Vector wars

“The Vector Wars” as we have started calling them have been raging for 29 years. They will, no doubt, continue to rage for years to come. The demise of FreeHand left a large hole in the market that despite Adobe’s efforts, Illustrator has not been able to fill. Though it should be mentioned that even today, in 2016, FreeHand is still available for purchase at Adobe.com and Adobe still provides technical and customer support, even if they are not updating the code (Note: FreeHand is not compatible with the most recent versions of Mac OS X). This is, we believe, to their credit and rather unprecedented in the software industry to continue to sell and provide support, if not updates for an application that was at end-of-life before Adobe acquired it and has been frozen for nine years.

Iconfinder on Affinity Designer (which I discovered because Edward Tufte was asking on Twitter about Affinity Photo) - as part of a comparison of AD, Adobe Illustrator, and Sketch.

A reader who has recently moved to Berlin came to dinner and asked why there was not much on the blog lately.  I tend to think "writers are fucked" has limited appeal as a recurring theme.

My Middle Eastern edition of CS Studio (from the days before Adobe moved to a subscription business model) has gone missing, and was last installed on a laptop that is dead, and if I were to find it I'm guessing it would not be compatible with the latest version of OS X.  The same is true of the version of Dreamweaver with which I cobbled together my website (which I can now update by wrangling with raw HTML in Textwrangler, which has, however, been rendered obsolete and replaced by a text editor that does not support my current version of OS X).

This is all stupid and boring. I gather Affinity Designer doesn't currently support RTL (right-to-left) text, so it's not the perfect replacement for my CS Studio ME.  It does support Japanese. It's available for €49, so it is, at least, affordable even for a writer who spent months fighting off eviction rather than finishing a book.  The review of Affinity Designer here.

Affinity Photo and Designer (available for Macs & Windows) here.