First FreeHand, now Canvas

adrianslists (apparently) - 08:33am May 30, 2007 PST
via email

It appears that Freehand is not the only venerable drawing program
for the Mac that has come to the end of its life...

On May 18th, the Executive Vice President of ACD Systems announced,
deep in a forum thread on the ACD website, that there will be no
further releases of Canvas for the Macintosh:-

<http://forums.acdsystems.com/index.php?s=&showtopic=3845&view=findpost&p=13380>
<http://forums.acdsystems.com/index.php?showtopic=4065>

Canvas started on the Mac and in many ways is unique in it
combination of vector and bitmap tools (although less so now than in
its early days). Interesting, I think they beat most of the other
players to market with an OS X native version (I'm sure version 8
came out before 10.1 was released).

Deneba was acquired by ACD Systems several years ago and development
has languished ever since. Version 9 and version X (which was 9.5
until the beta cycle ended) limped out the door but have been
plagued by bugs, particularly on the Macintosh side. They promised an
announcement about an intel-native version in January 2006 but until
the forum post last week there was almost complete silence from the
company. They still haven't released any information outside of their
forums and continue to sell an extremely buggy end-of-life
application with no obvious warning to their customers.

The way ACD has treated Canvas (and Macintosh users) has left a lot
people very saddened and I'm sure many of them are angry as well -
skimming through the threads above will turn up some interesting
posts, including a couple from a Deneba employee who is extremely
upset (it appears most of the others have left long ago).

We've used Canvas for years here as our standard graphics package -
I've lost count of the number of figures I've produced for theses,
posters and papers. It has never been the most stable of applications
but it has worked very well for us. I'm not sure where we will look
now as there doesn't seem to be an obvious replacement. But the
number of serious bugs and the general poor performance on Intel-Macs
means we will need to do something.

One alternative would be to run the Windows version under Parallels
(or Fusion). This may be what ACD is expecting - or at the very least
using as justification for ceasing Mac-development. I wonder how many
other developers will come to the same conclusion.

I guess another alternative is Illustrator. Unfortunately, the
pricing available to us on Illustrator increased more than 150% with
the introduction of CS3 (pricing of the other modules increase by
only 20-30%). It could be coincidence but it may also demonstrate the
lack of serious competition in this market.

Regards,

Adrian Smith
Centenary Institute, Sydney, Australia