ACD Systems has (very unwisely, in my opinion) decided to no longer update Canvas for Mac OS X. Canvas has LONG been a powerful and versatile Mac graphics application, handling vector graphics, bitmapped graphics, and even light page layout. One of Canvas's great strengths was in technical illustration, offering extraordinary accuracy, strong interoperability with other Mac graphics and layout applications, and a fantastic feature set (powerful dimensioning and other CAD-type tools, for example).
Their retreat from the Mac marketplace is a huge opportunity for any Mac graphics application, but I think ConceptDraw has a unique opportunity here due to its already-strong technical drawing feature set.
My hope is that CS Odessa looks long and hard at Canvas X and brings many of Canvas's technical drawing capabilities to ConceptDraw Pro.
I see that you have moved our discussion here from Ars, DarlF2...
I just played with the demo, and definitely ConceptDraw looks like it can fill the Canvas niche. Some annoying workflow issues (like adding a vertex is a normal menu option and not a pop-up menu on control click) that I would have to change. But it seems serviceable.
However, the one thing ConceptDraw is noticeably missing is the ability to do some basic bitmap edditing of raster images. It appears it can import bitmaps, but not edit them. I don't want to have to move to Adobe CS, as Illustrator is not really geared to technical illustration, and Photoshop is overkill for what I want to do with bitmaps (and a separate program to boot). But for ConceptDraw to be a true Canvas replacement to me, I at least need to be able to do some bitmap editting -- like say the level available in Lemke's GraphicConverter.
Hi! Yes, when I saw that the CS Odessa developers were very responsive I thought that perhaps bringing up the Canvas issue here might be helpful. If it is, I'm planning to link to this post at Ars.
I do think that ConceptDraw has potential as a Canvas replacement with ConceptDraw 7 Pro, but only with technical illustration. Bitmap editing and simple page layout are almost certainly WAY to ambitious for anything less than a new major version. Hopefully CS Odessa will consider this for a future version, perhaps even as a new spinoff ConceptDraw (ConceptDraw 8 Studio?) product...
Interesting thought, also looking at the CD Reporter. There does seem to be a bit of a platform to get Page layout in there as well.
But as a Canvas X user, I am really missing the seamless integration of vector drawing (Illustrator-like in Adobe-speak) and bitmap-editing (Photoshop-like) without having to go from one app to the other.
The big challenge would be to keep it an intuitive application. If I were CS Odessa, I wouldn't go there.
But I really fear the day that Canvas X will no longer be compatible with OS X 10.5.x.......