Plaidophile

It's been a while since a self-indulgent blog post about my ongoing woes, and seeing as how that's the whole reason to have a blog anyway, I'd might as well update the three of you who still bother to read it.

I'd been thinking of trying out CreateSpace for a while, and for some reason I got the notion of putting foodsexsleep on it to test the waters.

So, about a month ago I bought a Synology DS410j NAS and four Western Digital WD20EARS 2TB hard drives to replace my old PowerMac G5 as my NAS/backup archive/etc. Now that I've put it through its paces a while, I guess I'd might as well review it.

Every now and then I look at some of my older blog entries and then get a bit horrified about how much old crap I have on here that I don't really want people reading anymore (if only because it comes across as horribly narcissistic if nothing else). But going through and cleaning it up is an obnoxious pain. So today I finally did some SQL-fu and had it automatically unpublished all entries older than 3 years except for ones in a few categories which are generally full of stuff I would want to keep around (or which were already friends-only).

I'm sure there's still plenty of stuff that I should remove but I think this is good enough for now. I went from 2300 to 1300 published entries so I've already contributed to a roughly 50% reduction of blog effluvium!

Since I'm in a break between comics, and I've been completely redoing my MacBook because of upgrading its hard drive and adding a dedicated NAS to my network and so on, I decided to go ahead and upgrade to Photoshop CS5. Which is, frankly, terrible in how slow and laggy it is.

I've owned a copy of Pixelmator for years, and they've improved it immensely over that time, but there are still a few glaring deficiencies in the UI. They've finally gotten the brushes to work really well, but now I'm finding that all tools are set to use the same brush all the time - including the eraser, which is always sized exactly the same as the brush tool. Which makes drawing much more of a chore than it should be.

So, once again I'm looking at alternate drawing apps. I have VectorDesigner as well, but vector drawing has never really agreed with me for a number of reasons (usually tablet pressure support is rudimentary or even nonexistent, and I also like being able to screw around with things at the raster level which I find to be much more flexible, even with its "inaccuracy"). This also pretty much rules out Inkscape, although I might give it a try again anyway.

GIMP on OSX is of course a joke (the various native efforts are in perpetually primitive states, and the X11 version doesn't support tablet pressure since X11 on OSX doesn't support much of XInput).

Basically, I need a drawing app with the following features:

• Runs on OSX
• A drawing/sketching-friendly workflow
• Tablet support (pressure, subpixel brush positioning)
• Layers (ideally with groups, and group blend modes)
• Magic wand selection and filling, as well as fast selection refinement (expand and contract at least, ideally with fast keyboard access)
• Is affordable and I can justify paying for it with the understanding that I'm an amateur who likes drawing for fun and doesn't intend to ever make money on this

There's a lot of free/cheap drawing apps out there, but most of them have critical flaws that make them pretty much not worth working with. It seems like there's a whole bunch of niche apps which work pretty well for their niche, and then Photoshop is what everyone else turns to, ignoring that it's slow, bloated, and massively overpriced for just a drawing app...

So, I've had an idea for a site pinging around in my head for a while, and I'd like to program it up, but I'm being a virtuous (i.e. lazy) programmer about it, and I was wondering if anyone had any recommendations for things that would make my life easier.