NOW HAVING SAID ALL THAT I no longer do the majority of my photo editing in Canvas it is a little slow by modern standards.
I have books on Lightning Source outputted to PDF from Canvas. About the only bug lft is in printing, but I get around that by printing PDF. Canvas 8, a much more complex program than Adobe Illustrator, nevertheless made it to OS X 18 months before Adobe managed to get Illustrator there.Ĭanvas X appeared buggy - but if you had kept with it, you would have found that when Apple finally got to X.6.8 - when it had cleared up all the bugs it had intorduced into X against its own rules in other words - nearly every bug in Canvas X disappeared! They were not Canvas X bugs after all, they were Apple OS X bugs which showed up in Canvas because Canvas was actually written to the OS X rules. Fingers are crossed.Ĭanvas 8 and X were remarkable.
I've downloaded the trial and hope that this new version is at least as powerful as Canvas 3.5.2 and has a better interface and reliability than Canvas 8 and Canvas X.
I'll stick with the other apps I have.įor those interested, ACD finally released the long-promised Mac update to Canvas. Although it's got some really nice capabilities, their implementation is buggy and doesn't work for me.Īfter taking more than a year to finally release it (after a long Mac hiatus), I'm stunned that all ACD could come out with was this, especially after having messed up so badly with Canvas Support on the Mac after they first bought Deneba Systems. I don't find this program anywhere near ready for prime time for anything other than basic work. Lots of really nice tools and ideas, but so-so implementation. Maybe ACD's thought things through, but it's not reflected in their UI, preferences, or anywhere else I could find. To change, all I could find to do was work on each dimension which was a total pain. The default picks Geneva, 2 decimals, and no appended units. The apparently isn't a way to change the default dimension display. Fly-out window positions aren't remembered.
For drawings, dimensional and other precision is apparently limited to 2 decimals at least I couldn't find a way to increase it and I prefer to work with 4 places and round to 3. Palette locations on secondary monitors aren't remembered if you close and reopen the palette during a session, let alone across app launches. Preferences aren't saved across app launches. If the trial is supposed to give us a serious insight into the program's licensed capabilities, then the latter are sorely lacking. I've been poking around CanvasDraw a bit and finally just chucked it. But iDraw seems like it gives Canvas Draw a run for it's money in this regard. The new version isn't quite as capable for longer text, but still pretty decent. And it had such good text tools that I actually produced newsletters with it. What worked for Canvas for me in the past was its lightweight kinda CAD stuff it was really handy to have dimensioning stuff and tools like that without having to dive into a dedicated CAD application.
Not great, as it happens, but it looks like even the PC version might not be as nice as dedicated alternatives. I do have the demo, but I kinda got lost in ACD's web site in trying to figure out how well it works with mapping. I converted all my Canvas stuff years ago I couldn't even find any relics to test. Still, the fact that they let me hang to dry for so many years is really annoying. Some strange things happening to fonts though. I am testing the newly released Canvas Draw and it seems to read my old files reasonably well. I converted many of my canvas docs to illustrator, but that does not work so well. I was a very enthusiastic user of Canvas in the past, and felt very disappointed when they stopped developing for mac.