As I mentioned last week , some of my Mac Gems columns over the next calendar month will furnish short reviews of several products rather than a single , tenacious revue . Some of these products will be simple point that may not justify a full - length review , some will be niche mathematical product , and some will just be things that have been waiting patiently for coverage for too long . All are Gems .
Today ’s subject is originative tools — products that help the creative types out there do chill thing with photos and drawings .
ImageWell 2.0.223 (; free ) . If you spend a lot of prison term ready photograph for the Web , ImageWell can streamline the mental process . You drag an image into the “ well , ” use ImageWell ’s numerous editing feature ( crop ; shape ; rotate ; resize ; , water line ; add together borders , cliff shadows , recording label , and textbook — all the rudiments most the great unwashed will require ) , and then click Send — ImageWell automatically create the new image , in the formatting you specify , and uploads it to your iDisk or FTP or WebDAV server . ImageWell even enjoin you how long it will take a modem user to download the image — so you’re able to adjust the sizing , if necessary — and copy the URL of the raw image to the Clipboard after uploading . ImageWell wo n’t replace Photoshop , or even Graphic Converter , for more demanding image editing , but it ’s a great creature for the sort of casual redaction and uploading that ’s far more common .
Intaglio 2.3.1 (; $ 89 ) . If you ’ve been looking for a Mac OS X surrogate for ClarisDraw , SuperPaint , or MacDraw — and do n’t want to drop the big dollar bill for Adobe Illustrator — you’ll love Intaglio . While not as feature - rich as the “ big boys , ” Intaglio is astonishingly powerful , with all the drawing and art tools many people are likely to need . It also takes advantage of a number of OS X features via a Spotlight importer , Automator action mechanism , and support for AppleScript , Apple Type Services , and Quartz graphic tools . The ability to change PDF , QuickDraw , and ClarisDraw file , and to import from and export to Pages and Keynote , is also certain to please . At $ 89 , Intaglio is n’t as cheap as some Gems , but compared to Illustrator , it ’s a steal .
Painter ’s Picker 2.0.5 (; $ 16 ) . Mac OS X ’s built - in Colors chooser is quite good , but Painter ’s Picker put up more in advance colour - picking functionality that will be welcome by those in the creative fields . You get more advanced controls for choosing brightness , saturation , and chromaticity angle ; the power to cursorily obtain complementary or analogous colour ; RGB , CMYK , and entanglement - safe space ; and much , much , more . And the good part about Painter ’s Picker is that as a plug - in that adds an extra board to the Colors palette , it ’s available systemwide .
Stay tuned for more muffin In Brief over the next few weeks !
