tool experimentation
Aug. 13th, 2006 03:36 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
egypturnashSo I'm pondering tools. Looking for something with the comfortable vector nature of AI but with different visual strengths and weaknesses. Very very rough quick impressions.
Studio Artist - turns out to be designed entirely around painting from photographs, feh.
Inkscape - (0.44) It kinda loses me at the 'Please install X11 and restart Inkscape' dialogue I get when I try and launch it. It's already 68M, I don't want to install bloody XWindows, not when the screengrabs on the website include monstrosities like a dropdown for the layer list instead of a palette. Maybe later. Maybe not.
Lineform just won an Apple Design Award, but it's not doing it for me - it created friction pretty quickly when I tried to change the page size, and got a dialogue with nothing but dropdowns - I don't want to have to make a custom page size and put it in this giant list for every eccentrically-sized image! No global color swatches, and no promised features cool enough to make me abandon that major feature of my workflow.
Xara Xtreme - open-sourcing of a previously Windows-only vector tool with lots of effects; Mac version is just a vague hope at this point. I suspect it, too, will depend on installing XWindows.
Mostly, I'm just surveying what's out there that might fill the hole left by Microsoft eating up Expression, and turning it into a Win-only package called "Acrylic". I have the 3.3 release of Expression that MS made available for free download, but I worry about a future OS upgrade breaking it. Amazingly enough there's actually an update to the Mac version that fixes something 10.3.5 broke in it, though! And how well will it work once I get an Intel machine?
Expression is still the tool most likely to be used for a lot of work on Drowning City.
Studio Artist - turns out to be designed entirely around painting from photographs, feh.
Inkscape - (0.44) It kinda loses me at the 'Please install X11 and restart Inkscape' dialogue I get when I try and launch it. It's already 68M, I don't want to install bloody XWindows, not when the screengrabs on the website include monstrosities like a dropdown for the layer list instead of a palette. Maybe later. Maybe not.
Lineform just won an Apple Design Award, but it's not doing it for me - it created friction pretty quickly when I tried to change the page size, and got a dialogue with nothing but dropdowns - I don't want to have to make a custom page size and put it in this giant list for every eccentrically-sized image! No global color swatches, and no promised features cool enough to make me abandon that major feature of my workflow.
Xara Xtreme - open-sourcing of a previously Windows-only vector tool with lots of effects; Mac version is just a vague hope at this point. I suspect it, too, will depend on installing XWindows.
Mostly, I'm just surveying what's out there that might fill the hole left by Microsoft eating up Expression, and turning it into a Win-only package called "Acrylic". I have the 3.3 release of Expression that MS made available for free download, but I worry about a future OS upgrade breaking it. Amazingly enough there's actually an update to the Mac version that fixes something 10.3.5 broke in it, though! And how well will it work once I get an Intel machine?
Expression is still the tool most likely to be used for a lot of work on Drowning City.
no subject
Date: 2006-08-15 02:18 am (UTC)I have tried, unsuccessfully, to port a few things in the past. Mostly toys. Oh well. Maybe this can be my next thing to give up on!