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.

First of all DrawIt is non-destructive vector based program. Which means you can always revise any step and decision you have made during design process. The idea is based on shapes and effects applied onto them, something you could find in Macromedia Fireworks, Freehand (RiP) or Adobe Photoshop‘s layer’s effects.

Photoshop Layer With Effects

As seen on many Photoshop icon design tutorials, the starting point is a path filled with some gradient or simply filled with black color.  Then most of the folks apply effects created out of the path’s filling. The effects panel used all over again unfortunately is buried in Layers panel and requires extra interaction to pop it up.

In my opinion this really makes me wonder what made Photoshop to be considered better than Macromedia Fireworks or Illustrator for icon design when you are working constantly applying effect, closing and opening Effects window which is simply uncomfortable.

DrawIt Effect Stack

Here in DrawIt it is much easier to set effects for particular shape. First of all you are working only shapes, so you can always touch and redefine the shape’s shape using vector tools, while Photoshop it takes a bit more to redefine layer’s path, also when you did some manual touch to the layer then redefining its path will kill your modifications.

Also DrawIt effects may be applied in random user’s defined order. You can also double same effect, disable and reenable them on fly.

Photoshop’s touch to the image

There’s one thing that you can do in Photoshop but you can’t in vector based programs. It is some human touch to the color or shade using tools like burn, dodge. Such a “touch” can sometimes drastically improve  overall effect. Unfortunately this is impossible simply using DrawIt, as everything is an object here, so dodging particular area of an object is simply impossible.

Nevertheless there is always alternative ways to achieve same effect as you would get using hand drawing Photoshop tools in DrawIt. You just need “think vector”. Sometimes experimenting with various settings can result with amazing overall look of an object.

DrawIt’s perfection killed by some flaws

Unfortunately some minor but longstanding bugs are flies in the DrawIt’s ointment. Undo/redo is the basic thing you expect to work well in any program. It does work well in Photoshop, TextMate, iWork, but NOT in DrawIt, that tends to forget some actions in its undo chain, which makes unpleasant surprise when playing with effects.

Another thing that makes you suffer it a way you change colors of gradients and other various objects, sometimes you need to click few times to make DrawIt change the color of selected property. Again, color panel tends to forget what it was attached to, especially when you change switch objects Color panel is still on screen but attached to nothing.

Resizing objects can be very painful too. First, changing objects height makes it change its vertical position, this isn’t right! Second, trying to resize the document with all objects usually leads to misplacement of those objects.

Finally vector (shape) editing mode deserves more polish, as sometimes you may get crazy if you want to delete several points (no way to drag/select few points), or if you move the point out of the canvas you cannot control it anymore its handle disappears (clipped by canvas rectangle), while you expect shape’s vector handles should be visible outside of the canvas too.

Is it worth a price?

DrawIt is absolutely worth its price and I would glad pay for it again if those few annoying bugs were removed. The author is a very kind nice young fellow willing to listen for the new ideas for his project. One of such ideas is slicing functionality that is probably a result IM chat I did with the author while ago.

However peeking recently into author’s blog it seems he is more focused on his other applications – too bad, but that’s life – you are working on something that gives you best revenue, which may be not DrawIt in this case.

What about Photoshop? In my opinion it is definitely NOT worth a price if you want just an icon design software. I really regret all competing software producers such as Corel, ACD, Xara dropped support for Mac OS X, leaving us in hands of Adobe. Thank God there is DrawIt (and maybe Vectordesigner ;P).

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.

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.”

Here in Poland we had already some attempts to have an original Polish keyboard layouts in early 90ties. However it turned out because of economical and practical reasons that we can simply type on regular US ANSI keyboards and use right Alt key to produce accented characters – so called Programmers Layout.

Given that, once I was ordering my MBP at French Apple Store I had a choice giving my new MBP US ANSI keyboard or English European keyboard and finally French layout. Then I scratched my head and I’ve selected English European, assuming that this one will be the same as in most PC laptops sold in Poland. So regular ANSI layout, but having Enter instead of Return and some fancy symbols in place of Shift and Control buttons. Of course there was absolutely no preview at Apple Store how the keyboard will look like, previously I have seen MBP on promo photos (comming from US) and at Apple events in Paris, but I haven’t noted the layout since it was Freeench.

What was my surprise once I realized browsing that I have chosen most f… up keyboard layout I have ever seen. Few days after I ordered my MBP I was browsing some reviews and photogalleries of my looked forward MBP. And then I was shocked… most of the E.U. reviewers were mentioning horrible keyboard of MBP while US reviewers were mentioning that it is simply awesome. It was too late to rollback or change the order. Ash Searle’s review “I hate my Macbook Pro” made me really depressed, even that the most of this review may be little controversial, the Return button case is really true and SERIOUS. (Photos below taken from this site)

Since I am really used to sightless typing I expect Enter/Return below my right small finder. I realized that it won’t be possible with my new MBP. Call me an idiot, but I couldn’t even get a decent sleep during the nights before I have received my new laptop.

European Macbook Pro
Photo: Sonic Julez

Then I got it. Just have a look at the photo above. WTF is that!? Has Steve Jobs ever seen this layout. I know that it is supposed to be a retarded ISO layout, but c’mon is it a bad joke of US Apple’s engineers? How do I suppose to put my finger in this small gap to press Return?

I was really upset, finally I came across some post on MyApple.pl saying that you can replace the keyboard for extra charge. First I called Apple service in Paris, but they wanted 50€ for the keyboard + 80€ for the work. Price for the piece was acceptable but 80€ for unscrewing and screwing back the new keyboard was a bit too high. Then I tried convince myself I can live with this retarded layout.

Nah… once I came back to Poland I have set up a date with SAD – Polish Apple reseller and service provider. It is amazing how many times you can try calling the company that never picks up the phone when you are desperate like I was. Finally I have managed to get through and the nice lady told me they gonna replace it for the price of the piece (50€) and no extra charge for the service. Woohoo!

At last at the day of the “date” I made myself 1 day trip to capital city leaving my laptop for few hours and visiting some friends around. Finally I was having normal ANSI keyboard like all Americans do. :-P

US Macbook Pro
Photo: Justin Roselt