Safe from the Losing Fight

I just realized I hadn’t posted to my blog in a few months. The lack of content has been caused both me just being busy, and me being on Twitter.

If you would like to follow me, I’m macgeek02. I’ll update my contact page to contain my handle as well.

I still definitely have plans for more graphics articles, it will just take me a while to write and post them.

It has come to my attention that Scott Anguish has made the decision to pull Stepwise offline. You can read all the details at Stepwise, but the basic gist of it is, someone took some of Scott’s articles, republished them without permission, and misrepresented Scott’s feelings about the direction of Mac OS X.

Although I’m not a lawyer and can’t offer any legal advice or support, I can do something. First, I can express my displeasure at someone who claims to be part of the Mac developer community treating Stepwise, or any other developer for that matter, in this manner. I can ask Rixstep to remove the copyrighted material. Finally, I can inform the audience of this blog about what’s going on.

Scott, via Stepwise, has been instrumental in my journey with Mac OS X programming. When I was first getting acquainted with Cocoa in the OS X Beta days, I often found myself over at Stepwise, checking out the tutorials. When I began writing tutorials on this blog, Scott would link to some of them. I often used Stepwise as a barometer as to how relevant my posts were.

I hope that Rixstep will relent, and remove the offending material. It would be best for the Mac developer community if Stepwise came back.

It feels very strange to have a ring on my finger, since I don’t normally wear any jewelry at all, including a watch. But I think it suits me well.

The ceremony went quite well (it went quicker than we thought it would, no flubs or people passing out), and Elaine was absolutely stunning.

A couple of the more humorous moments:

• One of my groomsmen: “Leopard goes on sale on Friday… is the wedding rehearsal still on?”, “I could be experiencing 300 new features right now…”, etc
• My best man’s tux pants being about 8 inches too short, leading to many Futurama references, especially Zap’s “Have the boy lay out my formal shorts.”

Well, those are a few of the more geeky ones.

Thanks to all who came and/or sent gifts, especially from Texas and Tennessee. If I can’t visit home, it’s nice when it comes to visit me.

And now, on to Tahiti. I’ll be thinking of you when I’m lying on a beach in the south Pacific. Honest.

I’m calling a time out so I can go get married.

I was hoping to post another graphics article before the big day, but I’ve come to the conclusion that that’s simply not going to happen. I know what I want to write about next, and have quite a bit of code going in that direction, but it’s not quite ready yet. It’ll happen, just a lot later than I planned.

Finding time is further complicated by the fact that after the wedding, we have our honeymoon, then we visit my side of the family for about a week (since they’re on the other side of the country, and most can’t make it to the actual wedding). The end result is that I’m not going to be home for almost a month. Makes it hard to write up articles.

Anyway, I haven’t abandoned the blog, and more graphics articles are coming, it’ll just be a while.

Apparently, it’s official now: FreeHand is dead. (via Daring Fireball)

I knew it was dead back in 2003 when they laid off everyone (save a couple of people) on the core FreeHand team. They kept it alive for a while to do an updater with the few remaining people, then transitioned it off to India.

The somewhat odd thing was that the team knew FreeHand MX was going to be their last release. I remember a certain FreeHand engineer’s response to the question “why are you trying to cram so many features into this release?” as being “Because they’re not going to let us do another.” And to their credit, FreeHand MX was a return to their roots: vector based graphics program for print. At least from this observer’s perspective, it felt like FreeHand MX was the best FreeHand version in a while.

I’ve always had a soft spot for FreeHand, as I suspected most of my fellow Fireworks-ers did. After all, FreeHand and Fireworks were the only shipping products that were developed in the Texas office. Furthermore, Fireworks had been started by engineers from the FreeHand team.

Being so close in proximity, Fireworks and FreeHand often “borrowed” engineers from each other. When Fireworks was about to ship, we’d steal a couple of their engineers to help fix bugs. Conversely, FreeHand borrowed engineers from us, the Fireworks team, if they ever got behind. During the FreeHand MX cycle, I had the pleasure of spending about three months working on FreeHand, fixing bugs and bringing it up to par with the “MX” branding.

The most disappointing thing about FreeHand was Macromedia never let it live up to its full potential. After FreeHand fell behind Illustrator in market share, they pretty much ceded it. They had Dreamweaver and Flash, which were now their big money makers, and pretty much lost all interest in the print world. They kept trying to force FreeHand to be Flash, or to at least remake FreeHand for the web, instead of focusing on what FreeHand did best (print), and capturing that market.

Anyway, I digress. I’ve known for a few years that it was a dead product, but I’m still saddened to see that its official now.

P.S. Please note that FreeHand is the only product name with intercaps. i.e. Note that the F and H are capitalized in FreeHand, while in Dreamweaver and Fireworks, only the first letters are. This was a big pet peeve of the FreeHand team.

P.P.S As a technical aside, most versions of FreeHand (save the most recent ones) were written in a home grown language, that was humorously, and appropriately, called OOPS (Object Oriented Programming System). It was basically a preprocessor that generated C code that was then compiled to machine code.