Drawing conclusions
First there was Paintbrush, then it was iPaint, and now Vanilla Draw. What’s going on?
Paintbrush is (or was) a simple painting program designed by Mike Schreiber to be similar to Microsoft Paint and MacPaint. It is indeed simple. You can draw lines, make shapes, add text and colour them. It’s not exactly Photoshop, but doesn’t pretend to be.
Paintbrush is open source, which means anyone can download the source code and tweak it, or even use it as the basis for their own program — which is exactly what happened with iPaint. The developer, Danny D, notes that Paintbrush “hasn’t been updated for almost one year and it was time to do something.” After a series of rapid .1 upgrades, iPaint is now at version 2.0. Unfortunately, something broke along the way and it won’t launch. (Or has it gone back to version 1.0? It’s hard to tell . . .)
But lo and behold, along comes Vanilla Draw from Giza Products — which is also based on the Paintbrush open source code. It at least launches. As I write this, I have Paintbrush and Vanilla running at the same time. As far as I can tell, their interfaces and features are pretty much identical.
So what on Earth should you do if you want a good, solid drawing program for free? There’s nothing wrong with any of the programs we’ve mentioned here (that launching problem will likely be fixed soon), but our recommendation is to try DrawIt Lite. It comes from developers dedicated to selling a pro version, so you can be fairly certain they’ll keep it in good running order as a way of encouraging you to upgrade. Or just keep it for free.
Posted Saturday, November 8, 2008 in Reviews
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