Drawit Giveaway: 2 Licenses Up for Grabs

DrawIt is great. Tried it a couple of days ago and was very pleasantly surprised by the way things work in there. I esp. liked the idea that you basically have an object and then stack attributes/effects on top of it. It helped me quite a lot since I’m not really a graphic designer or something like that and often struggle with some of the techniques in this department.

As a feature request I’d really like to see for instance SVG support for import and export (where possible). Another great feature for me are the indicators when you’re moving an object within the image. In most editors it’s somehow a pain to position something right in the center of an image. Here, the indicators help you a great deal to position an object in the center, on the edges of the image or right next to another object. Very nice

DrawIt would be very useful for me when it comes to draw icons and other graphics for my websites and applications.

A question, though: On the features page it is written, that the filters are basically CoreImage filters. Does this mean that you can also add new filters to DrawIt?

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Very interesting tool. I find it almost useful to me, but missing one main feature. In order to use it I would really need a good slicing tool while exporting (I guess many people do).

I mainly do the web jobs, and vector graphics applications in this field are pretty much non exsistent (Fireworks aside), and there sure is a space for sleek and simple app like DrawIt.

Just add slicing and enhance a bit exporting functionality and this app will have whole new market at disposal.

That aside I like the way it works, the interface,the simplicity and the full screen option.

I really think you should target this thing a liitle more in the web developers direction :))

Great work none the less :)).

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This is definitely a great way to draw…
I’m really amazed how things work with this app.
No hidden windows for options. All is accessible very fast.

The CoreImage Effect-IDea is very nice. One can add its own effects to it…
Good idea.

More file formats would be nice.

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I like the three paned approach to image editing and creation. I also like the mac-like interface, it is much better than some other graphics programs that are on the market now. I don’t like the complexity of some vector editors, this program seems to take the best tools of other applications and merges these abilities with a simplistic interface and mac-appeal. Very nice.

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I wrote my review last night and am torn between which to buy… and very nice of Laurent to drop by and leave a comment… Would i like a free licence for it? God yeah. Going to Paris and Barcelona in a week, am saving every $ I can.

Very impressive work. But one suggestion. The watermark is too loud and discouraging or so I think.

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Have you ever had a program that you didn’t really need just cause it did a few things you wanted?

Illustrator is like that. Photoshop is like that. At least to me they are.

Great big programs to do the simple little jobs that I need to do.

I am slowly giving up on Office and moving to iWork.

I am starting to use iLife more and more.

I need 2 things now. A good illustration program and a good RAW photo editor.

Maybe DrawIt can fill the niche of the Illustrator replacement for me?

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I like the interface which really match Apple apps

I just got Pixelmator from MacHeist, after playing around a bit I decided I prefer something ‘classic’ like this

It could use mode approach (user can select simple, ,medium, pro). Simple will give you the most used function, and pro will reveal the most powerful function

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Really a great app. Very accessible and quick.
Would like some more file formats but about the only downfall.

Love it.

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Seems like an integrated Photoshop replacement. I like the fact that everything is in a window similar to Apple’s iLife. The price is awesome and the feature list is impressive. I would love to own this and use this side by side with my current application. Hey, this may be an inexpensive replacement!

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Drawit is a brilliant app, and i applaude the dev work that went into it, but i would like so see more extensive “vector” graphics functionality, to produce stuff that never, ever, ever gets low resolution, from iphone to giant 100inch projector, vector graphics all the way.

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I like Drawit aswell but vector suport isent that strong ithink. Have you looked at VectorDesigner ?..this one looks very promising, better vector support, and a very nice interface.

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I tried DrawIt the other day, and I loved the interface. I tried it again today, thanks to the excellent trial system. More applications should have watermarks instead of time limitations! To make people used the time system happy, it’d be great if the watermark only appeared after thirty days, but there might be some economic principle I’m blind to that would prevent that from being profitable.

As a means of testing it, I imported six alpha-transparent photos and tried rotating, arranging and resizing them to make a nice header for a blog nobody’s heard of. Unfortunately, on my Tiger MacBook with 2 GHz and 2 GB, the task was really slow and buggy. Rotations weren’t consistently updated in realtime, sometimes I wasn’t able to grab handles (clicks would hit the whatever layer was underneath), and sometimes things would resize themselves or disappear outright for no apparent reason. Overall, it would be great if treating bitmaps like vectors was as fast and consistent as treating vectors like vectors. (The problem might actually be that I’m using Tiger rather than Leopard?)

Other things which would be nice:

• There’s an option to open the last saved document when DrawIt launches. This is nice! But sometimes I want to make a quick edit to an image, and I drag it into the Dock. I don’t usually want the last saved image to open when I do this.

• I think the problem of the “add effect” button A) not doing anything and B) resulting in a hierarchical list at the top of my screen, rather than the bottom, can be attributed to my usage of Tiger.

• It’d be great if either it were made more obvious that I’m in bitmap editing mode (probably by adding “BITMAP EDITING MODE:” to the beginning of the bar underneath the toolbar), or if I could exit the mode by selecting a command unrelated to the mode. It confused me that some options were greyed out sometimes for a reason I couldn’t discern.

• This might be the result of my usage of Tiger, but when I use the Magic Wand tool on a solid color and hit Delete, it deletes all but a one-pixel line on the upper edge of my selection.

• I just tried the Feedback… option under the DrawIt menu, so I just realized that the resulting web page is blank.

• I have only ever seen two image editing applications that allow realtime, visual canvas resizing. The first is MS Paint. The second is Acorn. It’d be nice if there were a third! The way I see this working is if instead of a sheet appearing, a floating window would, and the entire image would get handles to grab. Or the sheet could stay, but changing values would result in the image updating in real-time.
Speaking of changing the values in the sheet, for me, pressing the up and down arrows reverts the values in the boxes to zero.

• Why does it look like this even when I’m editing an image that doesn’t have the brown thing in it? http://img511.imageshack.us/img511/560/screenshot8ha3.png

• It should be more clear that FAVORITES refers to EFFECTS (by making it visually hierarchical, or by renaming it to FAVORITE EFFECTS). The usage of the buttons below FAVORITES should be more ovious, probably by adding tooltips or by changing the icons. Or by adding Effects icons to the toolbar, and making smaller versions of those icons for the bottom bar.

• Why is the heart button blue, but not the button below ATTRIBUTES? Speaking of that button, it’s also unintuitive.

• While we’re on the bottom bar, the zoom level should have a percent sign after it when you press the + and - buttons.

• Since the effects manipulation and stacking are so extensive, making a droplet to open a file in DrawIt and apply a set of layers could be really useful.

• The bar below the toolbar is really weird. It doesn’t seem to have one specific purpose, and that’s confusing. If it could be an all-purpose thing used in a variety of circumstances, or a one-purpose thing whose usage is obvious, that’s nice, but it seems to be a combination of both, which is confusing.

• It’d be nice to be able to skew bitmaps.

• More support for round things would be good—If I could create an object, then apply a bunch of curving effects to it, it would make it easier to create things which aren’t geometrically absolute. People, for example.

• Bitmap/vector textures or particles would make realism a lot easier to add. Not everything is completely smooth—unless, like me, you live inside your Mac.

• It’s important that the above two bullet points work together perfectly. On the DrawIt site, there’s an example picture of a cabinet, but it looks like it’s made of plastic because there’s no texture. If a bitmap were skewed to fit it, it would look a lot more realistic. But what if I wanted to take the DrawIt logo and add a wooden texture? Good curving effects would need to be in place.

• There are bits of broken English throughout the interface and the help files. I assume that the program was initially written in Dutch, so a translation by a native English speaker would be mostly useless, but nice.

In summary:
• Tiger support should be better (or eliminated, since we’re in the future now). Basically people shouldn’t pay for a buggy product.
• Bitmap manipulation and support should be better; not everyone makes images from scratch.
• While extremely usable, the interface should be more intuitive in some respects.

Pardon my usage of “should” throughout—I know there’s more than one way to do all sorts of things. I’m just listing the reasons I haven’t convinced my dad to buy this yet. I know I will eventually, though! DrawIt is incredible so far, and provided that the interface remains as intuitive as it is now, it has huge potential for the future. Meanwhile, I’ll be destructively editing in Pixelmator.

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I downloaded and installed it.

I quickly went around the tools to see what this thing was capable of doing.

So I decided to make an oval. I rotated it 6 degrees. After this, I found it EXTREMELY difficult (almost nearly impossible) to then resize the oval again using the corner of the selection box.

I then quickly removed the application. Thanks, but for now, I’ll stick with Illustrator.

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Great to hear all these positive reactions. I thought all of you would scream for a perspective tool, but I guess I was wrong.
Version 3.3 will include new perspective tools, a few minor improvements and maybe some of the things you guys mentioned above. Thanks for all the great responses.

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I’ve only had a limited play around with this app, but I love it already. Its great to have such a powerful program that has a great learning curve, is simple to use and doesn’t grind the rest of what I am doing to a halt. The fullscreen feature is also really great.

Features that I would like to see:

-Better Photoshop support i.e. .ai, .psd file support (However hard I try to use editors such as Seahorse, DrawIt e.t.c sometimes Adobe Apps are necessary)

- When using the brush tool on a dark colour e.g. Black, it is impossible to see what I’m doing, a cursor that changed according to colour it was being used over

- The ability to close Fullscreen mode by pressing esc. (minor, but its what I’m used to)

However, this is a great app, I like how all the tools are enclosed in one big windows, and are not in palettes like CS3 and Pixelmator. (The website is nicely designed aswell.)

Nice to hear perspective tools will be added soon!

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Has the ease of use and feeling of a mac app yet it is a powerful, and overall extraordinary graphic designer. This program has endless potential, keep it up

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I tried out the program and it was rather decent. A little confusing to just jump right into it (I haven’t viewed any videos yet) but I think the interface is really clean and usable so that would be nice.

I played around with some shapes and some text and there is a big difference between the two. Most image editors that I have experience with do not do a very good job with text and I think DrawIt’s text interface could improve as well. Right now the textboxs are rudimentary and I think there is certainly not only room for improvement but a chance to get ahead of other programs. But then again you may want to focus more on what this program does best.

I’ll keep my eye on this program.

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Well this is a major step towards good vector design without illustrator.

After being a xara x user on the pc for many years this is the closest thing available on osx (until xaralx.org produce a genuine osx version)

This way of drawing and add effects should make everyone able to draw clean website graphics, icons like pro’s, as well as all those semi dtp things you want to play with.

Excellent development can’t wait for 3.3

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When I first saw some screenshots of this app, I got really interested. I really like the user interface. It looks and feels simple and clean. It seems like a very good, easy to use and capable application. Great work has been done on this one. I think it would easily meet most of my drawing needs. I have a few suggestions, though.

-I couldn’t find boolean tools like join, split, union, intersect, punch, crop. It would be nice to have those.

-I didn’t figure out how to adjust the rectangle roundness. There’s probably a way to do it, but it wasn’t apparent to me.

-It would be nice if you could switch between different documents by clicking on tabs. I would prefer working on multiple documents within the same application window.

-Is there a way to add a grid and turn on ’snap to grid’? If not, this could be useful at times.
Rulers would be useful too, as well as the the ability to create vertical and horizontal guides.

-I have one more suggestion right now and that is the ability to rotate shapes by holding down the command key while you hover over the corner area of a shape and then rotate it the usual way.

Keep up the great work and good luck!

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