I use illustrator, which works great but I don't think there would be any problem running EQ with Fusion on your Mac. I considered designing a quilt design program for the iPad/iPhone, I write software requirements for a living, figured I could put that skill to use! I guess I should add a mac version.

It's function is more like Visio but it works great for me to do design. I use a little program called OmniGraffle to design quilts on a mac. Maybe we should all suggest that to them!

Maybe EQ will come out with a Mac version soon. There's a very big learning curve to illustrator though. I've even created templates in illustrator. I realize that Illustrator doesn't have quilting features, but it works for me to be able to create blocks, duplicate/rearrange/color/change quickly how I like. I used to solely use pencil and paper, but have now switched to Adobe Illustrator and wish I had done that sooner! (I skill sketch though too, but primarily design in Illustrator). Perhaps if you have more detail on the design problem that you're trying to solve, we can find you more specific suggestions?) (It sounds to me like one of the draws of EQ, is that it'll give you yardage and cutting lists. If I wanted to buy EQ, I'd use VMware Fusion to run it (and I have every reason to think it would work perfectly, on an intel mac) - but, that's power user territory, for sure. However, if you've got blocks on a wall, you can very easily take a photograph copy sections into layers, and rearrange them. Where these approaches are limited is that it's tricky to simulate various types of scrappy combinations. I imagine Adobe Illustrator would be even better, though I'm not a user of it. You can do much worse than using a powerful bitmap graphics program like gimp or Photoshop (I use gimp because it's free, but it essentially covers the Photoshop territory). It would be wonderful if the EQ company would acknowledge that it’s about time to bring out an EQ version for the Apple Mac! So, as I don’t know of any other quilt design programme that’s compatible for the Mac, I use paper and pencil and sometimes I ‘design’ quilts in Quark Xpress. You can have Virtual PC installed on the Mac so you could use EQ, but my computer analist guy voted against it, it causes lots of problems on the Mac and I need it to work smoothly for my graphic design work.

I’m a Mac user too and all I know is that Electric Quilt is designed for Windows. I'd like to design wonky blocks and quilts with non traditional layouts. Does anybody have a good recommendation for quilt designing software for a Mac? I have no idea what to choose and would love some insight.

Alternatives to electric quilt 7