[X4U] Intaglio vs. EazyDraw for ClarisDraw replacement

Zane H. Healy healyzh at aracnet.com
Wed Jun 8 22:28:23 PDT 2005


Thanks to the "Clarisdraw replacement" thread yesterday, I've been 
playing with both the demo's of Intaglio and EazyDraw.

Overall, Intaglio feels more like Clarisdraw, and has the better 
gridlines.  Unfortunately it also seems to be lacking some features, 
and definitely isn't as feature rich as EazyDraw.  One definite 
annoyance is that they don't have the standard keystrokes for 
selecting Italics, bold, or underline (you have to include the shift 
key).  I've tried searching help for a couple things, and found it 
totally unhelpful (it comes up with pages that don't even contain the 
word I searched for).

EazyDraw definitely wins on features, and I've found most of them 
that I'd want, though the arrows don't seem to be as good as in 
ClarisDraw.  What really bugs me the most about EazyDraw is that I 
found the rulers really confusing, and the gridlines are just plain 
poorly implemented.

One thing I like about ClarisDraw, and have used is the custom symbol 
libraries, I don't see anything like this in either appliction.  I 
can live with them not being able to import my existing libraries, 
but I would like to be able to at least recreate them.

Another failing is in pattern fills, while EazyDraw definitely gets 
bonus points for including all of the ClarisDraw patterns, neither 
handles this as well as I'd like, and sadly Intaglio just plain 
stinks in this aspect.

Overall, I really want to like Intaglio, and am definitely leaning 
towards it, but at the same time, it seriously lacking features 
related to files and symbols libraries.  At the same time I think I 
need to spend more time playing with the gridlines on EazyDraw, as 
that's my primary source of complaints.

I've also taken a quicker look at the Beta version of OmniGraffle 4 
Pro, and a demo of MacDraft PE.  Both of these programs have one 
fatal problem for me, they won't open ClarisDraw files.  Of the two, 
I think I prefer MacDraft, and it seems to be almost exactly what I'm 
looking for.  Though while it is supposed to have Symbol Libraries, I 
couldn't figure out how to access them.

		Zane


-- 
--
| Zane H. Healy                    | UNIX Systems Administrator |
| healyzh at aracnet.com (primary)    | OpenVMS Enthusiast         |
|                                  | Classic Computer Collector |
+----------------------------------+----------------------------+
|     Empire of the Petal Throne and Traveller Role Playing,    |
|          PDP-10 Emulation and Zane's Computer Museum.         |
|                http://www.aracnet.com/~healyzh/               |


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