Bohemian Coding has introduced Sketch 1.0 (http://www.bohemiancoding.com/sketch), a vector drawing application for Mac OS X 10.6 and higher. Its intentionally minimalist design is based upon a drawing space of unlimited size and layers, free of palettes, panels, menus, windows, and controls.

Tools and modifiers are accessed as needed from drop-down graphical menus, and help/control dialogues open and close automatically. Sketch offers vector drawing and text tools and can be used in conjunction with the company's bit-mapped graphics editor, DrawIt for Mac OS X, as well as the portable SketchPad app for iPad.

In addition to a wide of object creation tools, Sketch features a host of object modification tools. These include: precise Boolean operations, join & split, decorate, transform, scissors, rotate, smart rotate, stroke width, patch, blob, eraser, distort, and mirror. Of special interest are dynamic Boolean operations on groups of vectors rather than complete shapes, and smart rotate which allows multiple copies of a layer to be rotated around a point. The application also has text handling, allowing: text on path, user-definable text styles, kerning, leading, stroke, fill, and inner and outer shadow.

Sketch 1.0 costs US$55. A free 15-day trial version is available for download.