Alternatives to Adobe

Mac users (and anyone interested in graphics) might want to check out this post, and its comments, on Khoi Vihn’s Subtraction blog.

He starts with the news that former Adobe employee Andrei Herasimchuk has published an open letter to Adobe co-founder John Warnock, calling for Adobe to open-source a handful of important core fonts to allow them to become ubiquitous, improving the overall design of the web.

That’s interesting outside of the Mac community, but Vinh goes on to gripe about the quality of Adobe’s Creative Suite software in recent versions, and offers up a new vector drawing program, Lineform, that does about 90% of what Adobe Illustrator does, is small, fast, and elegantly designed, and only costs $80.

Down in the comments, someone brings up Pixel, a similar cheap competitor to Photoshop. And someone else brings up freeware Seashore (a Cocoa port of the GIMP), and there’s some mention of Linux and Windows software in there too, but as a Mac user, I want something with an intelligently-designed interface that uses native widgets and supports the various conveniences I’ve gotten used to in Cocoa apps.