Alternatives to Adobe

[avram]

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.

Comments

[jl8e]

When I went looking for a drawing program, I ended up settling on Intaglio.

No idea how it compares to Adobe's stuff in features, but it was good enough for what I wanted. (A better, OS X-native MacDraw.)

[jcb.livejournal.com]

there really are a lot of killer linux alternatives that run fine though . . . especially if you have an intel-mac and you can boot into debian

[avram]

If they’re Linux alternatives, you ought to be able to compile them under MacOS X and run them with X11.

But I hate doing that. I’ll happily use Unix/Linux stuff for command-line or invisible back-end tools, but when a GUI pops up, I want it to be a Mac GUI, preferably Cocoa.