Yes, AltSys licensed FreeHand to Aldus (publishers of PageMaker), but my recollection is that when Adobe swallowed Aldus, Adobe intended to continue offering FreeHand but their internal politics eventually smothered it. They wouldn’t relinquish the rights, which is how FreeHand disappeared early on and PageMaker ended up as a classic competitor to MS Publisher on Windows platforms.
I believe you’re talking about PanoramaX. I bought some credits about 15 months ago, and it’s basically if you use it during a given month you get charged for the month. Otherwise the license is dormant. I think it is a different animal from an Adobe subscription, which runs whether or not you are actually using the software.
In general I’ve used many of those same packages, enough so that I’ve forgotten many of the details now!
Yes. Relentless focus on corporate “fleets” of computers and how they can become profit engines for large developers has nearly crushed the small user market. But I’d suggest that if you are a TidBITs member (and you should be!), take a look at the benefits list. There are many smaller developers offering useful and affordable products on that list, and they offer discounts for TidBITs members.
Doing just that, checking out the discounts given TidBits members. I read TidBits often back long ago when I managed 8 Macs. But then my scientific/engineering career took off for two decades, started a small company to commercialize tech two of us developed and tested working for the Air Force and wanted world wide but only about 10 customers. Spent 3 winters in Northern Norway (island off Tromso). Retired now and reading TidBits again. I do remember a spreadsheet program called Full Impact that was by far better than Excel in many ways (ask and I WILL list). It was by Ashton-Tate. But Borland bought them out to get dBase, and Full Impact was shelved and not sold to many that wanted it, including the main author. I did get the Affinity suit, and have posted some ‘bugs’ I’ve experienced on their forums. Did a group of disgusted Adobe engineers leave and start it? Affinity Design seems to have many of the neat/useful CAD aspects of Canvas.
Island off Tromso… ooh, that’s cold. I have a pal in Tromso, long on my wish list, as is Svalbard.
Serif impress, they have worked steadily and constantly improving the suite. They’re based in the UK and were formed back in the day, late Eighties. I think they were Windows originally. The Designer tool is new to me, the other two, Photo and Publisher being more akin to my work. I have many image editors and Photo is not my go to but I do value having it as an alternative to Photoshop. I have dropped InDesign almost completely for Publisher.
I heard an interesting categorisation of cameras recently, on the BH Photography podcast, while a particular body was referred to as an entry-level camera, it also could be termed an exit-level camera. Once the professional life is done, no need to carry the best around, they are frequently the biggest and heaviest.
I’ve been meaning to download the Affinity for vector (to replace Illustrator), but last week I was asked to quickly create an ad with pictures and text. I used to sell computer systems and was in user groups in the 80s and 90s, and remember those oh-so-magical days of placing text in Pagemaker and having it just flow around photos.
Illustrator wasn’t designed for this but it’s what I’m most familiar with these days. So I gave it a try, figuring I could work in blocks but still wasn’t happy with text paragraphs, or lack thereof, so I quickly downloaded Affinity Publisher. Not bad! It’s more Illustrator-like than I expected despite it not being the design program.
Two things I noticed - I could never get distribute objects to work correctly, not even close. And when I exported to a PDF for pre-press, I was able to open in Illustrator, it did not convert to curves (which I what I wanted), but all my text blocks became single lines instead of paragraphs (probably an Illy thing).
I will eventually download Design and give it a shot!
The thing I really like about the suite is that each can assume the “persona” of the other two apps. Publisher adopts Design or Photo personas directly. Designer can adopt Pixel editing or Export personas. Photo has a set of personas related to the kind of artwork you’re doing, which I think does not relate directly to the other apps.
You end up seeing sets of tools that provide a subset of abilities from the other two apps. That might be helpful in the end.
I see what you’re seeing as far as distribution (which Publisher calls “spacing”). I experimented with rectangular objects, and if the objects are identical, Publisher will space them identically. If they are different sizes, it appears to be spacing them proportionally, somehow. There are a few things like this that Serif might consider to be features rather than bugs, and if this is how they’re thinking about it, it would take considerable user pressure to get them to change their thinking. If you want equidistant white space between all the objects, you’re not going to get that with the built-in routine, I fear.
Annddd…right after I published my first reply, it hit me what’s going on.
Just like Illustrator and other drawing programs, you can set a point of origin for transforms on individual objects. So if you want equidistant spacing, you need to set the point of origin as “center of the object.”
The upper row still doesn’t align with the lower row, but it shouldn’t. The objects in the upper row now have equal amounts of white space between them after applying the horizontal spacing transform.
When you select a group, this shows up in the Toolbar:
Illustrator has a feature called “Distribute Objects” and I was thinking that because I had a photo box with a couple of text boxes, that it didn’t understand it. But I think you proved that theory wrong with your boxes. What I would normally do is place the top and bottom images exactly where I want them, then I want the middle image(s) equidistant between them. Ideally this would give identical white space between objects. BTW I am on CS6 so I’m not sure if that has changed over the years.
I just saw your second email and I’ll have to try that. It’s pretty seamless in Illy, I’m either doing a vertical or horizontal distribute.
Thanks to this thread, I changed my license from Photo only to a universal version. I’ve been watching my wife struggle with her Christmas letter using Pages, which didn’t go any better than it used to do with Word. Now I’ve slipped a copy of Publisher 2 onto her MBA so that in future she should find the process a little less insane.
I hardly ever use my Canon 5D (first affordable full frame sensor, doesn’t do video) any more, though that coupled with a 100 - 400 zoom with sun shade attached is impressive in crowds. I recently got a Panasonic point and shoot size but with all the manual adjustments available with a Leica lens is my go to now. Only downside is although it has a built in mini flash (horrible for group shots) it has no hot shoe or flash socket for a separate flash, so I built a unit to hold the camera and separate flash, with the flash fired by it coupled to a photo diode pointed at the mini flash.
Not really. Being surrounded by ocean it hardly ever got below 32 F. Now the blowing dry powdery snow is a different story. We had a 1 mile dirt road to travel to the observatory we worked at. They had a farm tractor with snowblowers on front and back, and cleared the road in the morning, evening, and when needed during the day. But if we decided to call it a night say at 7 am, before the morning tractor run, the road would be impassable, with 4 foot drifts, that dry snow blew constantly. We often just parked 1/2 up the mountain, often crawling on all fours (each limb sinks less that way) up the snow covered road to the top, such is the life of a scientist.
P.S. The northern lights (the reason for our research, to measure remotely the changes in the magnetic field at 90Km during them) were fantastic.
That sounds great @phillman5 I would love to see that.
The only remote observatory I’ve visited was a week long stay at Paranal, the ESO in Chile, high in the Atacama desert in Chile. Quite something, a lifetime experience. The nights were cold but perfectly clear, the southern skies startlingly different.
I recently upgraded to v2 of all the Affinity apps too, and am liking them so far. Still have my CC subscription though, as I haven’t yet found a suitable replacement for Lightroom.
I was a long-time Illustrator user, and have been stumped in my attempts to do a lot of the same things in Designer. I used ‘Illy’ to design leaded glass windows and 3D objects I made out of leaded glass, as well as to do fairly basic graphic design projects. The basic shape tools and how they work in Designer are so different from Illy that I get lost trying to do pretty basic stuff.
Do any of you know of any tutorials that compare how things are done in Illy with how to do the same things in Designer?
The excuse Adobe offers is that Type 1 fonts are not supported by some web browsers. IMHO, the reality is that they want to sell more fonts and subscriptions.
I just got rid of my last portions of CC. If you go to Activity Monitor, especially after a reboot, there are several Adobe processes, like about 8 - 10. Some do quit after they do their ‘thing’, but some take minutes, slowing down your boot process, as they call home and check with Adobe servers. I used the ‘delete’ apps to delete most stuff, but still there were a few processes hanging round, most in Library/Application Support/Adobe The last one, AdobeGCClient, checks integrity of Adobe apps, mostly CC apps, and right now after some quick research, Acrobat DC, might need it to run, I am not sure. I am keeping Acrobat DC around to sign PDFs electronically. From my research AdobeGCClient runs at boot. So I renamed the folder and the app by appending an X to the end. So now it is not loaded at boot. I am leaving the Adobe Updater process. But this sweep eliminated 8 - 10 Adobe processes from running all the time.
