The MacBook Air was cool, and so were many of Apple's other announcements. But like any Macworld Expo, the real gems of the conference were in the small booths and stalls where independent developers showed off their homegrown programs. My job was to search through these stalls looking for the coolest product of all. Unlike most years, I had a hard time choosing between two of my favorites.
The first was OmniFocus, an incredibly full-featured to-do list program that handles due dates, concurrent tasks, and data synchronization incredibly smoothly. The program costs $80, but people who own OmniOutliner Professional (a checklist manager that many people use for to-do lists already) can save $20. There's no single critical flaw with OmniFocus, but I ended up passing it up for my top spot due to the fact that even the best to-do list is still kind of, well, dull.
My choice for the coolest unheralded Macworld product of 2008? A new vector-drawing program by Tweakersoft named VectorDesigner.
In the graphics world, there are two different kinds of images. Some images are "raster," and are stored as rows and columns of pixels -- the sort of images you'd get from a digital camera, scanner, or screenshot, for example.
Other images are "vector," and are stored as mathematical formulas for the lines, colors, shapes, and gradients of the objects in the images. (More info on Wikipedia.)
As a result of this difference, vector images have a huge advantage: they never look pixilated when you zoom in on them. This is why vector images are the default for logos, clip art, and obsessive people. Historically, there have been a number of professional programs for dealing with vector graphics, including Adobe Illustrator and CorelDraw. VectorDesigner ($70, free 15-day demo available), as you might have guessed by its name, focuses heavily on vector graphics as well.
VectorDesigner has a number of shapes: rectangles, ovals, polygons, stars, paths, and text. Once you've placed these shapes, you can combine them by adding them to each other, subtracting a piece of one shape from another, or grouping two shapes temporarily so you can easily move them around together. (All of these tools are handily found in the toolbar.)
In addition, you can fill shapes you've created with colors, gradients, or existing images, and rearrange the paths of existing shapes to make them more or less smooth. Finally, you can use standard Mac OS X tools to control shadows, opacity, brightness, and so on.
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While these tools might seem pretty simple, they allow you to create very sophisticated images. The bike in Figure 2, for example, uses stars for the spokes and gears, a custom path for the seat and handlebars, and a series of rotated and added rectangles for the frame, and took less than 20 minutes to make.
Of course, creating images from scratch is the easy part; sometimes, you'll have to work with the improvised or incomplete work of someone else, or share your work with others. Fortunately, VectorDesigner can handle these tasks as well, easily importing standard vector (EPS) files and exporting to vector and raster formats (a useful feature if you'd like to convert your image for the web, for example). In addition, you can import any raster image and have VectorDesigner try to approximate it using vector shapes, thereby gaining the unlimited-resolution benefits of vector images without doing any drawing for yourself (Figure 1). (This feature is fairly primitive, however, so it helps to make your image grayscale and pump up the contrast to make it easier for VectorDesigner to trace the edges correctly.) All of these features are fairly intuitive, and any confusion is cleared up by the four short, helpful tutorial videos in the Help menu.
Most people who need to whip up a quick image for a newsletter, website, or printout fall back on what they're used to -- in most cases, a painting program. Practically speaking, though, it's often much better to do the work in a vector drawing program like VectorDesigner, since shapes are easier to manipulate long after you've created them, and the resulting files don't lose any of the resolution of your work. As a result, once you get over the very shallow learning curve, VectorDesigner may become your default program for quick designs, paying for itself many times over in saved time and clearer images.
Even if your primary goal isn't productivity, though, VectorDesigner allows you to make many professional-looking images more easily than other programs can. For example, VectorDesigner's text tool lets you place flowing text along any arbitrary path you've created -- a great way to make eye-catching logos. Plus, with a full selection of Quartz Composer filters, VectorDesigner lets you turn existing images into effects-laced spectacles in a way that older graphics programs can't.
Most of the features of VectorDesigner are available in higher-end vector drawing programs, but the $70 cost of VectorDesigner is hard to beat. Moreover, if you've never used a vector drawing program before, the simple features you'd end up using in a higher-end program aren't much different than the standard features in VectorDesigner -- and in VectorDesigner, they're easy to find.
Inevitably, though, VectorDesigner suffers many of the flaws of a version 1.0 release. Particularly annoying is the lack of common Mac OS X shortcuts: Option-dragging a shape doesn't duplicate it, dragging a color swatch to a shape doesn't automatically fill it in with that color, and there's no simple key combination for forcing an oval to become a circle or a rectangle to become a square.
For the most part, though, VectorDesigner is a competent, easy to use program that can introduce one of the most underutilized graphics styles to everyday users, and save lots of time and money in the process.
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