To all developers to vector application, it's time to make all your means to give us a true alternative to Illustrator, regardless of your price, it will still be much less than the Adobe racket!

I've been using Intaglio to do so many things for so long that I was surprised to read some of the negative comments by those who admit they haven’t used it much at all.

First, forget about comparisons with other applications. Intaglio is one of a kind, and must be taken on its own merits. I especially wouldn't compare it to Adobe applications, which have determinedly become more Windows-like and less intuitive over the past decade. Anyhow, Intaglio is a powerful drawing app with many features that aren't immediately obvious...and therein lies its biggest weakness — its documentation. You have to know where to look, and what to look for, and even then the explanation is not always clear or complete. I often end up playing with the features to figure out how they work.

Intaglio does have some annoying quirks:

• The pattern editor desperately needs grid snap, and much better documentation. The pattern editor is hopelessly small, and creating patterns that tile seamlessly can be tricky.

• Default font settings, style, and color should be in a Preferences dialog. Why assume that I want Geneva 12 point as my default, and then force me to change it for every new document? The ability to create user-defined text styles would be very useful.

• The text ruler is non-intuitive, especially when used with tabs and bullet-point or numbered list text. I usually end up creating the bullet points or list numbers as separate text fields, and then line them up with their associated paragraphs as graphic elements.

• The gradients editor is good, but it needs additional gradient styles (for example, the circular and shape burst gradients in AppleWorks 6).

There are many, many more plusses than minuses…too many to list. I love the arrow editor, for example, and the masking functions are great. Intaglio integrates well with Freeway Pro for web design, and I use it for the vast majority of my video graphics. A few years ago I needed to make some engineering drawings and went looking for a decent CAD application, only to discover that all of the CAD tools I needed were already available in Intaglio.

For all its quirks, Intaglio is still my favorite drawing app. It looks deceptively simple on the surface, but it has a great deal of power under the hood. You won’t discover its virtues with a cursory or superficial glance. I’ve invested the time to learn how to use it, and that investment has paid big dividends.

Not ready for primetime, but it's fast. I haven't used it very long, but long enough to make some solid observations.

1) There's no way to hide the grid universally. You have to hide the grid every time you open a document. Time consuming and annoying.

2) I used the pen tool to draw an object but it didn't connect the shape together when I closed the path by clicking on the first point of the path until I used the option key. Not what I expect from a drawing program's bezier tool.

3) Text is sketchy. It kind of "blinks" while I type. I'm on a fast machine (i7 MacBook Pro with 16GB of RAM) so it's not my computer.

Also, I tried pasting text from TextEdit and it didn't respect the boundaries of the Intaglio text box.

The worst part is when I hit the "return" key, the cursor appears stuck right underneath the text until I start typing.

Also, wish they'd allow for right-clicking on words and pulling up the Apple spellchecker that will replace it with the proper spelling like you see in most Mac apps including Safari, TextEdit, etc.

4) Interface issues. It would be nice if a move tool could be enacted by hitting the spacebar at any time (like Adobe). Instead it's hidden within the zoom tool which must be enabled first to active the hand/move tool.

5) Keyboard shortcut. Wish I could change them to better match up to Adobe's. It's confusing switching between the two otherwise.

All that said, this thing launches very fast and I love the fact I can drag and drop images into documents and easily resize them. Because of the image resizing, it would almost make a great replacement for TextEdit if it would just handle text more smoothly.

If Intaglio handled text more smoothly and preferably allowed me to export to rtf, I'd buy this as a replacement for TextEdit. It would be great if they'd offer a "lite" version that just allows for text and images (you can resize). It also would need to support tables.

There's one app that is available in the AppStore.. Yeah I know.. but still quite a good vector app.. Not sure why these people don't advertise it on here.. iDraw.

http://www.indeeo.com/idraw/index.html

Intaglio's main strength is that it has a moderately powerful set of vector drawing features at a price that is much lower than something like Adobe Illustrator. I've found it particularly good at creating web graphics. It also seems to work just fine on Snow Leopard.

However, I've also found some strange problems. It has crashed on me a few times since I've been using it. I've lately been working with a very large document (large in terms of length and width, not file size), and the visual artifacts are awful! The little dotted blue lines that indicate when an object being dragged is lined up with another object don't get properly erased, so I end up with a bunch of them scattered all over my document. Scrolling erases them, but this is still a pain. Some of the floating palette windows also have gone white, forcing me to close them and reopen them. (While I'm on it, those windows are awfully awkward... I don't really like them at all. They take up a lot of space, there's no easy way to group them together and some of the functions don't need to take up space on screen in a window.)

I tried to contact the developer, using the support e-mail address provided on their web site, and after 5 days it bounced back, with the error from qmail saying that it had "been in the queue too long."

'The page size is 19,72 x 27,62 inches (see "Page Setup")
Inches!!!! Bah...