Simple graphics on a Mac. Why is that so hard to do?

I don’t want a copy of Photoshop. Its not that I’m cheap (that’s a whole other story!), its just that I don’t like using sledgehammers to kill mosquitoes. I’m trying to do some simple bitmap editing and it has turned into a big headache because it is hard to find a simple graphics editing program.

I was using Pixen which is highly regarded and does just what I need it too. Buuuuuut… I can’t get the program to run more than a few minutes without a crash. And that just really bums me out because it seems like the perfect program. Sadly, I’m not the only one having this problem, posting around the net seem to indicate that this is a common issue.

And unlike Windows, the Mac doesn’t seem to come with any simple programs a-la Paintbrush. What’s up with that? I realize Apple is all about minimal cruft and what-not, but this really takes it to an extreme.

For the moment I’m trying out tileeditor which is a pretty minimal editor, but at the same time seems to work pretty well. (Although as a side note I would like to point out that you need to start the editor in the same directory as your artwork, otherwise it seems to try and save to the wrong directory. Every time I did this is put _tmp and the front of the path, which of course doesn’t exist. I’m not sure if this is a Mac specific thing, but just starting the program in the art directory seemed to get around this issue.)