Today I heard about an interesting software project known as Inkscape. This is open source software and versions are available for Windows, as well as Linux. Unlike The GIMP, which is open source software designed to compete with Photoshop, this is drawing software, something like Adobe Illustrator or CorelDraw. It is a fairly new project, being only up to version 0.40 after about a year since forking from Sodipodi, but it seems to work nicely!
When I first started using personal computers at work, we used a popular Windows drawing package called "Arts & Letters" and I got to the point where I was fairly good at it. The publisher seems to have sputtered at some point so that, as far as I know, almost no one uses it in its present incarnation. On the other hand, somebody must be buying it because they're still in business. But it isn't widely used and, at approx $140, it is much cheaper than Illustrator but is still a bit expensive for me. Until now, however, I could not find a decent replacement. Since this is an early alpha version, even though it appears to work well, there is still a lot of development to go. I have installed it on my PC and will almost certainly use it. I lust after Illustrator but it costs five hundred bucks!
12/26/2004 EDIT: Here's a link to a review of Inkscape.
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