Pixelmator has earned a following by doing the tasks most people use Photoshop for, but doing them much cheaper. That's truer than it's ever been in the new version 1.4, which adds a new painting engine, new brushes, and support for Photoshop brush formats. If you're a professional photographer, Photoshop CS4 might be worth $700 to you, but if you're someone who just needs powerful drawing and image editing tools, Pixelmator's $60 price tag looks pretty tempting.

With Pixelmator's existing tablet support, and the new brush customization features, you should be able to use Pixelmator for just about any drawing task. It's compatible with practically every image format, and has lots of intuitive little shortcuts that make it behave the way you'd expect from a good Mac app. The main gripe I've seen from commenters on the Pixelmator blog is the lack of a Photoshop-like "save for web" feature. Word on the street is that it will implemented in the next version, but that one feature should hardly deter you from checking out this great app.