sushi-k.com

So I need to do a bunch of technical illustrations.. what to use?  I hope to avoid buying Illustrator just now, so looking at free and low-cost alternatives, the major players seem to be:  Inkscape

• no patterns built-in
• pattern creation and editing is clumsy
• no support for named styles
• styles and patterns can’t be shared across files
• kinda buggy
• PDF export doesn’t play well with Preview.app
• everything keyboard-accessible
• good features for diagramming like glue points and connectors
• no auto-save (not reliable anyway).  not sure if Inkscape crashed or X11, but an hour’s work is gone just the same.
• X11 app, so integration is not so good

Lineform

• only bitmap pattern fills, not so great for a vector editor
• few primitives
• no support for diagramming
• otherwise nice UI, fast, quite nice

Intaglio

• good feature set
• lightweight
• good AppleScript support
• no support for diagramming
• crashed at least once on my Intel MBP

Lineform and Intaglio are both well done, but Lineform is still a bit immature, and both programs are clearly designed first with graphic design in mind. In the end, Inkscape seems to have the largest feature set, convenient primitives, support for diagrams with connectors, and it’s free. I really want to like Lineform and Intaglio, but for commercial software of that price (~$90), they really need to work on their non-artistic features to make it worth the purchase to me. As it is, I think I’ll end up buying Illustrator somewhere down the line.  Of course I may be on the wrong track completely; perhaps I should be looking at CAD software instead of illustration.

Finally got around to switching one of my other domains to elahost, which is hosting this site. The web site moved over pretty smoothly, but mail proved to be another matter entirely.

Having created an identical mail account on elahost before changing the dns entries, I expected to be happy after simply changing the mail server in Mail.app setup. Indeed I was able to send and receive mail without interruption after hitting “ok”, but suddenly my inbox and sent folders were empty!

A moment’s thought told me I should have expected this, since I was using IMAP. Ok, that mystery solved. But why now can I not see any folder but “INBOX” on the new server?!

Not sure why, even now that it’s working. I seem to have fixed it by changing the username from “me+domain.com” to “me@domain.com”, two forms which the provider docs say should be equivalent. Don’t know if I knocked something loose in Mail.app, or if it’s a bug in whatever mail account system they’re using on elahost..