New alternative to Illustrator is having a hard time.

This is just sad.
I still remember Freehand as the greatest vector editor I have ever tried.

http://www.stagestack.com/en_US/blog/blog-post/2013/01/09/an-open-letter-about-stagestack/

The site looks great and the videos shows potential. How come the low interest??

Wow you’re right, they seem know a thing or 2 about quality. Just googled the popular google phrase : illustrator alternative and it came up empty.

Did they spread the word? Which channels did they use? Maybe it’s a case of bad(no) publicity?

Alternatively, maybe people are just not interested in pledging 25€ when they can get some other free alternatives first? I’m guilty to this train of thought as well.

Well Twitter and Facebook I believe. But with very poor result… 233 something followers… but 41% of the project is done… Yet they are out of money… Its not an Open Source tool though so I stick with Inkscape but still… Freehand was nice!

PS this sounds interesting:
“At the end, we can see only one possibility and that is making the project OpenSource to give people back what we have so far. Of course, for us that’d mean to loose all money we’ve been investing the past two years but that’s the way it is. As we cannot fund the project this way, we’d need to find some volunteers first before opensourcing it.”

Since i got used to Inkscape it has completely replaced Illustrator for my needs.
Cross platform and free… :eyebrowlift:

I liked Freehand better than Illustrator back in the day. I’m pretty satisfied with Inkscape these days - but I’m not a big time vector user either.

Even so, hate to see the small guys like these fail. I wasn’t even aware of this one until now - maybe they should advertise it at logo design boards and things where vectorheads tend to hang out. Course, maybe they already have and there is legitimately low interest. :frowning:

You are absolutely right and I must admit I love Inkscape as well.
I would not substitute any proprietary program instead of it and when I do vector work I do it in inkscape.
I miss stroke on inside/outside of path, better performance with complex paths and I would love a reramp of the interface to make it more customizable. Apart from that, Inkscape does it for me. Its open and it saves SVG which is awesome for a web developer!
I just know a lot of graphical professionals have greater needs than I :slight_smile:

I find myself doing most graphic work in Inkscape rather than Photoshop just because Inkscape has such good option to export work as PDF with rasterized blur (at 300+ DPI) which works perfectly in Indesign documents and still save the original as a svg which you always can reopen and re-scale/work/adjust when needed.
And Inkscape svg logos and simple graphic elements usually imports and extrudes well in Blender :slight_smile:

I use Inkscape, and although I feel for the travails of the Stagestack people, the pragmatic side of me knows that “a labor of love” is often precisely that. If you’re not careful, you wind up pouring out “a large number of currency units’ worth of” professional development effort, only to be confronted with the fact that you are receiving no actual currency-units in return even though you ask.

Sad but true.

Is there anything we could do to at least give these people some more visiblity? Nothing pains me more than to see something waste away like that.

I tweeted and G+ed it out, but I don’t have many followers.

As they tagged their software at 400€ for a single license, they’re then aiming directly at the same market target than Adobe Illustrator.
And competing commercially with applications that has been already professionally proved is never an easy task.

This without even mentionning the fact that Adobe basically gave away publicly on the internet Illustrator CS2 for free, even if they say it wasn’t their intention.

So how about kickstarter, or other ways of crowdfunding?

I too am totally satisfied with Inkscape and I find it way easier and simpler than Illustrator. Never did anything with freehand though.

But putting this much effort into a software without having the people to use/pay for it is somehow a little naive. And you can’t blame people for not supporting your project, that’s somewhat selfish. The open letter is written in a moment of frustration and so he blames the community for not being more interested. He/they should rethink this statement.