I recently found a little gem in the ever-growing list of software of the Apple site. DrawBerry is a free vector graphics editor for OS X. It has a slick, Pixelmator-like interface and is pretty easy to use. It’s not as powerful as Inkscape, but it’s much more lightweight and it’s very easy to use. Some features to note are, layers, opacity, blending modes, history, fill shapes with images, SVG support, shape alignment tool, and much more. Check out the video below, and screenshots to get a closer look.

DrawBerry from Jay Hilgert on Vimeo.
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Its time for some more free stuff everyone, and I have a good little giveaway for you! The kind folks over at Electric Rain have offered up 3 copies of Swift3D V5 ($249 value each) to 3 lucky BittBox commenters. If you’re not familiar with Swift3D, it’s a very powerful 3D modeling/animation software that makes it super easy and fast to create stunning 3D animations and import them directly into Flash without writing a single line of code. Even if you don’t win, enter the promotional code “BITTBOX” to save 15% off the regular price. Details and more on the software after the jump.

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Some of you may have noticed that Leopard’s finder doesn’t really like EPS files. Its a huge inconvenience to have to open a file just to see what’s in it, and if you’re at all like me, you have a hard drive full of downloads that need to be browsed once in a while. Never fear, EPSQuickLookPlugin is here to help. It’s a (freeware) plugin for QuickLook, that allows you to view the contents of an EPS file (in Finder and QuickLook) without opening an application. Now that’s gonna save me about 500 hours per year, I’d guestimate.

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Liquid Resize is a content aware image resizer that allows yo to resize images without the typical restrictions of the aspect ratio. You can download Liquid Resize as a standalone application for product review purposes from onOne Software, but in it’s final form, Liquid Resize is slated to be a Photoshop Plugin. (pricing not yet released) Even if you hate demo versions, the trail period is 3 months, and it’s fully functional, meaning you can save your images without watermarks and such.

[via: PhotoshopNews] [image by: bryce_edwards]

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I’m rather sad to be reporting this one, but Vector Magic, the awesome free online vectorizing service is no longer free. It looks like the creators behind the service have left Stanford to make a desktop version of the popular software, which will be selling for a price that has yet-to-be-decided. Personally, I prefer Vector Magic over Live Trace in Illustrator, but that may change if the price isn’t right. Vector Magic is a single-function software. It’s nice, but It only does one thing. I can’t see myself paying more than $50 for a software that only does one thing, but I guess we’ll have to wait and see what happens.

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