I’m running into some pointless frustration trying to put together simple illustrations for a talk I’m going to be giving. The software I have access to is simply too powerful for the task. I’m using Adobe Illustrator and Photoshop to knock out simple technical illustrations. The crapware paint program that comes with powerpoint is too crapware for the task, but the learning curve required for Illustrator and Photoshop isn’t worth climbing for tasks I’ll be doing maybe once every couple of months.

Back in the early nineties there was a program for the Mac called SuperPaint. It hit the spot exactly. It had a drawing layer (vector based), a painting layer (pixel based), and the ability to copy stuff from drawing to painting layers. There was a modest selection of tools, an intuitive interface, and a trivial learning curve. I can’t believe that such a program doesn’t still exist somewhere, but I can’t seem to find it. It’s such a basic and useful thing that someone has to be making it. There’s no reason there should be a large gap between kiddie-style drawing programs and the full fledged professional graphical design software. I can’t be the only person who occasionally needs to put together a simple illustration that looks halfway decent.

If anyone in out there knows of a suitable program, please let me know about it, either in email or comments.

[update a few minutes later] Of coursee, as soon as I post this I discover how to do something in Illustrator that I’d been assured was impossible, by people who use the program almost daily. It occurs to me that a lot of high powered software would be made vastly more usable by have a Beginners Mode, or Simple Mode, in which much of the more sophisticated functionality was pushed into the background. My Illustrator learning curve is made considerably worse just due to the sheer number of menus and options I have to dig through to find what I’m looking for. We have this problem at the lab with ProE (CAD software) – the guy who really knew how to use it left, and now we have a detailed set of drawings of the machine that we can’t really work with because nobody has the time to learn the ins and outs. If ProE had a Beginners Mode we could just dive in and and at least get some basic use out of the drawings.