GRAVIT goes opensource

[FFH Mark]

Big News from Quasado...

Gravit made Open Source
You might already have heard about Gravit, the versatile Design Tool for Mac, Windows, Chrome OS and the Web as it went quite viral the past couple of weeks and was already called the successor to Fireworks and Freehand by known blogs and magazines. If you haven’t heard about it yet, make sure to hop to our Website and get in touch with the current Beta.

We’ve been developing on Gravit since roughly about two years and spent roughly about $270.000 into it’s development. It has been a major project, one I personally was really excited about because Gravit is completely written in HTML5, CSS3 and JS — nothing more. It has started out as an experiment to see how far one may go with browser technology and it turned out to be so far the we’ve not even hit the edge of any limitation.

Gravit has been shaped towards former Macromedia (now Adobe) Fireworks and Freehand, two highly innovative products shamelessly dropped by Adobe to promote their own products only after having bought Macromedia.

We’ve always thought the designer community should have a versatile tool they can rely on, something versatile, powerful and yet easy to handle as Fireworks and Freehand, not something bloated like most Adobe Products (Editor’s Note — This is no Adobe bashing, just something our designers discovered by themselves over the years).

And here we are. Gravit is in it’s final stage, reaching Release Candidate Status in about a week or two and planned to be released end of September. It is the tool we’ve always wanted even though we know there’s still a lot of work to do to make it even better but hey, we’re at version 0.9 so be patient with us.

After all, however, we’ve thought about a way to offer a secure, reliable tool for designers that would last (hopefully) for a very long time and steadily improve. To reach that goal however, we think that millions of smart JS- and HTML5-Geniuses out there might doing even better than we can do so we’ve finally decided to Open Source Gravit. We think that we’ve built a great platform for everyone to continue working and developing on, something Designers can use from day one and we’re looking into a really bright future considering all those smart developers out there that might improve and shape Gravit even more — To be the one and only vector/bitmap design tool we’ve always wanted.

We will actively develop and manage the Project as we did until now. Gravit is the core product of our company’s strategy and we’re eager to help in evolving it. We’re currently working on commercial projects around Gravit like an innovative project solution for designers and various addons as well as enterprises can commercially license the Gravit Code to use it in their own products without Open-Sourcing it.

Great times ahead for all of us and the best thing is that really everyone can (and should, hint! hint!) get involved with this great project. Be it designers to improve the design, typography or icons of the app or be it UX guys improving user experience or last but never be least — developers helping in sharpening every edge, fixing bugs and creating new features we’ve never thought about it.

If you have questions while staying tuned until end of September then reach out to us either via Twitter or Facebook. We’re looking forward to hear from you!