I should have written something about DrawIt long time ago, as this small but powerful non-destructive vector based bitmap design tool really deserves the attention.

DrawIt was created and is maintained by its author Pieter Omvlee. While doing initial design of this application Pieter asked for help French designer Laurent Baumann (working now for Apple). Pieter’s skills and Laurent’s talent joint together created something extraordinary, the great UI of DrawIt made from scratch to give you an ability to quickly create web/bitmap designs with vector tools and stack of effects. I will not get into details here, as you can find few good articles about DrawIt over the Internet, but I will rather describe little experiment of mine I have made today and try to answer the question if DrawIt can be good Photoshop replacement for icon and web design.

Since lately I was forced to use Photoshop, I decided to give DrawIt a try and recreate one of outstanding Photoshop tutorial icons using DrawIt. My choice went for Basic House Icon from PSDTuts+ site. You can see the result of my work above and you can download the DrawIt source file here.

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Updates

1. It uses now click menu instead of keystroke “System Events” command, because in some cases when you had this script assigned to shortcut that used Ctrl or Shift modifiers, those modifiers were sent together with Cmd to “Terminal” producing invalid behavior.
2. It waits 0.5 second when window is busy just in case Terminal.app was not running and it is just loading the shell which makes it busy for short while too. Fixes incorrect behavior of opening extra tab when Terminal.app was not running.

If you ever wondered how to open specified path in new tab of Terminal.app or reuse current one if it is not busy (running a command), here’s a script you may use:

tell application "Terminal"

    activate

    set windowCount to (count of the windows)

    -- Terminal may be just launched loading the shell, wait a bit
    if windowCount is greater than 0 and first window is busy then
        delay 0.5
    end

    -- Still busy / no windows? open new tab
    if windowCount is greater than 0 and first window is busy or windowCount is 0 then
        tell application "System Events" to tell process "Terminal"
            click first menu item of first menu of second menu item of first menu of third menu bar item of first menu bar
        end tell
    end if

    do script "cd #{e_as(e_sh(dir))}" in first window

end tell

Where #{e_as(e_sh(dir))} is your desired folder. This is modified chunk of TextMate‘s command script found at Mark Eli Kalderon’s Blog. Thanks Mark!

Note: Mark’s TextMate command script does not open anything when Terminal.app has no windows or it is not running.

Here is a story of a blot on the great MacBook Pro landscape, which is the european, so called ISO, keyboard.

The “Apple Extended Keyboard II – ISO layout” is a keyboard specially
designed for the (retarded!?) European market. The layout complies with ISO 1091 standard on the “Layout of printing and function keys.”

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