A long time ago (1993) , in a place far, far away (San Diego, California) there lived a small company called FutureWave Software. They produced a software program named SmartSketch a vector-based drawing program and at one time the number one drawing program on the Macintosh in Japan.
SmartSketch had all kinds of "friendly" features, very different from the dominant drawing program of the day, Adobe Illustrator.
In 1995 they decided to add animation to vector drawing and released FutureSplash Animator, a program for creating animations on the web. Soon after, Macromedia acquired FutureWave and in a victory for the Society of Short Syllabic Words changed the name to Flash.
Macromedia however didn't release SmartSketch under the Macromedia banner, they had already acquired Freehand, another vector-based drawing program which competed with Illustrator and saw no need to muddy the market further... but don't despair, SmartSketch still lives!
Even though Macromedia, and now Adobe, have tweaked it, the guts of the drawing program in Flash today is still essentially SmartSketch. If you've used the drawing program in Flash you know what I mean: the" intelligence" behind the pencil tool options: "straighten", "smooth" and "ink"; the "knocking out" and joining together of graphics, the "natural drawing" tools, that's all from SmartSketch now playing nicely and in the same family as the program it once tried to rebel against, Illustrator.
People coming to Flash with no Illustrator experience enjoy working with it once they get the hang of it; Illustrator users may complain a bit, but additions to the Flash drawing program, the Pen tool, for instance, make Illustrator user's feel a bit more at home, still it's different enough to be a bit of a pain for hard core Illustrator power users and certainly it's not as powerful.
Illustrator user may want to skip it: these days with better integration between Flash CS3 and Illustrator CS3, there's less need to use the drawing program in Flash, just create in Illustrator and import into Flash.
More on that some other time.
If you're not an Illustrator aficionado yet you may just want to stick with SmartSketch, otherwise known as the drawing program inside of Flash.
10 comments:
i was just starting up Flash 8 and noticed that the splash window had created a button on my windows taskbar with the title "SmartSketch". it definitely still lives inside and even looks as though its trying to jump out!
Yea i know. The reason I found this is because I saw that and googled it. It's pretty cool. But I wonder if that was on purpose or an accident overlooked...
SmartSketch was the first vector drawing program that I had ever used. I saw it demonstrated on an old PBS show called Computer Chronicles. I bought it for $25. Over the years I have followed its various incarnations in Flash, and it remains my number one scientific drawing program. My favorite feature is the way it paint fills like a raster program. Today, I make drawing in Flash, export them as WMFs or PDFs to import into Illustrator for final tweeking (often replacing a fill witha pattern).
Is the SmartSketch functionality (i.e., drawing multiple shapes and being able to select and edit parts of the shapes) accessible from ActionScript? Is it possible to write ActionScript to draw this kind of arrangement of shapes?
Thanks!
-pd
There are Actionscript methods that allow you to "draw" with Actionscript, though I wouldn't characterize them as SmartSketch shapes just basic vectors, and the type of drawing you'd typically do with Actionscript would be fairly basic. The "Smart Sketchy" features are not generally accessible with Actionscript.
Thanks. It's too bad, because the SmartSketch drawing model is so unique and powerful, it would be great to be able to use it programmatically.
I have used Smartsketch for years copying it from computer to computer since the installation disks are gone. Now it won't run in Windows 7 and I am heartbroken. It starts ok but crashes as soon as you try to save. Where can I get an installation disk?? Help!
I still have my copy of SmartSkech and want to use it but cannot on my Win7 or Vista. Going to try to find an old XP to run it on.
Finding an older computer running XP might be the best bet to keep Smart Sketch alive and running, or better yet, buy Flash Professional and you'll still find many of the Smart Sketch feathers thriving. The official term for many of those original SmartSketch features found in Flash is "Merge Drawing" mode and it is the default drawing mode in Flash.
My old version of SmartSkech still works on Windows 7 :)
I have had to get a few new .dlls over the years but all the core files are from 1995.
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