It's been a while since Freeverse's vector application, Lineform, got an update. Lineform 1.5 came out in January 2008, but the Apple Design Award winner has remained unchanged since then. That's not a bad thing; as we've mentioned in the past, Lineform is great vector program. But it's always nice to get new features.

Freeverse has just released Lineform 1.5.1, fixing some bugs and adding some new treats for users.

Here are some of the highlights:

• Improved gradient behavior -- you now have more control over your gradients.
• Improved performance with multiple objects on a canvas
• Undo now includes the function name, so you can see what you are undoing
• New Lineform Clips available in the Media Browser.

That last item is actually pretty great. Lineform now comes with a bunch of vector clips in various shapes and symbols that you can drag into your documents to use as they are, or edit. You can also add additional vector clips to save and use later.

When Robert did a faceoff amongst low-cost vector apps, he commented that having more shapes would be a good addition to Lineform. Lineform now has pre-built polygons and star shapes that can be simply dragged into your project.

Plus, Lineform continues to support SVG, PDF and EPS formats and it's easy to apply non-destructive filters to your projects.

The guys at Freeverse were also nice enough to extend a $30-off coupon code to TUAW readers! Enter tuawlineform151 when ordering at Freeverse's site and you can score Lineform 1.5.1 for just $49.95.

$50 for a vector app that is as powerful and easy to use as Lineform is really, really hard to beat. If you want to give it a trial before buying, you can download it free and use it for 30 days. Lineform now requires OS X 10.5 (previous versions did run on Tiger) and it is a Universal Binary. Existing users can install this free update either by using the built-in update check or downloading the DMG from Freeverse.

Do you spend part or all of your time creating resolution-independent graphics for the Web? If you do, then you're probably familiar with Opacity. It's a powerful tool for creating icons or other graphic elements that are designed for viewing on a screen rather than on paper.

The developer of Opacity, Like Thought, LLC, is now shipping version 1.1 of their app. Opacity 1.1 requires Mac OS X 10.5.2 and has a redesigned interface with a new grid and dynamically generated images in the toolbar. To make life easier for new users of Opacity, Like Thought also added a "How To" screencast and four new templates.

The biggest addition to Opacity 1.1 is support for SVG vector graphics for the Web. Opacity creates reusable workflows called factories, which now support such cool features as gamma stripping in PNG images, automatic uploading to Web sites using Cyberduck, and multi-page PDF images.

If you own Opacity 1.0, this is a free upgrade. A demo is available for download, and you can purchase Opacity for $89.

Rumors of Freehand's demise have been raised and squashed before, but now it's official. Gruber points to this notice that Adobe has canned further development Freehand in favor of Illustrator. Adobe is offering some discounts on Illustrator for registered owners of Freehand, as well as some tutorials aimed at helping folks move over, but they will not be offering any further updates to Freehand. Apparently in an effort to capitalize on annoyance of longtime Freehand users, Freeverse is offering a discount on their competing vector graphics package Lineform. Just enter code "freehand" to get $30 off the regular price of $79.95 until June 1st. This looks like a great deal on Lineform; even if it's not quite as powerful as Illustrator, it's still a substantial vector graphics application for about $50.

[via The Apple Blog]

We've mentioned Lineform a couple of times, but the newly released version 1.3 of Freeverse's Illustrator alternative vector illustration program adds a significant new feature: PDF import and editing. You can now directly import a PDF into Lineform, resize it, and mark it up with the standard Lineform drawing tools. Other new features include improved SVG support and 256000% (!) maximum zoom.

Lineform remains $79.95 and a demo is available.

[Via Daring Fireball]

Everyone knows about GIMP, the open source graphics editor that competes with Photoshop for editing bitmap images, or images with "pixels in a bitmap." But what if you need a free program that can work with vector-based images, such as those that Adobe Illustrator builds?  Inkscape is an open source vector graphics editor that runs in the X11 environment compatible with Windows, Linux, and Mac OS X.

Inkscape can import many and work with many of the common graphics formats, such as JPEG, PNG and TIFF, and can export as PNG and many of the common vector-based graphics formats.

GIMP and Inkscape combined can offer many of the same capabilities of their much more expensive cousins Adobe Photoshop and Illustrator. If you're looking to build a graphic design machine on the cheap, you should at least check out these open source programs. They may just suit your needs.