Review: Top 3 FREE Graphic Utilities For Macintosh.

The Mac platform has more than its share of great graphic applications. Can you say P-h-o-t-o-s-h-o-p? There’s Fireworks from Macromedia (not to mention Flash and Freehand), Graphic Converter, Canvas, Photoshop Elements and ImageReady, and many more, specialized graphic applications; both vector and bitmap.

Here’s the Top 3 FREE Graphic Utilities for Mac. Not including a good one from Apple nemesis Microsoft.

Free Ruler
If you do graphics and you don’t have Free Ruler, please get it and thank me later. Send money.

Every Mac user that works with pixels on screen and needs to measure distance from point A to point B will instantly recognize the value of Free Ruler.

It’s a ruler. It measures pixels. It works. It’s FREE. Click Here to check it out.

iPick
This is one from previous lists of “must have” Mac applications. If you care about color on graphics and/or web pages, you’ll find iPick will be a tool you can’t live without.

iPick is especially handy for web page graphic designers. Getting those HTML colors in a hurry is important, making sure the colors match well with others (like a color wheel) is important, and the FREE price is important.

Click Here to take a look at iPick. All it needs is an eyedropper and it would be the perfect FREE graphic application.

Pixen
This one is new to my list. The more I work on graphics, the more of a pixel pusher I become. That means blowing up bit map graphics, vector graphics, and editing at the pixel level. Pixen does that very well. While it’ll work on some larger graphics, it shines on smaller (256x256 pixels) graphics, which are perfect for the web.

Better yet, Pixen is Open Source, so it’s free. It won’t come with tons of extra features and effects and filters (save your money for those utilities), but Pixen pushes pixels around quite well.

Click Here to check the details on Pixen and download. The only drawback I could find was a bit of slowness on larger than 256x256 pixels—even with a dual 2.5 ghz PowerMac.

Microsoft Expression
Not including Internet Explorer, when’s the last time you got something free from Microsoft? Well, if you’re a Windows user you probably said, “Today. Viruses!!“ Or, something resembling a four-letter word with fewer than two syllables.

Expression 3.3, all 55 megabytes of it, is a very decent vector graphics application for the Mac. As you’d expect, the interface is a bit clunky. Well, Windows-like. Even the icon needs work. But Expression does graphics.

As I understand it, Microsoft bought a Hong Kong company, Creature House, that developed Expression. Then it went to Fractal Design (they did Painter, owned by Corel). Then back to Hong Kong, then Microsoft.

As is often the case with Microsoft acquisitions, they don’t have a clue what to do with it so it’s FREE. That works for me. If you’re on a budget and need a graphic app with plenty of tools, and you don’t mind the “odd” GUI, then Expression can do wonders.

Click Here to check out Expression from MacUpdate.

3 great FREE graphic applications for the Mac. 4, if you count Expression. That’s how we review more Mac applications. We cheat on the count.

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