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

[Riccardo Mottola]

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