Rita is similar to Scribbles (and you may have read me boasting about Scribbles) for the Mac: it’s a vector drawing program featuring an infinite canvas. I love the infinite canvas.

Unlike Scribbles, Rita allows you to edit each individual brush stroke and, unless you merge them together, remembers each one (this bogs your machine down while zooming, rotating, etc. but is otherwise a zippy fast app). Rita also allows bitmap imports, so at some point I’m going to be using it to composite PNGs with nice alpha channels (Update: import is fine, alpha channels perfect, ability to rotate individual objects fail: the software will rotate but it resizes at the same time. Doh.)

I’m not sure why I chose green. But it did bring me down the garden path to the Joker’s place.

Get Rita. It’s free until you register and registration is only $20.

I like drawing (duh) and I like computers (really) and yet mixing the two up has been a slow, evolutionary process. From the Koala Pad of the Commodore 64 days to serial and USB mice and back to a drawing tablet in the form of the Wacom Bamboo, the mechanics of computer drawing has been almost as important as the software end of things. Almost.

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The Mac’s dock is a handy shelf you can store icons on – just personalize the space by dragging apps on (or off) it. However, you cannot visually group them. That is, if you wanted to increase the space between your media apps and your web apps to make sure your potatoes don’t touch the apple sauce.

Enter “Dock Dividers” by Brandon Kelly – a clever little end-run around the whole business. Download these icons (which are little vertical or horizontal spacer bars) and simply drag them in where you need’em. The end.

Works in Tiger OS X 10.4 – probably in Leopard, too, but I can’t really tell. I’m stuck in the past, you see.

Did you get a thumbdrive for Christmas? Or have one kicking around, perhaps carrying a few files but otherwise not as useful as first hoped? Put your USB drives to work by using portable apps.

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