FreeHand and Illustrator hark back to the '80s and currently have big, bloated codebases. These companies may have to expend a great effort to move their legacy codebase and old UI to the new paradigms of Mac OS X. For old-time professional designers who don't want to learn new products, those applications will continue to be fine. However, the iMac and iBook will continue to bring a whole new class of users to the Macintosh, who will be thrilled with the ease of use and the ability to unleash creativity with our design applications, without the steep learning curve of traditional drawing packages. Plus, Create offers direct to Web publishing and other features not commonly found in its competitors. Finally, since Stone Design doesn't have the huge corporate overhead of the established software companies, we can offer a very attractive pricing model.
Cocoa is a high-level framework that has many benefits for the developer.
As an example, from the TextView we get no 32K limit, automatic Unicode support, kerning, ligatures, justification, et cetera. If traditional Mac developers just shove a quick carbonization onto a legacy codebase, their bloated applications will look like Aqua applications, but won't provide the deep integration of data sharing that true Cocoa applications inherently have, nor take advantage of the object model. Recently, it was announced that you'll be a part of the Darwin team. I'll be providing spiritual guidance. I encourage all developers who believe in open source to take a look at Darwin, and for all of us to find the niche where we can best serve the community.