DrawIt discontinued
A few days ago we decided to remove DrawIt from our website and to stop selling it. Here I want to explain the reasons for doing so.
For a long time we’ve had two drawing apps; DrawIt and Sketch. Both are vector-based and DrawIt added support for bitmap filters on top of that. This was a fundamental difference and made DrawIt a very powerful application – in theory.
In practice it meant that the app was significantly slower than Sketch and that text rendering was even worse than Photoshop’s. These two were the main reasons for developing Sketch; I wanted a fast light-weight vector drawing app with perfect text rendering.
Over time I’ve come to realise that having two drawing apps makes no sense. The fact that Adobe has Photoshop and Illustrator does not mean its a good idea for us to have the same. All I needed to add to Sketch were bitmap filters and DrawIt would be obsolete. Sketch doesn’t have this (yet?), but we have added a pixel preview in the last beta and we’re getting closer.
Instead of selling customers and app that I know won’t be updated anymore I decided to remove DrawIt from the website immediately. While I know there’s no good alternative yet in Sketch, it felt wrong to pretend that DrawIt was still a good purchase. I want to be proud of the apps I sell and this was no longer the case with DrawIt. It would go to far to explain the fundamental architectural flaws in DrawIt, but suffice to say the idea was a good but the implementation less so.
My goal at the moment is to add the last missing bits from DrawIt to Sketch. When that is done I’ll make sure a cross-upgrade is easy by making sure Sketch can better read DrawIt files and by giving DrawIt customers a cheap way to get their hands on Sketch. I will have more news on that once Sketch is ready for this.
I wanted to wait with this blog post until I had something more concrete to offer, but too many people have asked me personally about DrawIt and so I thought I would do better to explain it on my blog. If there are more questions, please make a comment or write to our support directly.
Thank you for listening
János Adelsberger
Can people who bought DrawIt download it again?
Pieter Omvlee
Good question. Yes, you can still download DrawIt here: http://www.bohemiancoding.com/download/drawit.zip
Ed Boal
Shame but also exciting – if you can integrate Drawit’s features such as pixel/bitmap and also all of the effects, I will buy this tomorrow. This is potentially a Fireworks killer.
Pieter Omvlee
That’s a good description of what we’re trying to do yes.
Iannis Maragakis
I use both Drawit and Sketchit and definitely I would like to see a fusion of both applications.
Web Walker Solutions
Wow, that’s exciting news. Any idea of when Sketch is going to get this update?? Would love to buy your app instead of Fireworks!!
Pieter Omvlee
Can’t say when unfortunately. I don’t know myself yet. We’re working on it and making good progress, but we want to make sure its well-polished before we release anything.
Ed Boal
So glad to hear that you have Fireworks-killing ambitions…I love Fireworks but simply cannot afford to upgrade (from MX 2004!). I am signing up for your updates and hope to receive news that Sketch/Drawit hybrid is ready to go!
Samo
Pieter, I was one of those silently wondering about DrawIt (and sometimes about Fontcase) and this blog posts clears up a lot. I gladly bought the apps and still support your endeavors, and I think a lot of your other customers do so too—and open communication like this helps us understand the situation a lot better, so I would encourage you to continue it. I know decisions like dropping a product are hard when you feel an obligation to your customers, but I also think we’re a forgiving bunch as long as you’re working to improve the products—so good luck with Sketch and hope you do well with it.
Torsten
I used DrawIt then and when, but always enjoyed it: Easy to use with large potential. In the last days I got a new Mac and want to install DrawIt on it. Just now I realize that this project has been stopped. That’s too sad for me, but I can understand your point.
ant
I have a trial version of DrawIt.
As you’ve stopped selling it – will my trial version work after the 30 days are finished?
ant
I already bought Sketch in the AppStore – just saying…
Pieter Omvlee
@ant, it will stop after 30 days, and there’s no stop that as we’re no longer selling or giving out license keys. In all ways Sketch is a much better app, so use that instead.
ant