I was about to jump ship. I've been using Alias Sketchbook Pro to draw our strip for over a year and half. There is no program that better allows sketching on a computer, but it has limitations and they were getting to me. I had always done postproduction (e.g. filling in gray tones) in Photoshop, but increasingly I have been doing more and more work there.

But my prayers - most of them, anyway - have been answered with Alias Sketchbook Pro 2.0. I knew that had been working on this, and my worry was that they would bloat it out with new features without improving basic functionality. I worried for naught. The new release is as lean as the old one. They just smoothed out the rough spots and made a few crucial improvements that address 90% of my concerns.

My computer is all set up and tomorrow I plan to start drawing next week's strips. Looking forward to it!

Update: Maybe I spoke a little too soon. The changes are all great, but there are still some gaping holes. Performance for large files is still awful, and while Sketchbook can now write multi-layer Photoshop .PSD files, it still can't read them.