Illustration and technical drawing program Canvas no longer developed for the Mac. Vista version in Fall.

Canvas development will be Windows only, as Mac version dropped

The future of Canvas, originally published by Deneba, has been quietly repositioned by ACD Systems.

From 1987 onwards, Canvas had gained itself a loyal following amongst designers and technical illustrators. Never quite having the success of Illustrator or Freehand, Canvas always seemed to exist in a parallel design universe, with some designers simply deciding that it was the superior drawing application. Many also claimed that it offered specialist features lacking in the big guns from Adobe and Macromedia.

Now, after years of sporadic updates, few new features and a long period of non-development, the new developer ACD Systems (who took over the product form Deneba in 2003), has announced on its forums that they will no longer be developing Canvas for the Macintosh platform.

The announcement has left Macintosh users of the program with few options. They can either stick with an increasingly outdated program, with no development future or bug-fixes, convert to Windows, or find a way to transfer their files over to one of the Adobe CS3 graphics programs.

According to the announcement by ACD, there will apparently be a new version of Canvas certified for Windows Vista, in early Fall 2007. However, there were no details as to whether this will offer any new features, or if it is simply a Vista compatibility update.

ACD announcement

21 May 2007

Other Drawing and graphics related news

• Freehand discontinued
• Corel Painter X

Illustration and graphics discussion topics

• Adobe Illustrator Help
• Using Corel Draw
• Corel Draw or Adobe, Which is best?
• Anyone use CorelDraw
• Software for making bar charts