With the recent announcement that Adobe will not be providing support for Creative Suite 3 (CS3) in Snow Leopard and my waning belief in Adobe’s ability to resurrect Fireworks my interest in alternatives has again be piqued. Back when I wrote my open letter to developers asking for someone to step forward and provide us web designers with a current and solid alternative to Fireworks I looked at Pixelmator, Acorn and Gimp (DrawIt is also worth checking out).

Unfortunately right now none of these packages offer the blend of bitmap and vector tools which Fireworks has always excelled at but a little extra time spent with Pixelmator in particular has me confident that someone, somewhere is not far from providing us with a usable alternative. With the addition of some basic vector tools and the ability to draw and export web slices we’d be pretty much there.

The most recent blog post on the Pixelmator website relating to the upcoming 1.5 release inspires further confidence, the ‘Spider’ codename can only be a reference to web features right? However Saulius from Pixelmator is quick to point out that 1.5 will not include vector tools…

…please don’t expect vector tools in Spider…

Here’s hoping the Pixelmator team keep up the excellent work, if they maintain the development pace they’ve set thus far (4 full point releases in two years) then we might see a release with Vector tools before Fireworks CS5 rears it’s head.