When Mac OS X first arrived, Adobe Illustrator had powerful and affordable competition in CorelDRAW and Macromedia Freehand. Unfortunately, Corel went on to drop support for OS X, and Adobe went on to buy Macromedia (and not long after killed off Freehand). So what happens if you need a vector editor, you don’t really need all of Illustrator’s ultra high end features (very few people do), and you don’t want to spend $599 on Illustrator?

Dekorra Optics may have an answer for you in EazyDraw, a very affordable vector editor designed specifically for OS X. EazyDraw successfully imports just about every file type in use by older Classic vector editors, and is designed to work seamlessly with Apple’s iWork 08. For that matter, if you’ve migrated from AppleWorks to iWork 08 and found yourself out of luck when it comes to opening your old AppleWorks vector drawings, EazyDraw will come to your rescue. It successfully imports these files, complete with all content, even non vector elements such as embedded PICT and bitmaps files. You can then continue to edit the files from within EazyDraw.

Dekorra Optics makes a point of showing that EazyDraw is not just for hobbyist drawing. It can be used for electronic schematics, programming flow charts, business organization charts, database relationship diagrams, logo design, maps (including drawing to scale by miles, kilometers, and more), mechanical drawing (again, drawn to scale, with both hatch patterns and artistic patterns including brick, stone, metal, and water), and web graphics (including bitmap export to the GIF, JPG, PNG, BMP, TIF, ICO, ICNS, and FAVICON file formats).

EazyDraw can be downloaded as a view, draw, save, and print demo with a limit of 30 graphics. It can also be downloaded as a fully functional trial with no limit on amount of graphics, and a time limit of 9 months, for just $20 (which can then be applied toward your purchase price, if you buy the full version within 2 months). The full version is priced at $95 for download delivery, $119 for the CD, and $139 for the Box Version with CD and printed manual. Those are a lot of nice alternatives to Adobe Illustrator’s 30 day trial and $600 price tag. EazyDraw is available from www.eazydraw.com.