I’m working on a redesign of EagerEyes, and while I have some reasonable tools, things still take way too long. I know that designers like PhotoShop, but I don’t have that, and it’s out of my price range. PhotoShop Elements is too limited in the functions I’d need (I have an older version of that that I never use).

My main tool right now is Acorn, which has most of the features I need, but it also lacks a lot of convenience. There is no way to group layers, making it hard to keep an overview when trying out lots of things. It also requires a few additional steps for inner shadows (which I may or may not use in my redesign ;), etc.

The tool that would be perfect for my purposes in theory is DrawIt, which is a vector-oriented tool that can also do pixel-stuff like apply CoreImage filters. It takes some getting used to, but it’s really powerful and has some incredible workflow features. The main downside is that its text rendering is really ugly, and it doesn’t look like there’s a fix in sight.

I also have a license for VectorDesigner, but there are some issues with getting that to really do what I want it to. I need to play with that a bit more, though.

Is there some other tool that’s used by designers, runs on a Mac, and is affordable? I need mostly pixel-oriented stuff, but a hybrid like DrawIt would be great, too. Any suggestions?