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.

About Vectors

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.

Figure 1: One of the most useful VectorDesigner features converts a raster image (like the Backup program's icon at left) to a vector image (like the one at right).

How It Works

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.