I wonder if owning Illustrator can bias a review of these competitors. One might prefer ZeusDraw in this case as it extends the Illustrator feature set with some new stuff, and the others don’t and only compete on existing features?

After trying out the apps myself (and confirming selected tests in the article) I decided to go for Intaglio. In my opinion it is the most mature of the reviewed products both in terms of legacy and version number, has a broad feature set and variety of import/export formats.

One thing worth mentioning is that Illustrator allegedly does not use the Quartz 2D graphics subsystem - in contrast with all the reviewed products. This could be important if you are looking for pure Mac OS X integration.

Anyway I second most of the feedback: this is a great review and incredibly helpful. A big thanks to Jon for writing it all down - and just at a time when I was looking around for a vector drawing app (having only recently come from Windows/Xara).

Xara, by the tone of their posts and community seem(ed) (s) to want to get a good build together of their ‘ware and then work with Inkscape to capitalize on features on both sides.

Doesn’t seem to be happening although I haven’t kept tabs on this at all.

Inkscape has huge mindshare in the Linux Community. Xara has been around a long time, but measured strictly by number of users and popular recognition, remains small even compared to CorelDraw. The mindshare thing is a real problem for developers competing in this sector, and problems are compounded by developers having to choose what project will get their time and attention. So even if there are real dedicated fans, if they don’t code, not much can happen.

Have you tried building Xara on Mac OS X yet? Is it okay? Bad? Indifferent? I may try it on my Parallels install just to see. I like the look of the active tools and no dialog box approach.

http://www.xaraxtreme.org/developers/documentation/mac_xcode_project_build_instructions.html

Illustrator’s pencil is, for me, the gold standard. If you sketch a curve, and then sketch it again, the first one goes away. (This did confuse me, until I read the first chapter of the manual — which was excellent, BTW.) It’s just like sketching something with a pencil, but digitally.

I’ve tried using Inkscape, but I really can’t, because it doesn’t do this. If you sketch a line three times, you end up with three squiggles.

This is important: Illustrator is better than pencil-and-paper, and Inkscape is worse. If you can’t beat pencil-and-paper, there is zero chance I’m going to use your program. I’ll just spend my money on a flatbed scanner instead.

So if you were going to do a part-II or follow-up, please let us know how sketching is in these apps. Thanks!

Filters: take paths and output paths. You can’t go back and “edit” a filter’s settings, but you can edit the output path just like any other path. So you could e.g. add arrowheads, and then tweak the shape of the arrowhead.

Effects: take paths and output rasters. (The raster DPI is set by the “document raster effects settings”.) The original path is not modified (unlike a filter), and you can edit the effect settings (like changing the arrowhead style or size), but you can’t edit the output, and worse, the output is no longer vector art, but rasterized, with all of the caveats that apply to that. (Though it will be re-rasterized if the underlying vector is scaled *in Illustrator*, scaling the whole output in some external program will lead to blocky art if the raster DPI is too low.)

Sometimes you want one, sometimes you want the other. Sometimes either will do. But the distinction is very important — a designer has to know when raster art is being produced, versus vector art. (It’s not so simple as one is “non-destructive”: they are both non-destructive in a sense, and both destructive in a sense, depending on whether you see producing raster art as the destructive step, or changing the original vector path as destructive.)

Can’t say I use iDraw. I ran it head to head against WouldjaDraw a couple of years ago: http://www.blindeye.net/?p=543. It has a few nice features but I’ll be honest and say that I’m not exactly an illustration app power user. For most of my simple vector work I just use Flash. I did get a copy of VectorDesigner but haven’t played with it much.

One other thing: I’m not sure how active development is on iDraw. The version on my hard drive is the same as the version currently available (1.3.2) and I don’t recall upgrading it since I did the comparison.