You'd think, but but it ain't necessarily so. I had an online grocery order due to arrive last night about 9.30. Due to the rain-related traffic chaos & etc, it eventually turned up about quarter past midnight.


Jon

I'd still prefer that to having to deal with, well, the clueless women who go shopping sometimes. Also, I don't drive

Nice one Edd

*hugs Edd*

Well done Sir. What town will you be working in? Anywhere near your fair lady?

If you need any oily fish recipes for inspiration let me know. I make a wicked low calorie mackerel pate and love cooking salmon

Hatfield so commuting via Kings Cross or Finsbury Park.

Not far then! I pass through Finsbury Park myself every day. We should arrange a meet up.

I used to do your commute from a bit further in - New Barnet.

Cheers, Caz! I might well take you up on that.

Please do!




Amy keep up the good work. You're making me feel ashamed now. I keep thinking about sit ups.... but that's as far as I get lol

Care to name names?

Happily. Bohemian Coding Sketch.

They have a 15-day unlimited trial. Essentially the full software to play with for a couple of weeks. Bohemian Coding, apparently, wanted to create a sort of combination Photoshop/Illustrator/Fireworks package without the overheads. It seems to work as vector and bitmap at the same time, and has some interesting slicing and web export features I intend to explore in some detail.

I bought Mapdiva Artboard a while ago. It's good, got a great pedigree - being an offshoot of another app from the same maker aimed at cartographers - but I find it awkward in use. Stuff like making gradient fills and the whole colour thing, and an odd method of applying styles to objects that I can't grasp, make it clumsy to me. I find I don't want to spend the time referring to the help files in order to do something very simple - something Sketch hasn't needed in the few hours I've played with it so far.

Thanks. I'll be taking a look at this. Maybe I can hold off on my Adobe upgrade for a while, though I will need to do so at some time. This and Pixelmator may be good alternatives to the usual suspects.

EDIT: Not a bad price either.

EDIT 2; RGB and CMYK colour models? Where?

This is an issue, but I don't tend to worry about it any more. Everything gets flattened at PDF output stage.

The program was developed for UI design work, and has just been expanded to a slightly wider audience. I think the thing is to sign up for their forum and make the suggestions. I may well once I've made up my mind to buy the program.

EDIT: There is an open request for CMYK support on their Get Satisfaction forum. I think the program is still pretty new, and features are added as and when they can. There's currently a big bug with undo which seems to be a little intractable, for example.

I know Sketch well, but I'd be a little wary of Bohemian Coding. He (because it is in reality only one bloke) has had a habit in the past of just dropping applications he's got bored of and withdrawing all support at basically no notice. Version 2 of Sketch is actually an amalgamation of Sketch version 1 and another program he did , IIRC called 'DrawIt'. Drawit was the bitmappy bit and Sketch 1 was a pure vector app. He merged them together, dropped DrawIt completely (i.e. no more bug fixes and no answering support queries). if you liked DrawIt but didn't need the extra stuff Sketch did? Tough luck.

There was another quite decent little app called.. CoverShot or something. Took an image (say of a movie poster) and turned it into an Icon that looked like a DVD or CD case or etc, so if you ripped DVDs you could have the file icon look decent. Pretty much all it did, but it was good at it and well coded. One day, without notice, he withdrew it entirely. Took the download away, removed the product page from his website, just erased it. Never gave an explanation why.

He's patently a very talented coder but I think he's a bit... flighty. If Sketch does what you need it to do now, then fine. But if you're relying on extended support into the future, I'd be a bit more circumspect.

Jon

Wise words. A lot of the small vector apps have appeared, using the OS X core systems to give them a leg-up, and are very often small companies, start-ups, speculative ventures. In many ways, this is a great thing as it encourages developers to have a go. Equally, if they don't get support they drop by the wayside.

Interestingly, I came across something called Expression earlier. A German company is trying to recreate a modern FreeHand - which is basically all I want.

http://www.goexpressive.com/

I shall be watching with interest.