Last year when Adobe bought out Macromedia, one of the main things I complained about was what would happen to my Freehand. Well we all know what’s happening, it’s a dead duck (no news about it, and no updates since the acquisition). They’re going to continue developing the supremely bloated Illustrator. You know the one I’m talking about, it takes 7 days to load once you’ve clicked the icon, and has features on top of features, most of which are completely useless to man and beast, with the hope that you can justify buying the latest version. If you hadn’t guessed it I’m not a big fan of Illustrator, I’ve always been a Freehand guy, so obviously I’m nice and bitter about the whole situation.

Xara LX

So before I switched over to Ubuntu, I was looking for an alternative. I thought it would have been Xara Xtreme, was about to buy the license for it, and then I realised that it was actually open sourced on Linux. Fuel to fire, I was sick of Windows to be honest, so I jumped into the deep end. What's great about this little programme is that they're just porting the Windows version over to Linux. At this present time, my understanding is that they're not trying to add any new features (these I'm sure will come in the future); the progress has been very encouraging. As far as I can tell the guys and gals over at Xtreme are effectively producing a 0.1 update every month, so we should have the full version by the end of the year, if not earlier. It's pretty usable right now, although it doesn't export to SVG at the moment (it tries but it fails every time I try), however I'm sure that will come in the next version. While Xara was sorting itself out, another vector programme came out with a very good update.

Inkscape

Inkscape was a fork of Sodipodi. I do remember playing around with that programme a while back and thinking it's got potential, but not for me. Thankfully the Inkscape crowd took it over and have been slowly but surely enhancing this programme.

Things that I would like sorted out on Inkscape:

1. Remembering my preferences - I'm talking about the panels. They keep getting reset to hidden every time I actually log out.

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Sizes of panels - The default are far too big and clunky. The later versions should allow for the panels to be stacked on top of each other in a clear method, with even the option of docking them as well. The panels take up a great deal of the screen real estate, and I’ve got a 20 inch screen.

<li><strong>Multiply/Mirror tool</strong> - This is a pretty important tool for me. I don't know how to explain it, but in Freehand I can copy an element and then either multiply it as along a grid or around a point. I'm not completely sure how you would go about doing this in Inkscape. I'm sure there is a method for this, however I've not really found any tutorials or methods that show how to do this clearly. I do recommend that 

<li><strong>Tabs</strong> - This is a very simple request, and I'm surprised that it hasn't been given a priority of sorts. Every time you want to open a file, or make a new document, it opens in a completely different window. It's like the behaviour of Internet Explorer for an application. Bring me the tabs please. This can't be a really difficult addition, but would enhance the programme a great deal.

<li><strong>Icons </strong>- There has been some serious movement in regards to getting some better icons used here. Generally I believe several tango icons have been used. To be fair, it's a massive improvement over the previous version however there is still work to be done. I hope they get the same guy that has sorted out the Gimp icons.

2. Colour Palette Options - This is just an annoying behavioural thing to be honest rather than a feature. Currently if you use the eye dropper icon and pick a colour it doesn't allow you to change the colour of the stroke, but always the fill, even if you've highlighted the stroke of the new item. So you end up copy/pasting the hex number into the stroke panel. It's not the end of the world, but it's really counter productive in some instances.

Apart from these little things, I’m extremely happy with Inkscape and it’s really encouraging that there are loads of new features that the dev team are already trying to implement into the later version. This includes a history panel (which is great) and a few other additions (hopefully the above points will be addressed as well).

KDE Alternatives

I've got to say that I'm seriously not a fan of the KDE environment. Mainly because I think it's seriously over the top, and I just love the simplicity of the Gnome environment. Having said that I know there are a ton of KDE specific programmes, but I'm not sure if any of them offer anything further than the above two applications. Anyone have any applications I should be trying out?