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Initial Review of Microsoft's Acrylic BETA
Geuis writes "I'll admit, I'm not a big Microsoft fan. I'm an old-time user of Adobe Photoshop, and I love nearly everything it can do. However, in the interest of science, I decided to try out the new beta for Microsoft's answer to Photoshop, Acrylic.
My review is posted on my blog.
Final recommendation: Stay as far away from Acrylic as you can. It needs so much development work done, it shouldn't be out of Alpha testing. If this is anywhere close to the final product they are planning to release, then Microsoft should be prepared to eat another few million in lost development funds. There's no reason you should have to eat it too."
What utter crap, that guy has no clue about what Acrylic is meant for, and keeps comparing it with Photoshop (it's like comparing apples and oranges). And ofcourse, his utter prejudice against MS doesn't help, either.
I'm not a particularly big fan of MS, but having seen Acrylic, I can assure you that that guy has no clue about what he's talking about.
Anyway, I wrote a detailed rant in reply to his blog entry.
Man, since when did Slashdot starting posting ridiculous reviews from Joe Schmoe off the street?
Will it run on wine?
GETPKG - Package Management for Slackware
If he cant download a file successfully, how can you trust his review?
I messed with it the other day myself.
Photoshop competitor? Hardly.
Nifty little tool? Sure.
This article? Jumping to conclusions based on a beta showing that doesn't even pretend to be anything more than a test run.
I don't understand why Slashdot (a place I like to think of being pretty well grounded in approaches to technology reviews) has gotten caught up in this blog nonsense. Blogs are not news. This guy who wrote this review is a nobody, and as prior replies to this posting say there are tons of flaw by the "author." Could we have a return to posting articles by real journalists in magazines with real editors? Come on Slashdot editors, don't buy into this blogosphere crap! :)
The reviewer obviously rode the short bus to school. For starters, they complain about being unable to download the file, it got corrupted, etc. I had no such troubles, obviously their computer or internet connection has issue.
THEN, we hear about a few lame attempts to use bitmap functions of the product, comparing it to Photoshop. Not one word about the vector functions. Come on! This isn't going to be a Photoshop replacement. The whole point of Acrylic is drawing clean vector-based objects with a pressure sensitive digitizer.
My review of the reviewer? Stay away from their blog at all costs.
Vector based and pixel based image editing is so completely different, both from a design and mathematical standpoint, it's no surprise that Microsoft's slap-dash attempt at combining both editors into one package failed. Even a company like Adobe would be hard pressed to make such a package. MS needs a lot more experience before pulling this off successfully.
And sometimes it takes them 20 years, and they still don't get it right.
My other Sig is
Microsoft's Acrylic is based off of "Creature House Expression", which they recently acquired. As it turns out, the software isn't all that similiar to Photoshop, most of the tools are actually vector based. Read a short review of the original Creature House Expression here.
I just using it to edit/store small .BMP files ;)
I call DUPE!
5 5&tid=109&tid=152&tid=185&tid=1
http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/06/10/15502
BTW, the "type text in image" thing still sucks...I'd start looking for something (maybe even open source) that doesn't.
I thouhgt all software will have its own constituency of people it satisfies no matter how good or unfinished or unpolished it is...just like Linux distros do satisfy some. So why go on advising a potential customers to like "Stay as far away from Acrylic as you can...?" This is not fair.
The reviewer complains that his Photoshop plugins didn't work when he put them in the Acrylic folder. Did he seriously expect them to? I mean, that might be the dumbest reason not to like a product that I've ever heard...
My Systems
I am no fan of Microsoft, but having done support for them I know how whiny and unyeilding their customers can be.
they want a small app that will fit on a floppy, backwards compatibly with EVERYTHING, bug free out of the box, have perpetual support, and they want the damned thing to get up and dance a jig.
MS may be a monopolistic greedy bloodsucker, but they do not deserve all the bashing they get for the software they actually design themselves
Talking to Geeks is like eating jello with a chainsaw, interesting, but painful.
...should simply not be allowed to be posted here; magazines make a point of not doing it, so should websites. We all seen those articles in the past slating graphics cards before helpfully pointing out that the drivers are still being working on and this doesn't seem any different.
While I wouldn't expect Microsoft to touch Photoshop with a beta version of a graphics package, I'd prefer to reserve judgement until the packages is shrink wrapped on the shelves. As it stands, it's a cheap shot at Microsoft which is undeserved, especially if you consider the large number of open source projects which are continually being worked on that would be equally at home under the label 'dodgy beta'.
People - Microsoft included - that put betas out tend to do so for constructive criticism, not for review.
The writer seemed unclear as to what this software is for. It is not, as he says, "Microsoft's answer to Photoshop." It's more like Microsoft's answer to Illustrator.
Except it's not that either. It's a repackaging of some software they bought a couple years ago called Expression, which is to Illustrator as Corel/FractalDesign Painter is to Photoshop. That is, not really a competitor, more like a companion that specializes in natural media.
Granted, MS might be confusing the situation by trying to make the software do too much (red eye removal in a vector software? er, OK), but this isn't meant to be a Photoshop competitor at all.
// I will show you fear in a handful of jellybeans.
Microsoft's first two versions of any product always sucks. Why should this be any different.
So it can blow?
Take the cheese to sickbay, the doctor should see it as soon as possible - B'Elanna Torres, "Learning Curve"
Grandparent:
The first two versions of ANY product always suck, if you consider an alpha build a full-fledged product.
Parent:
IE is at 6+ and it still sucks.
Well, that doesn't change the fact that the first two versions of IE sucked, dude. ^_^
As an avid user of photoshop, and someone who is generally unfriendly to MS even I must say that this review is total crap. After reading this review I have no idea what features Acrylic has really, the only things compared are the brushes, image navigation, and plugins.
What about things like how it performs in a digital camera workflow, prepress workflow, web design workflow, etc. I have no idea from this how this program handles color spaces, vectors, or myriad other features. Hell, this review doesn't even mention how well it supports type.
The lack of discussion regarding acrylic's vector capabilities is the most damning thing since acrylic uses a ton of code from an acclaimed vector program (Creature House Expression) Microsoft bought from another company.
I've been waiting for a decent review of Acrylic, but this is not it. It should also be mentioned that Adobe Photoshop has a truly massive featureset which almost no one uses in full. It's a bigass swiss army knife with different facets used by different industries. Duplicating the functionality of such a program should take a VERY long time, give MS a little break here.
Photos.
You'd think, but Microsoft seem pretty good at fucking up someone elses codebase. They took VirtualPC 5.2 from Connectix and managed to break half of it without any major changes. I tried VPC 2004 from MSDN, laughed, and decided we'd stick with the "old" Connectix version and maybe look at "Microsoft" Virtual PC in 12 months time. Maybe they'll have it back to the same state it was in two years ago by then?
As opposed to the professional journalists from CNET, ZDNet, and slashdot itself? Given a choice between John C. Dvorak's latest bowel movement of a story and some idiot blogger's "reviews," I'll take the reviews.
there's more than one way to do me.
...and it never was. This began its life as Expression by a company called Creature House. Microsoft bought the company to get access to the unbelievably cool vector editing capabilities of Expression, likely for use in Longhorn's Avalon UI. Acrylic is Microsoft's first release of the app with their branding and small UI changes. Expression never had a good UI to begin with and Microsoft really has done nothing to improve or destroy it. However, this is, and never was a raster editing application. if it were to be compared to anything from Adobe it would be Illustrator.
the torrent. Thanks
Great-Grandparent:
The first two versions of ANY product always suck, if you consider an alpha build a full-fledged product.
GrandParent:
IE is at 6+ and it still sucks.
Parent:
Well, that doesn't change the fact that the first two versions of IE sucked, dude. ^_^
yeah, IE was particularly bad when relaased primarily due to it being "Based on NCSA Mosaic. " [see help->about]
I actually thought MS might have crippled the download at first because I tried it with Firefox. I guess they haven't stooped that low yet.
Err, well, thanks for keeping us up to date on your paranoid fantasies, then.
Acrylic is a piece of crap and I can only describe it as unusable. I haven't seen a program crash and at times freeze like that in a long time. If you enjoy stable quality and easy-to-use software stick with Gimp or settle for Photoshop.
i'm glad that it's not meant to be a replacement for microsoft, though, because many PHBs would require that we use this instead of photoshop since microsoft "works well with office".
best college pickem site ever: pickem.terrbear.org
A blog article can be occasionally good. But here's a simple rule that slashdot should use:
"Do not accept an article submitted by its own writer!"
Not perfect, but at least if it's submitted by someone else, the article has got at least one positive independent review.
I for one would never dare submitting my own stuff. The proper way is to do nothing. If it's really good someone else will discover it and submit it to slashdot.
1. "I downloaded the file 3 different times and each time the file was corrupt. " It downloaded fine for me.
2. "There's no way to move around the image easily. No scrolls on the side or bottom. " but in fact there are scrolls on the top and bottom, they just look a little different than the usual scrollbars
3."Another problem is that Acrylic is slow. " but it seemed fast to me.
4. "Overall, there is nothing outstanding about this product at this juncture." but I thought it had a much more intuitive interface and therefore was easier to use than other similiar software packages.
Let's look at the recent timeline:
1. Microsoft introduces betas of Avalon and Metro, vector-based rendering/document tools for developers.
2. World wonders how designers will actually work visually with this stuff.
3. Microsoft gets rolling with a VECTOR-based design tool, using Expression as a head start.
Shouldn't take a blog "review" to put it together from here... Frankly, it could be a lot of damn cool possibilities if this is done right.
There is no reason to waste your time to read that review. The reviewer could not even download properly, when most of us had absolutely no troubles with it at all. He compared Acrylic with the wrong product. He missed the point of vector graphics. He wastes online space by wrting craps. If there is a way to vote on how useful the review it is. I will vote that review as absolutely stupid and unhelpful.
I just saw "Revenge of the Silt" or whatever it's called, and I didn't like it one bit. I don't see wy everyone is carrying around light sticks when phasers are clearly superior, and what's with that short green dude? Is he some sort of third Klingon race? He's got the forehead right, but the skin color and the height are major issues for me.
And what's with this "Force" thing? I guess everyone is now hopped up on that chemical from "Plato's Shepchildren" and it's flying' furniture everywhere! I though that only worked on the one planet...?
And haven't these people heard of Transporters? I mean gag me with a tribble! My advice: Stay as far away from this movie as you can.
I'll admit, I'm not a big C|Net fan. I'm an old-time user of Usenet, and I love nearly everything it can do. However, in the interest of scoring troll points, I decided to try out the new blogs-as-news posting for Slashdot's answer to news, Initial Review of Microsoft's Acrylic BETA. My review is scribbled with crayon on my chest. Final recommendation: Stay as far away from /. as you can. It needs so much editing done, it shouldn't be out of 8th grade. If this posting is anywhere close to the next one they are planning to release, then /. should be prepared to eat more lost respect, page hits and ad revenue. There's no reason you should have to eat it too, whatever that means.
To confirm I'm not a script, GFBAVBA.
That's the error message that I get all the time when trying to use filters in Acrylic. What a POS!
Yeah
Any attempt to upgrade the basic paint program that comes bundled with windows is a good idea.
God spoke to me.
News at 11. News for nerds, stuff that splatters.
Web2.0: I love when people Flickr my cuil and digg my boingboing until my google is reddit and I start to yahoo
It needs so much development work done, it shouldn't be out of Alpha testing. If this is anywhere close to the final product they are planning to release, then Microsoft should be prepared to eat another few million in lost development funds.
Actually, if he was able to do everything that it offered to do, and the only nuisance was that it was slow, then it pretty much qualifies as a beta, and that's only if they plan to address the problem before the gold release.
Oh, you mean it doesn't do everything under the sun that the user may have wanted? Yeah, that's a problem, but it's because it's a "1.0 release", not because it's an alpha, beta or gold.
For few versions of MS Office, Microsoft included a nifty picture editor. Its functions were very basic but it was very handy. In the latest version of office the editor was removed. My suspicion is that Acrylic will replacement it in the next version of office.
I use photoshop constantly and it's the best! But, it's also very expensive and it takes years to master. Acrylic is not up to par.
Acrylic will be just one more application in MS office and its functionality is good enough. Photoshop has nothing to worry about now but in time most ms office users will have not need to buy photoshop and Adobe will have to lower the price of photoshop and improve the user interface for simplicity to stay alive.
Microsoft's goal to get people to upgrade will be met and continue its revenue steam.
There's a reason why Microsoft dominates. They know how to compete. In there view Tech advancement is not their first goal. Their first goal is to sell one more version of MS office. They've done that for over 10 years by adding applications and functionality to Office not necessarily advancing technology.
I remember the first IE version. It wasn't based on NCSA Mosaic, it was a blatant rip-off of NCSA Mosaic. They just changed the icons.
The screen shot looks more like the notoriously bad ColorStudio interface, back from the days of Photoshop 1.0. Now that's really awful, not being as good as v1.0 products in a market that's up to v8.0 or more.
The phrase written in the back of the App window is "ABET" as in aiding and abetting a monopoly.
Nuff said.
** A Sketch a Week **
http://www.sketchplease.com
Obviously one of the mods today has a double recessive in his/her sarcasm gene.
Karma: Chameleon - mostly influenced by bad '80s New Wave music
I know, I know. I should be testing this out myself, but the only 2k box I have at home is a 450mhz pos with not nearly enough space to work with. My question about this is generally concerned with how it "requires" windows xp sp2 to install and was wondering if this was going to be another xp-forced install (thanks for thinking to older customers ms!).
I know a lot of places that have powerful machines still running on win2k (out of spite I assume) which I guess would exclude them from this in the future if this is indeed XP++ required.
[!] No, I can't see my comments. They are not worthy of +3 moderation.
And therein lies the problem. It was a fine-working crossplatform app. It is that no more.
And what has the red-eye tool got to do with Avalon? That in itself is a tell-tale sign of a "photo-managing" app. I'll bet you a beer this is being pitted against iPhoto/iLife.
For what it's worth, I was curious enough to get a throw-away Passport.net, managed to download it easily enough, installed it... and couldn't get the app to do anything beyond showing the splash screen and a few tool palletes (no parent window with aa menu). I used a reasonably current and vanilla WinXP system with plenty of RAM, and even rebooted, then disabled a bunch of background processes, with no luck. {shrug}
http://alternatives.rzero.com/
I have used Expression since the 1.0 version was released as demoware back when Metacreations owned it.
;). But, seriously, the program is an early beta that is going to be different than the 3.x version.
Since Creature House bought it back and since MS bought CH, I've had a chance to putz around with the program to see what is up.
Similarly, I've used Photoshop since v.3. Heck, I used version 4 for years without once regretting that I didn't upgrade.
The point in mentioning these things is that I can tell you what kind of Photoshop user that reviewer is and that he didn't even break the surface of Acrylic.
He's one of those Photoshop users who thinks PS is all about the plug-ins and about cutting and pasting images together. I'd wager he's never created anything from scratch in PS besides maybe a beveled button for his crappy website, circa 1997.
Two, even though Expression was in Beta when Creature House was bought by MS, it is a complete program...now. It is a general purpose illustration program...now. It can be used to create the sweetest vector lines...now. What MS is doing is adding raster pixel editing functions. The chances that MS Paint code is being chunked into the Acrylic program are pretty good
The reviewer's problem is that he is so used to PS making whatever he does easy for him that he's never had to use an illustration program. He probably can't draw or design to save his life. He probably hasn't done photo processing in a darkroom before. He's probably never used any of PS's tools to work on a blank document, starting with nothing. And ending up with something except the aforementioned website button...Start with a rectangle and fill...
He also didn't take the time to realize that the program's zoom i/o feature makes more sense than any other graphics program and gives you precise and dynamic info on the page size and zoom percentage. I'd love that GUI option in *any* program I use. It is a good use of the mouse or stylus. It is like dialing up or down....
Now...
I hate MS and I hate the notion that they might think that they can just buy their way into a market. Or that any market with some growth potential is a market that it must dominate. That's bullsh1t! They should innovate and create new markets instead of trying to play catchup, lock-in and smash.
I'll forgive MS for not releasing a Mac version of Acrylic because I have Expression 3.x, gratis courtesy MS.
But, that reviewer is a chump. The kind of chump you use to make examples of for future generations who you don't want to see resort to chumpery.
I would advise that likewise, the same is true today, though it is certainly changing for the better. Within our "community", it is still PC to bash Microsoft because that is what is expected.
Microsoft, within the past couple of months, has changed its business tactics from spreading FUD, as has been shown in the Halloween Documents (BTW, have these been shown to be anti-MS FUD?), to recognizing the validity of it's opensource competition.
Perhaps we as a community should extend the same professional courtesy, for once? No more anti-Microsoft FUD ...
Kris Kerwin
kkerwin@insi__REMOVE_ME__ghtbb.com
Kris Kerwin kkerwin@insi__REMOVE_ME__ghtbb.com
Wow, what a crappy article.
.. or something along those lines".
.tif, .jpg, .bmp, .png, & gif as well as Illustrator and .pdf files.
But I've never heard of this before, so it piqued my interest. I downloaded it (I think it's 'code name acrylic' so the final product name will probably be something like "Microsoft Vector Artist
Fair warning I am not a graphic artist, but I dabble a little. A lot during school, much less so now.
Anyways, the bloggers comments aren't accurate - the UI seems familiar enough if you've ever used Adobe Illustrator or Corel Painter you'll have no time getting around. There are some variations on the usual 'windows UI' - but they're more inline with other graphical editors (eg. As is customary the mouse scroll button zooms etc..)
It can export to
I really liked the behaviour of the freehand pen, the visual cue of seeing the harline withing the preview over where the ink will go is a feature more drawing progams should incorporate. I also like the option to toggle 'highlight new path' maybe there's a way to do that in illustator but I haven't figured it out - and it's a design flaw that bothers me when drawing a series of lines tightly packed.
I'd like to try this with a tablet. Some programs really behave better (What would be perfect for me is to have the width bahaviour be modifed by the stoke speed). Draw fast=thinniner, slowly draw = fat line, sit there the ink should 'bleed' a bit.
*** Things I didn't like,
Not enough variation in some of their built-in strokes. The titular 'Acrylic' stokes look way too alike, it's distracting for the tails of a 'natural media' stroke to look so identical.
*** I couldn't find a color mixer or a way to change the 'canvas' type.
*** some of the behaviours of the gradiant on a stroke seemed confusing. Is it 'head to tail'? why is it when I mix up the order of storke directions some are 'black to white' and other 'white to black'? This is probably because it's beta, so I can be pretty forgiving of that (at least it didn't crap out).
All in all pretty solid for a beta, I'm curious to see what the final product is like.
I've took a look at the screenshot and I think that even GIMP looks more user friendly!
Cheers,
RoadkillBunny
This guy who wrote this review is a nobodybr>
And is better when Bill Gates - he is somebody - says somthing like "Technology X is going to fail, use instead Microsoft products"?
It's not importat who is talkin, but what is saying.
My city: Barcelona.
1. Write about a new product or software release.
/.
2. Portray Microsoft negatively.
3. Portray Firefox positively.
4. Claim that MS is trying to sabotage Firefox users.
Welcome to
IMO, Acrylic will be a replacement for MS Paint, given that Paint is totally ridiculous today.
I wonder if this reviewer was smart enough to realize that Download Accelerator Plus (that little lightning bolt in his task tray) cripples 70% of your downloads. Also it's ridden with spyware. This review is rediculous. How did it get posted?
Ok, wait a second and enlighten my darkened and not really fast mind. /. its revolutionary feature stands in the fact it combines raster and vector editing in one single software.
I didn't really followed the Acrylic/Expression development, but from what I heard here on
Now, what's the damned point in this?
In my little opinion, the whole thing is useless. I was perfectly fine with having separate programs for raster and vector editing, and absolutely no need to mix them.
nbody2002:If you can read this you may be addicted to the internet
--rant--
I think what's most annoying with blogs and bloggers is that his blog has so few visitors or whatever that he feels a need to post this himself on Slashdot, proudly thinking he had written an insightful and newsworthy review. Of course he do, he think his blog is about "smart words, interesting ideas" after all. Then the bright editors here of course include it without even looking at the quality of the submission (or maybe it's because it piss on Microsoft, I don't care and it doesn't matter), and voila -- strike one for the blog community.
When in reality he was just having a fun time bashing an application without even seemingly knowing the purpose of it.
If the blog community continues to grow and influence / stupidify the web like it's doing now, and sneaking up with their personal, biased, unprofessional, comments at high rankings on Google thanks to their interlinking system (how else will people find their thoughts in the noise they're their own creators of?), with bloggers posting their own blogs as news submissions and getting accepted, we'll one day look at journalism in newspapers by educated and analyzing journalists and writers trying to stay unbiased, as the good old days. Yes, even there, there may be some decaying going on, but at least there are still some quality news sites out there.
Don't get me wrong, free speech is a great thing and bloggers are great at making use of this freedom, just saying the signal to noise ratio was bad on the web to begin with, and I don't feel this stuff is making it any better. I wish I could just avoid it, but when every other news item here tend to be from a blogging dude feeling important, and same with search engine results, it just start getting on my nerves.
It's a bit scary too -- one of Sweden's largest newspapers has recently degraded into having more blogs where instead of having their journalists spending time making well written and researched articles, they just blurt out about whatever is on their mind for the moment and hit "Submit". And some people seem to think this is the coolest thing to happen since sliced bread on the web.
Beware: In C++, your friends can see your privates!
I seem to recall a custom version of the GIMP that attempted to make the interface behave more like photoshop, et al
can't remember the name of it at the moment however
Gekido's Lair
...this doesn't make it into Longhorn, either.
She's allergic to acrylic.
loololololololol they diddnt weven maek it themsleves!!!!!!!!1111111111111
I don't even have to download the program to see that it sucks. That UI is one of the worst I have ever seen. It's like one of those Chinese organizers you buy at a Buck or Two for $2.99.
Photoshop or not, you have to at least try to make the buttons and icons usable. And what's with those palettes? Who needs a palette for the various transform commands? I'd go blind searching for the right button in my "Toolbox" window.
IE4 was pretty good
--Mike Perry, Untangling Tolkien
Yeah, sure, it sucks... as it all does from Microsoft... however... :-D
Let's look at this, Microsoft has made a product that is actually new and innovative
Okay, it's a beta, and it sucks? No it doesn't the writer doesn't know where the buttons are, and what they will do.
Take the comparison photoshop gimp. I only know gimp, and I guess the change from gimp to photoshop will take a little more time then 3 clicks to see where everything is.
Conclusion:
$bad review.
$Microsoft is doing a good job.
$compare with Gimp!
As that's all I drink ! :)
This Jon Katz article describing slashdot as a "weblog" was the first place I ever saw the term: http://slashdot.org/features/99/05/13/1832251.shtm l
(Yes, that's from 1999, back when two-digit dates were popular.)
I remember because I found the term confusing and thought it should be the log of a webserver. Thankfully, the abbreviation "blog" came along eventually and prevented further confusion.
(Reality reasserts itself sooner or later.)
learn the difference
Acrylic is pretty nice for making quick sketches, like caricatures, and having them look like pen and ink.
Is it to a threat to Photoshop? Hell no. It's a threat to Paintbrush.
That said, it's kinda neat. I'll look at it again once they finish it. Microsoft's stuff is so committee-driven that it's very rare for them to come out with anything even this neat.
Intolerance for ambiguity is the mark of the authoritarian personality.
Does MS make anything BUT beta/alpha software anymore. Every POS they release is always beta. Not that their final versions aren't any less beta.
And what the fuck is with the confirmation image bullshit? I don't mind typing in the stuff, but this shit isn't even readable. Same then when i signed up for a new hotmail account to collect spam.
There's no consensus on the definition of a blog, but Slashdot is not a blog in any meaningful sense of the word. Things may appear on it in chronological order, but apart from that there is little about it which is blog-esque.
A blog-esque Web site consists of postings representing the views and thoughts of an individual, or tiny group. Not so with Slashdot.
Slashdot represents the views of the editors in what they consider 1)Nerdy and 2)Newsworthy.
AND they add lil' comments to the articles letting us know how they feel about it.
P.S. Stop making up fugly words like blog-esque.
You can't take the sky from me...
He's actually running it on a 3Ghz AMD Box!
Mozilla stole tabs from NetCaptor. So what? Right?
I mean, I know /. is anti-Microsoft, but this is just drivel. Did you guys post this just because it was a negative review?
What the fuck has happened to this industry? The bias is sickening, whether it be for or against Microsoft, open source, or whatever.
What happend to the real geeks that can look at something and judge it by merit?
This guy may not be aware, but in the latest major PS release (cs2) has a redeye tool.
You keep bitching at this guy for saying that acrylic sucks, and that acrylic isn't beta quality, and that it needs generations of work, but not before you say, that you can't compare them BECAUSE ACRYLIC NEEDS WORK. My god maybe photoshop sucked once, but it doesn't suck now. Acrylic DOES suck now. At the end of the blog, the guy says MS is targeting low end users, but that it would be too complicated for them, and now you say he has no clue what it is meant for? Please enlighten me Mr. Metlin.
and pull down your hat, my spidey-senses suggest the MShills are gonna jump all over this thread like flies on...stuff that draws flies!
You can save to the non MS EXP format.. just choose export...
Come on man at least look to see if MS screwed it up some other way and did something half assed... Either they forgot to give you options in the save dialoge or they forgot to disable that feature in the export for the beta. The only way it does make sense is so that new users do not end up with 20 types of the same image file... But with the interface as clunky as it is, this program does not appear to be for new users. This program makes the GIMP interface look good... I will stick with Photoshop...
---In a time of Chimpanzees I was a Monkey.
I think that's highly unlikely. Vector manipulation, which is the fundamental strength of Acrylic, has very little utility for photos. There are no user-friendly tools for auto-adjustment or balance. And there is absolutely no "management" function whatsoever. MS may very well bundle such a utility, but this is not it.
If you don't know where you are going, you will wind up somewhere else.
I'm an avid photoshop user (pro even, wooo...), but the kludgy photoshop interface that scatters mouse buttons onto the keyboard instead of keeping them on the mouse (eg click for one function, shift-click for another, etc) means it does not translate as seamlessly as other apps do to some of the evolutions in interface technology that have occurred since photoshop began - photoshop only really works if you're using something very similar to the mouse+keyboard interface that the early versions were designed for.
I draw on a tablet-PC for some production, and the problem with photoshop of course, is that it needs a keyboard in tandem with the wacom pen, so I can't fold the keybaord away and use the tablet-PC like a sketchpad if I'm using photoshop. (Ok, technically I can, since the tablet-PC offers a virtual keyboard option, but it's a workaround for photoshop's interface, not a fix).
My suspicion, even though I have not heard of Acrylic until this moment, and that I am pulling out of my ass, is that MS will be making this drawing app such that in addition to whatever they're trying to acheive with it, it is better suited to the modern pen interface than photoshop, thus killing an extra bird with one stone - making the tablet-PC even more attractive as an art machine / sketchpad.
Any other tablet-PC users here tried Acrylic yet?
Sorry, but I have to make fun of this guy:
"I think I should expand a bit on my definition of Alpha, and Beta. Generally:
Alpha:
Features aren't set, features can be added, dropped, etc.
Beta:
Feature set is fixed, and debugging can begin.
As you can see, Beta, can be quite a ways away from production quality. Just ask google."
Right, he can't be more wrong. Don't you love it when people say completely wrong things, and think they sound smart. The internet, sigh. He should ask google, and see about all the new features they added to gmail since the start of beta.
But really, this is a crappy review written by a crappy blogger of a crappy program by a crappy company for a crappy os by the same crappy company. For pete's sake, all you need is a Linux box, the GIMP, and Inkscape. And it doesn't cost you a dime. No need for this sillyness...
No *WAY*!
I guess Win2k users are out of luck. Why do I think that any new software or new versions of existing software will be 'XP or higher' for all future releases?
This was tested on a 3ghz AMD processor with 512mb RAM, and a pretty new graphics card(less than a year old, NVIDIA I believe.)
...Where'd he steal a 3ghz AMD CPU from? Doubt he overclocks; doesn't even know what his graphics card is...
Yes, I do know the meaning of BETA, and at least in the company I work for, beta means FEATURE COMPLETE (buggy and slow, maybe, but the features should all be there). What I see in Beta is pretty much what marketing plans to ship.
If Mickysoft plans to compete with Adobe and Macromedia for the high end market, their product has to be feature complete and really smooth at launch.
If they plan on snarfing up the impecunious designer market, they'll have to compete with Corel's Paint Shop Pro (which has simple vector editing, if I have read the info correctly) and CorelDraw, the GIMP, and a host of other quite capable products.
Yes, I know Acrylic might be favorably compared to what PhotoShop WAS at V1.0, but when Adobe's products came out, there was nothing that could compare with their feature set. If Microsoft wants to enter the market with software that might have been competitive in the 1990s ... it's their money to waste.
It's definitely one of the nicest vector drawing programs I've used on my Mac, works great with the Wacom pressure-sensitive tablet.
Unfortunately, it looks like this version only runs on Windows. Not too surprising, but disappointing, none-the-less.
-Mark
Acrylic should just be renamed to Ugly Grey. The application looks like crap.
This is my sig.
I never quite understood why Microsoft stopped making Photodraw. It was better than a lot of other similar programs in many ways.
I downloaded it yesterday and tried it out... I have to agree, this program in short... sucks. I used Photoshop, Gimp, Fireworks, and while Photoshop is indeed still the king when it comes to graphic editing. Acrylic is nowhere near complete, even the interface needs to be redesigned. The only saving grace to it is the neat pencil tool, that is smooth and gives an artsy vector point in the beginning and end. Something obviously from the drawing aspect of the program in its second reason for existance... to challenge Illistrator.
- Dragonlord Warlock (aka Dion) "So many computers.... so little time...."
released this beta...oh wait a sec, they did, nobody cared, and Microsoft bought them.
I loved Expression when it came out in what, 1996?, it was a cool little utility to use with PhotoShop and Illustrator. As everyone has pointed out.
Microsoft isn't trying to create another PhotoShop, they want to kill off Acrobat. They may say otherwise, but it's killing them. Think of Acrylic as chipping away at the house of Adobe.
who needs this when it's impossible to rival the power of ms paint look at this
Get your torrents...
I would have thought so as well, but then why the red-eye tool?
Does it process 48 bit colour like Photoshop can?
SCIREV.NET - fanfics,reviews & more
Remember this guy?
Clippy! http://photos15.flickr.com/18832781_3459cdb8be.jpg ?v=0
R.
No worries, most people have never heard of it. But it's a damned cool application. Adobe should have bought it when they had the chance, just as they should have bought Painter.
About 6 months ago a few people on the Adobe Forums were wondering about Expression, and I did a quick image to show them.
For the benefit of you folks here I gathered together a couple precursor images, plus 2 screenshots of the image I did and slammed a quick page up on my server. Don't hate me because I suck at building web pages!
THIS PAGE might give you a bit of an idea what's going on with Expression.
My Human Gets Me Blues.
Sometimes I wonder if the only requirement on an article to get posted on /. is that it's anti-Microsoft...
He got flamed on /. for flaming Microsoft!
Strange times.
This review is absurd. I have no idea how it got posted to Slashdot.
He's done the developers of the original Expression a terrible disservice by not even performing a cursory examination of its featureset. As mentioned by many others here who spent enough time to actually learn the purpose of the tool, this is not an image-editing program in the same market space as Photoshop!
What makes Acrylic/Expression novel is not the "redeye" tool (the hell?) but the fact that it is a vector-imaging tool that allows a variety of amazing ways to render natural media (e.g., oils, acrylics) or photographic source material (ropes, chains) along an editable vector curve. This is really, really cool enough on its own, but then these rendered curves can then be rasterized on the fly and blended as though they were native pixels. The blending tools are no Painter 9, but this is a Beta and I'm still impressed.
And his response in the comments is BS. Saying that the review was "fair" for a "first look" at this tool is like saying it would be fair to do a "first look" review of Photoshop and then never use (or even be aware of!) its filters. How fair would a review of Photoshop be if I acted as though all it could do was crop, resize, and rotate the canvas? The heart of Acrylic has been completely missed, ignored, or some combination.
And what does he mean, what is MS "trying to pull"? By letting people play with a technology preview of an innovative piece of illustration software for free? He acts like they owe him something!
I hate Microsoft as much as the next Linux-running coder geek, but alpha/beta/whatever, they're just letting people see and test what they are developing. Even after 20 minutes I could see the interesting new utilities provided by this app without having to accuse MS of attempting to do something ignoble.
John C. Worsley - Artist, Musician, Coder
Portfolio
Anyone remember Digital Darkroom ? - what a marvelous eye-opener it was for someone just making the transition to digital photo manipulation ! And then Photoshop - first release was NOT buggy, had a really intuitive interface, and just worked - never crashed - even with 20 windows open. That's why it became the standard - it just worked. First impressions are important, and this review was just that - a first impression. Depth will come later; first impressions are often what determines the relationship between a user and the application. Why keep on bashing the reviewer when they obviously are giving their FIRST look comments? (IMNSHO, the only remarks regarding the review that make sense are those with contrasting comments regarding a first use of the code) OTOH, M$ does have a long-standing reputation for releasing buggy code to the community in order to find and highlight those bugs - and haven't we all felt like unpaid beta- or even alpha-testers for Redmond ?? Give this 'reviewer' a break.
Is he really that prejudiced? He does after all, use that Windows installation a lot, look at how many desktop icons he has accumulated. Also note that the icon immediately to the right of My Computer is for a game written by Microsoft.
Wouldn't someone who was so prejudiced against Microsoft use its products less rather than more? Why isnt he using linux?
I would like to thank microsoft for
A. continuing development of expression
B. Allowing people to download expression free
Illustrator acutally stole a load of ideas
from expression.
Awful amature slashdotting
I agree with the grandparent post that the linked article is more of a blog comment than a review. In sum, I think he probably got it as a "Microsoft rip-off of Photoshop" not to be taken seriously.
Instead, I suggest you look at the following list. They are more professional and in-depth reviews of Microsoft Expression (formerly Creature House Expression - the basis of Acrylic) by various magazines online:
Notice that Mac version has always been available except for this Beta Acrylic release. So I bet Expression was designed to appeal to artists among the Mac community to begin with.
Expression has made use of a unique technology called Skeletal Stroke (the review by creative.com has some explanation), which adds substance & complexity of raster graphics along vector paths. So I believe this vector drawing & painting package, while not as popular as Adobe Illustrator, has always been targetting a niche market with its own appeal.
In fact, it can produce some of the amazing effect found in Chinese water painting and other fine art drawing handily, even easier than you can do with Illustrator. The downside is a steeper learning curve to tap the full power of this unique & different app.
You can find more tutorials & resources on Expression at Wikipedia
Enjoy!"so and so says microsoft is crap" seems like a lot of these are on /. lately.
Your rant is just as worthless as his review. Thank you for making that clear to us.
A worthwhile reply to his review would have been something a tad bit more substantial than:
You do not know the purpose Acrylic serves nor what it is capable of, and try comparing it with another app that you are used to. And an app that is not even in the same league as Acrylic.
OK, what purpose does Acrylic serve, if you're Mr. Know-It-All? You never tell us. Yeah, that helps.
Or:
In fact, you're not even comparing it against the right application, and you ignore the fact that _you_ are used to Photoshop's UI and features.
Which is the "right" application? Gosh, you don't tell us that, either! What a surprise.
Or this little gem:
My, my! Do you know anything about software product development at all? Almost all good products of any kind take a good many generations to mature.
Maybe he doesn't, maybe he does. You haven't listed your creds, either, so where do you get off copping an attitude?
Dude, before you sprain your arm patting yourself on the back on what a good job you did giving that guy a piece of your mind, you might want to take a couple seconds and realize that your contribution to the whole issue had zero value.
Man, since when did people start believing that pointless, circular, arrogant drivel with zero concrete information was any less ridiculous than "reviews from Joe Schmoe off the street"?
Don't forget, he is using a '3ghz' AMD(with some sort of nVidia card, so it has to be good). It might not be working all that well since he's obviously using a peice of AMD lab test hardware /sarcasm.
Maybe people should make sure they have the most basic knowledge about computers down before making a review about something computing related..
rather good for a 1st time shot, for an almost from-scratch vector program. and do whatever you want with it until the last days of this year. looks like well polished freeware but, besides a few memory flaws, it's VERY FAST. Then again, my laptop has a 256 meg agp graphics card in it.
I would expect any final release of this to pack a lot more features, otherwise, who cares?