David Karlins

If you liked MacDraw--the vector drawing program that shipped with the Mac way back when--you'll love its conceptual successor, EazyDraw 3. EazyDraw gives non-professionals a painless way to create illustrations, logos, floor plans, technical diagrams, flowcharts, maps, and Web graphics that can be copied and pasted into other applications, such as Microsoft Word () or PowerPoint (), or Adobe Illustrator ().

I found EazyDraw 3's interface inviting, starting with its old-fashioned pencil desktop icon. Instead of presenting users with the traditional Pen tool for creating anchors and generating paths, EazyDraw instead employs a Path tool that works more like a pencil--you click and drag to draw.

Adobe Flash CS4 has been radically redesigned and restructured. With CS4, Flash has finally turned the corner from a code-based authoring tool with an interactive animation element, to a designer-friendly space for illustrators to intuitively draw animation. Yes, draw animation--by shaping the path of an illustration the same way an artist would draw a vector path in Adobe Illustrator. With its revamped animation logic, and substantial new animation tools, Flash has now evolved into a much more accessible environment for designers who are comfortable with Adobe design workhorse applications like Illustrator, Photoshop , and InDesign.

The new Flash identity is immediately apparent in its new default layout. The stage--Flash's design surface--has been moved from the bottom to the top of the window, with the formerly dominant Timeline now dispatched to the bottom of the screen. The change is both functional and symbolic. Underlying the new look is a new logic and model for generating animation.