Adobe Illustrator CS34

Adobe Illustrator CS4 review by Ben Long, Macworld.

"If you're someone who started out with Adobe Illustrator back when it was called Illustrator 88, then you've seen lots of changes over 20 years. Illustrator is one of a handful of powerful vector drawing products aimed at graphic artists and illustrators, and it's always been elegant and production-ready. Even if Adobe has sometimes been slow to add cool new features, you could always count on Illustrator's stability and its color and output engines to perform well in a professional production environment.

Illustrator, as a high-end professional app, doesn't really have any competition on the Mac anymore (CorelDraw is Windows-only), which might explain why Adobe is only now getting around to adding some features that the program has needed for years. If you're a Mac user who needs a vector-based drawing tool, Illustrator is the biggest and best player around, and the new CS4 version is a solid, impressive upgrade that adds some cool new tools" Full review

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What Is New In Adobe Illustrator CS4

A brief outline of the new features in our favorite vector editing software Adobe Illustrator CS4.

Multiple Art Boards
Transparency in gradients
Gradients exposed
Blob brush tool
RIA and Flash CS4 support
Enhanced GUI...

Separation preview feature
Panel-based editing
Smoother, more polished workflow
Improved direct editing experience

More details about those features, here and a comprehensive review here.

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Creative Suite 4 (cnet review)

"Adobe released details Monday about Creative Suite 4, its first update to more than a dozen design and editing tools since Adobe CS3 some 17 months ago.
The costs of the applications, set to reach consumers in October, haven't changed since CS3, but remain hefty. Should longtime users upgrade?" Read Full review

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Phantasm CS Designer/Studio Adobe Illustrator plug-in review

With such a range of Adobe Illustrator plug-ins on the market, it’s rare to come across one that excels to this extent. Phantasm CS adds Photoshop-style adjustment tools and functionality that seamlessly integrates with Illustrator’s native features, including standard gradients, meshes, filters and effects.
Furthermore, Phantasm CS is fully compatible with Illustrator’s Actions and Live Effects, which can potentially speed up your workflow. Read full review PCAdvisor.co.uk

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Aviary's creative suite

A demo video of a Aviary's new browser based image editor software and a part its review from webware.com
"I finally got a chance to catch up with Avi Muchnick, the CEO of Flash software maker Aviary and of the art contest site it spun out of, Worth1000 (a Webware 100 winner).Aviary is an ambitious project to create a full suite of online applications for creative professionals. The first application, the image editor Phoenix, is now in private beta (read to the end of this post to get an early invitation). The second, pattern maker called Peacock, was recently added.Coming up after these applications will be Toucan, a color swatch program for designers (like Kuler on steroids), a 3D-sketching program and modeler, a vector-based editor, and a smart image resizer." Click here to see the full video review.

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Draw Freely : Inkscape New Release

24th March

The Inkscape community today is announcing the release of the newest version of its open source vector graphics editor. Inkscape 0.46 is a major update that introduces native PDF support. The implementation of PDF support in Inkscape provides an easy, open source solution to editing PDF documents.

Tons of new features and performance improvements are included in this release. Dialogs now have the ability to be docked to the editing window. Gradients can be edited completely on-canvas. The new Paint Bucket Tool fills bounded areas with color. A new 3D Box tool helps create perspective-correct drawings. A new Tweak tool provides an intuitive method for editing paths and painting objects. The new Live Path Effects feature can create "brushes" and various organic effects on paths. Improvements to color management include support for color spaces other than sRGB. Most SVG filters are now implemented, and a new powerful UI is provided for editing filter stacks. Check it out www.inkscape.org

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Clothing Design Software for Fashion Designers

Harper Arrington Publishing LLC(www.DigitalFashionPro.com) today announced the release of The Creative Pack 1 upgrade for Digital Fashion Pro - Fashion Design System. The DigitalFashion Pro System is an innovative solution that gives fashion designers, students, and even ordinary people the tools they need to design their own cutting edge fashion collection using digital fabrics and garment templates...

Harper Arrington"The Creative Pack 1 upgrade was invented to give clothing and shoe designers a host of new resources to develop their designs with," said Michael Harper, co-developer of Digital Fashion Pro and The Creative Pack 1, and co-founder of Harper-Arrington Publishing LLC. "The Creative Pack 1 features The Shoe Factory, Designer Series Templates Trend 1 Library, Digital Fabric Pack 2 and The Vector Art Gallery. We are really proud of this new product. We set out to make Digital Fashion Pro the best fashion design system in the world, and we strongly believe the Creative Pack 1 has brought us closer to that goal." Full article

DETROIT, Mich., March 3 (SEND2PRESS NEWSWIRE)

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Live Pen Calligraphy Plugin for Adobe Illustrator

"Considering the popularity of Adobe Illustrator, it's surprising how few plugins are available to extend its capabilities. Now Zero-One has brought some fresh thinking to the creation of non-uniform vector shapes with its Live Pen plugin, which should prove of interest not just to type creators but a broad spectrum of illustrators and designers.At the heart of its functionality lies the ability to let users control the width of a path at any point. Pen anchors can be added, deleted and moved as required, along with the ability to create new pens and mix different pen types.

Live Pen for Windows Illustrator CS2 can be purchased for $99 on the Zero-One site. CS and CS3 versions are expected in spring, 2008, with a Mac version to follow in the summer. A trial version is available for download." www.designertoday.com

"It is very handy tool. You just draw a path and easy set the width you need at the required place." Dimitry Belyaev, Art Director

Core features:
-Digital Natural Drawing
-Moving Pen Anchor
-Simple Adding Or Deleting Pen Anchor
-Pens Library
-Minimal Anchors After Expanding
-Smooth Integration

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Modbook Mac Tablet

"Andreas Haas, CEO of Axiotron, tells InformationWeek how the company turns the dowdy MacBook into its sexy Modbook Mac tablet, and why its not afraid of competition from a rumored Apple-made Mac tablet.

If you live all day in Adobe Illustrator, Photoshop, or some other visual Mac app, Axiotron has its eye on you. The company makes the long-awaited Modbook Mac tablet, designed for designers, illustrators, and other visually creative professionals.

"It's for people who draw, scribble, and paint," said Axiotron CEO Andreas Haas. We sat down with Haas for a one-on-one interview recently.

The Modbook, priced starting at $2,290, was announced at Macworld 2007, a little more than a year ago, and finally started shipping Dec. 31.

Axiotron built the unit in cooperation with Apple. The Modbook is manufactured by the same companies that make Macs. Axiotron ships the manufacturers the pen displays, the manufacturers rip the displays and keyboards out of standard MacBooks, and then add the Axiotron display. The manufacturers keep the notebook displays and keyboards and use them to repair defective MacBooks -- displays and keyboards are the most common points of failure for notebook computers, Haas said.

Apple is reportedly developing its own tablet computer, but Axiotron isn't afraid of the competition, Haas said. The Apple tablet will basically be a bigger version of the iPhone or iPod Touch -- a consumer device with a 7-inch to 10-inch display, running a cut-down version of Mac OS X with little or no third-party application support, with an interface that's lacking in fine control, in part because it'll be controlled using the user's finger. "Finger painting is fun -- when you're four," Haas said." View Full Review

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VectorDesign : MacHeist 2 Bundle

Yesterday, TweakerSoft’s VectorDesign was revealed as the final app for the current MacHeist 2 Bundle. As Pixelmator is to Adobe PhotoShop, VectorDesign is to Adobe Illustrator. For those of us who want to be able to create and edit vector graphics (.svg, .eps, etc.), but don’t want to spend several hundred dollars, VectorDesign looks to fill the void.

MacHeist aims to bring the best shareware from the brightest independent Mac software developers to the masses. We’ve already highlighted the contents of the bundle, but since then all of the original apps have been unlocked - Speed Download has been included, and two games from FreeVerse have been added as well. So now VectorDesign has been included as well.

As it now stands, the bundle has a value of nearly $500 worth of quality Mac shareware for under $50. not to mention that $300,000 has been raised for charity! Read more

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The easiest way to convert images to line art

Faster than a tracing hand, this powerful software is the raster to vector converter you need for Illustrator (Adobe), CorelDraw (Corel), Flash (Macromedia), WebDraw (Jasc), Sodipodi (freeware) and any vector-based software. Vector Eye instantly converts scanned black-and-white or color raster images (bmp, jpg, tiff, png) into editable vector files (svg, ps, eps).

Just scan any sketch, or select an image (or a sequence) in an AVI movie, make some bitmap adjustements (scale, select zone, enhance, swap colors, rotate...) and Vector Eye will automatically create multiple SVG file corresponding to differents settings. You can analyse, modify till the result suits you (quality, weight, number of vectors).
Just save it in the appropriate format for your purpose and drop into your favorite editor or authoring tool to complete or animate your design. You could also use the batch system to launch hundreds of vectorization processes. Download

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Fireworks CS3 Review

When Adobe first acquired Macromedia and its products, it was hard to imagine how Fireworks would fit with its new stablemates. Previously, it had been aimed at designers who wanted a Web-oriented Photoshop-like application, but had no need for the Adobe behemoth’s print features.With Fireworks CS3, Adobe has subtly repositioned the application, making it a near-essential purchase for anyone working in Web design. Full review

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Mac Vector Package Free Your Creativity

Just happened upon this really fun vector drawing application - I find it poops on Illustrator as it’s actually fun and intuitive to use and includes features that I’ve been wishing Adobe would have included for years. If you create vector arwork take a look at the demo.

www.freeverse.com it’s $79. Written by Mark Bannerman

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