms of usability in the same thread.

tomos:
Bit of a jumpy start - they decided to rename it (I think Expressive was considered too close to some other names out there) - but they renamed it to Stagestack ... :o

After getting a well deserved negative outburst, they are now looking for a new name -
Help rename Stagestack/Expressive

if you feel inspired, post here. or there.

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