Deneba has announced a preview release of Canvas 8 for Mac OS X that serves as a shot across the bow of Adobeis lead in the graphics market. Canvas is a graphics development, illustration, and layout app, and the preview release of Canvas 8 for Mac OS X is a free download. From Deneba:
Deneba Software today announced the availability of a special public preview version of Canvas 8 Professional fully optimized for Apple Computeris new Mac OS X. This preview edition targets illustrators, graphic artists and business professionals who are early adopters of Mac OS X or are considering a transition to the new operating system. Now, for the first time, the OS X user community will be able to experience the award-winning power and features of the new Deneba Canvas 8.
The Mac OS X version of Canvas 8 contains hundreds of enhancements and advanced new features including: vector and raster Sequence recording, AppleScript(tm), ColorSync(tm), and QuickTime(tm) support. The new version also contains customizable Web Image Slicing and direct Flash export.
Denebais enthusiastic support for OS X should not surprise long-time Apple watchers. Fifteen years ago, the Miami-based software developer was one of the first companies to engineer and market products for the Macintosh platform. OS X is widely viewed by the technology industry as a significant improvement as it promises more stability and enhanced graphics capabilities.
Rob Crawford, Senior Software Engineer is leading the Canvas 8 / OS-X project. "Canvas 8is user interface has been optimized for Aqua, and has numerous new time saving features", he stated. "Also, developing Canvas 8 in a protected memory operating system like OS X, allowed us to develop a very robust product that can easily handle the largest graphic files."
Canvas 8 also contains an updated PDF(tm) export filter which supports full data stream compression, direct embedding of PostScript(R) and TrueType(tm) fonts, hypertext links, transitions and much more.
The preview release is available as a free download for users to try. The company says the final version will be released on October 1st, 2001. The final version will be a Carbonized app for Mac OS 9.x and Mac OS X. Deneba offers a tour of the apps feature set at its Web site.