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.

get me out of here

For 26-year-old Guillaume, the trade-off is all too easy to understand. In May 2016 he finished his graduate-school training in business law. A few months later, he decided he didn’t want to work in law after all; he wanted to play video games. Guillaume likes adventure games, which allow players to immerse themselves in fantastic and foreign worlds. During his studies, he could only spare a couple of hours each day for his habit. Now he can slip into his video-game worlds for five or six hours at a time. A law career would have meant more money. Yet it would also have meant much more time spent at law.

(Mutatis mutandis, this is the world-view of many writers. Except, did they but know it, they could probably drastically diminish their real-world exposure if they ditched writing and focused on video games.)

Terrific piece in the Economist's 1843 magazine, the whole thing here.

HT @TimHarford

Truer words

If you want to attract and keep developers, don’t emphasize ping-pong tables, lounges, fire pits and chocolate fountains. Give them private offices or let them work from home, because uninterrupted time to concentrate is the most important and scarcest commodity.

Joel Spolsky on Geekwire.  (Mutatis mutandis...)