I have begun a perverse new project which I call Billustrator, a simple drawing program with a familiar interface:
It is written in Java, and thus runs on Mac OS X and Linux as well as Windows. It will be small and lightweight, so that users can do simple editing quickly. The architecture is extensible by design, and so it is not limited by its own assumptions. I think it would be keen to be able to embed it into web pages as an applet, and thus enhance the graphic capabilities of this 'Web 2.0' nonsense. [Along the lines of the (e:strip) chalkboard, only more so.]
(e:dragonlady7) thought I was cracked, until this afternoon when she said she needed to crop & scale an image and had to resort to Photoshop. I guarantee that Billustrator could have had the job done before Photoshop had even finished launching.
The main UI is nearly done, and all the commands and tools are stubbed out. Even the builtins are implemented as plugins, so the plugin architecture is coming along as well and should end up very robust. More details [or not] as they become available [or don't].
- Z
Sounds like a cool project! It would be neat to have this as a plugin on estrip.org.
carolinian, have you tried using the Gimp with the X11 program in Mac OS X? It's a really cool open-source image editor that I use all the time on Linux.
Actually it wasn't so much that I needed to crop and scale something (which I can do in iPhoto, but that also takes about eight years to load, now that I have over ten thousand photos in it... Sigh), but that I needed to draw a quick diagram of something to explain a point. More and more I need to draw quick diagrams, and less and less do I have time to crank out Photoshop for it.
Though, as I can't find my tablet or my mouse, it's kind of almost a moot point. I don't know how well I can doodle with a touchpad.
Ordinarily, I'd say you were off-your rocker.
But considering that there's really no simple paint application that comes with OSX, it's perfectly understandable. It's kinda weird that you get lots of software for ripping and editing MP3's from iLife, but the second you need to doodle something, you have to buy an $800 program. I've been using JDraw for several years for such doodles; you may be able to harvest some useful Java code from that.
Of course, you will need to add Bonjour and Flickr support for added geek points. ;)