uh... Inkscape (http://inkscape.org/)?-eleman (July 22, 2012, 01:30 AM)
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.link (http://www.freehandforum.org/forum/viewtopic.php?f=9&t=705&sid=6e598956cbd747e93f0d9a184224b837#p1551)
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
Edit/ this post responds more positively to using Inkscape.I was gonna say...
But for professional use, the interface gets a bit of a slating in terms of usability in the same thread.Ok, I understand that freehand was/is very easy to use and intuitive, but to pan the Inkscape GUI as "Linux-like" and "ugly" strikes me as a bit churlish, though I do agree that most Linux GUI's in the early days didn't offer anything better than Microsoft's best circa 1995. We've come a long way since then. I had no problems figuring out what the different functions did just by playing with it for a while, and the "hidden" items are a simple web search away.
to pan the Inkscape GUI as "Linux-like" and "ugly" strikes me as a bit churlishI agree,-Edvard (July 31, 2012, 10:05 PM)
I think it's a form of designers' snobbery. I guess their whole career is about making things look good, so many would struggle with an interface that doesnt have that as a priority.Agreed as well. I can find much delight in a well-designed (read: easy to navigate, not necessarily pretty) interface myself. I totally appreciate that the guy had trouble adjusting to a new interface, we all do, and it's especially frustrating when the successful navigation of said software interface affects the success of one's livelihood, as would be the case with a professional designer/architect/artist/musician/etc.
I dont know how long it takes to adjust to new software, probably it depends how many years you've been using your old software ;-)That certainly depends on how much effort has been put into the usability of the software. Even if everything is totally backwards from what you're used to, if the functions are easily discovered or intuitive, the change should be rather painless. Recently, I tried and failed again to seriously work with gEDA (http://www.geda-project.org/); never again, even if the EvilMadScientist.com (http://www.evilmadscientist.com/) guys are all over it (http://wiki.evilmadscience.com/Talk:GEDA_Resources). I can get to a certain point in the workflow, and suddenly I have no idea what to do to move to the next step, and myriads of Google searches and Reading The Free Manual haven't yielded a sufficient answer. Bad form, gentlemen.
As you can see there is a FreeHand bias here-tomos (July 22, 2012, 02:41 AM)
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/
Like on Facebook http://www.facebook.com/quasado
or donate http://www.stagestack.com/-tomos (January 09, 2013, 09:01 AM)
What about Xara Designer Pro as a competitor to Illustrator?
Blindingly fast and easy to use with lots of native import options (including Freehand 3).-Carol Haynes (January 09, 2013, 09:37 AM)
one couldnt work with CMYK colours and see it in progress.-tomos (January 09, 2013, 02:22 PM)
One thing that makes me wary is the fact it does so much!-tomos (January 09, 2013, 02:22 PM)
but pros seem to mainly avoid it so far-tomos (January 09, 2013, 02:22 PM)
Doc Pixel 10.01.13 @ 01:32 pm Random first thoughts after reading the comments here: Henry Ford on innovation: "“If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses.” Sorry to be so blunt, but re-creating Freehand as it "was"... is a dead end. As someone above this post mentioned, iDraw is an example of what future vector software will look like and be built upon. It is also software initiatives like this that pull in investors by the boat-load. Making business and software decisions by listening to people still declaring their hatred for social platforms: very short-sighted and they should be ignored. People declaring their hate and refusal to even try illustrator, leads me to believe that if StageStack deviates in the slightest way from Freehand... which these people know and have an undying love for... they will be the biggest complainers. In that regard, it's a good thing they are not socially connected... because no one will even hear their complaints. Other than probably their customers who will have to endure another round of whining and complaining why they can't get their projects done on budget and punctually. Design-software at this point NEEDS the tech-savvy social connected crowd. New innovative and inspiring tools for young ideas and people designing for themselves and their generation and shaping the world "today and tomorrow". Note: I just turned 50 a couple of days ago. I had these same discussions 25 years ago explaining why we don't need a GUI to $150k typesetting machines; we need NEW software that takes advantage of the new Macintosh and PC platforms of the future. People like Bob Sander-Cederlof delivered that way back then... can Quasada do that today? A 3rd Party plugin from Quasado to open old Freehand files will never ever see the light of day. Patents and copyrights held by Adobe, and the original API platform no longer being supported to get at the binary code makes it a "dead end project". The Rosetta PowerPC emulator code will never be reverse engineered so that Mac users will ever be able to install Freehand in current or future OS versions, similar to the resons above. More info: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/QuickTransit. There is no need for a new Freehand unless it is built with future considerations like touch and pen input for the future, and RGB is the base design color model. Period. Because CMYK is also a dying (dead) technology. INFO: Last year ebooks broke the 50% mark of all books sold on Amazon. Newsprint and magazines have been on a downward spiral for the last 5 years, and it will continue at a pace never seen before. Within a short period of time, whatever is still "printed" like packaging, will surely be 100% "digitally" printed, where the RIP will be doing RGB conversions according to the inks in the system. This could very well be from 4-16 at a time and encompass a spectrum far exceeding that of any 4-16 color traditional printing press. Ask Heidelberg. I have. The statistics and trend in the traditional printing markets are scary bad. Add to the digital printing the fact that paper has become a very expensive commodity, to the point where traditional printing/publishing is becoming far too expensive to consider for old-school advertising, marketing and daily/monthly publishing. Ads in newspapers or magazines were mentioned above in a comment: I hope it was just being sarcastic(!) Should Quasada also deliver demos on diskettes and CD's? Besides the financial benefits of going digital, the added benefit is that it's FAR more ecological. A topic that the younger generation is becoming fully aware of in school. The consequences if they ignore conservation are more than evident. As far as I'm concerned, death to dead-tree publishing can't come soon enough. My Summary: 1) stop wasting your development money building a "better mousetrap" clone from yesterday. 2) reconsider your strategy and think where you want your software to take young designers and publishing in 1 year, 2 years, 5. 3) How can you leverage the young designer's energy and desire for "new" tools, learn them, and new ways of being productive; shining a light on THEIR world, not those of their parents, me or any other old folks commenting here. Social communication, interest and "tuned-in" investors are all but guaranteed when you find the right combination of must-have tools for the "Future Designer's Toolbox". Build that! |
Stagestack faces dead-end, source code release considered
Alexandre Prokoudine 10-Jan-2013
Stagestack, a work-in-progress vector graphics editor is facing the dead-end after failing to become a financially self-supporting project. Developers are thinking about releasing the source code now...
(see attachment in previous post (https://www.donationcoder.com/forum/index.php?topic=31708.msg314782#msg314782))turns out we read the article too quickly :tellme: (but it still sounds like it's not alive as a big project)
It's history folks! Stagestack is no more.
[..]
Full article here (http://libregraphicsworld.org/blog/entry/stagestack-faces-dead-end).
:(-40hz (January 17, 2013, 01:28 PM)
... Quasado might start an open source project. Interestingly enough, this is exactly what the Quasado team is now considering.
[...]
For now Quasado is looking for your input on the possible future of the project.
What are our next steps
- Try to improve communication ASAP without wasting to much time better spent in programming. As a first step, at least weekly status reports as well as a monthly newsletter might be a good step.
- Focus on innovation, leaving other aspects of Freehand (expect it's better usability) a side for later revisions
- Focus on getting somewhere even if worse then others at this point but keep improving
- Try to stick on timelines
- Work on this project as much as we (I?) can without funding right now
What are we currently doing?
As a first step of better communication, I want to tell you what I've been working on lately and just finished today.
My idea was to rework the current, underlying model of handling graphic documents. The current model has several weaknesses including not being able to load/save, no proper undo/redo, no propery linking between nodes (i.e. for styles etc.), not prepared for multi-threading and so on. To save time for the future, I've decided myself about three months ago to write a separate project that included a completely new model as well as rendering engine. Now, today I've finished with the new model and overall, I'm pretty much satisfied with it. It supports all the features mentioned before and ought to be a good ground base for a better Stagestack Core. And as a goody, here's the first usable output of loading/saving, as you can see, we're trying to stick with standardized xml:
Whats going on regarding Stagestack? [...] Quasado is not ready to give up. They have decided to build a pure web-based (JS/HTML5) edition of the product first, which will help to better fit into present investor strategies (web and mobile apps) as well to allow it to run on mobile, web and for getting a prototype out much sooner. Furthermore, thanks to the donations received--and Quasado's own financial fund--this first prototype can be developed completely on its own. Quasado is planning on publishing a limited-function prototype for people to play around on the web by early to mid-April 2013. [...] We asked about details on their programming process and Quasado tells us they will be using the same web-code for building up a desktop edition by replacing performance-critical parts with native code. They believe this is quite an interesting experiment and will still allow users to work with exactly the same feature-set on the web as well as the native application. They are also building an infrastructure / SAAS Solution around the web edition that will allow designers to better manage and handle their designs as well as interact with their customers. It will support interactive components; meaning users can do UI-Drafts, for example, and other such functions. |
I think their approach of developing it for the web and then porting it to the desktop is ill-advised at best. (Call it a hunch and take it with a grain of salt.)-40hz (February 26, 2013, 06:18 AM)
And yeah, cloud/web/SaaS/'subscription model' is all the rage in tech investment circles. And probably will remain so until the day some super-popular online/cloud product does a major crash and burn on its users. But until that happens, web is where it's at.-40hz (February 27, 2013, 06:57 PM)
UPDATE:
Whats going on regarding Stagestack?
[...] Quasado is not ready to give up. They have decided to build a pure web-based (JS/HTML5) edition of the product first, which will help to better fit into present investor strategies (web and mobile apps) as well to allow it to run on mobile, web and for getting a prototype out much sooner. Furthermore, thanks to the donations received--and Quasado's own financial fund--this first prototype can be developed completely on its own. Quasado is planning on publishing a limited-function prototype for people to play around on the web by early to mid-April 2013.
[...]
We asked about details on their programming process and Quasado tells us they will be using the same web-code for building up a desktop edition by replacing performance-critical parts with native code. They believe this is quite an interesting experiment and will still allow users to work with exactly the same feature-set on the web as well as the native application. They are also building an infrastructure / SAAS Solution around the web edition that will allow designers to better manage and handle their designs as well as interact with their customers. It will support interactive components; meaning users can do UI-Drafts, for example, and other such functions.-tomos (February 26, 2013, 05:14 AM)
Quasado's Alexander Adam: Q: What is the reason the former Stagestack project was abandoned, or better said, changed to Gravit? Alexander Adam: [...] Let me start with some numbers. Gravit’s codebase consists of about 150k lines of Javascript code while Stagestack’s codebases consisted of about 450k lines of code. However, Gravit already includes most of the UI functionality. Gravit has been rewritten from scratch in pure Javascript and HTML5. This was a tough decision for us but it worked out pretty well. [...] Another point of our decision was the idea to build Gravit fully web-based. While it still will also be delivered as a standalone Mac- and Windows App, we strongly believe in the future of web-based applications. Having a Javascript-Codebase opens the world of Gravit (Extensions, etc.) to millions of developers. Gravit will run on Desktop, Web and Mobile out-of-the-box, giving it a major advance over other technologies like the ones from Adobe. Imagine designing and viewing your documents everywhere, looking exactly the same. No matter whether you keep them in your Google Drive or DropBox account, design them locally on your Computer or view them from your Mobile. Gravit is built for the future while Stagestack was build for the past like most existing design tool solutions are. The codebase, the UI, the UX, Gravit is less strict on “cloning“ Freehand but rather works towards transporting the Spirit of Freehand in combination with up-to-date design tools. Q: What has been reached with Gravit and what is planned for the near and far future? Alexander Adam: Gravit is pretty close to Beta which should be due in July. All basic stuff for creating full working designs like paths, text, styles, pages etc. are implemented. The next version which should follow close enough will fulfill the missing parts which are mainly symbols and master pages. Gravit will be a free product as we want everyone to be able to use it and enjoy a better world of designing. We want to steadily improve it, making it the most versatile design tool available on the market. After releasing Gravit version 2 this year, we’re planning on working on Gravit365, a SAAS-Solution for managing design-related Projects. This is ought to be our “cash-cow“ that will fund the development of Gravit. Our goal has always been to improve and innovate in the design-related field and that’s what we’re trying to do with Gravit as well as with Gravit365. |