Its selection handles are a bit big & clunky, and it can do that irritating thing of moving an object 1 pixel when you click on it. It has nice rulers (click and pull for guides), and the layers work well. The user interface is OK (could be better, but could also be massively worse), and the screen layout (I found) could be made quite similar to (my implementation of) Intaglio. Graphic will then open this, and the only thing you have to do (and not always) is reset the scale all your dimensions then come good. SVG (best with ‘embed images’ ticked if there is imported stuff). Under 11.6.1, Intaglio runs just ‘enough’ to open an existing document, and export it as. It does everything I want, and crucially, the migration process appears easy. It’s Graphic (on the App Store for 25 of our UK pounds, formerly called iDraw, and seemingly with a slightly troubled parentage, with AutoDesk (cripes) involved somewhere in the development. There are actually very few apps that seem to have this collection of capabilities, and all the obvious candidates (EasyDraw, etc.) appear to have been ported from some Fisher-Price Windows version and have user interfaces designed by brain-dead monkeys.īut I found one, so I thought I should share it because there’s a chance that someone else has the same requirements and sensibilities. I also need to drop in PDFs or PNGs as a backdrop, and export the lot to PDF or PNG. For me, it’s solid, scaled 2D drawing with grouping, ‘scale whole group’, allignment, and basically the whole MacDraw-type toolset, with reasonably accurate dimensioning so that you can either ‘type dims as you draw’ or select an object and then edit the dimensions by typing them in. As everyone finds, this is not easy and takes ages, as everyone had different ‘essential functions’ and other stuff they either ‘must have’ or ‘can’t cope with’. I then started a search for a replacement. Under 11.6.1, those additional grey lines were also just not tolerable. Otherwise, the only thing that bothered me with Intaglio was the lack of trackpad support for pinch-to-zoom, but I could live with that.
So having to use Floating Windows was a deal-breaker for me. I had a nice narrow bar down the right in Intaglio and all the Inspectors in it - worked very well. One of my main reasons for using Intaglio from the outset was that I had a choice not to use Floating Windows – as these are usually so poorly implemented, and you just end up with too much app furniture obscuring your task - only Claris (MacDraw, ClarisDraw, ClarisCAD, etc.) ever got this right IMHO, with each pallette minimising to a convenient ‘stack’ at the top right.