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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."
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.
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.
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.
...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.
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?
Well, it's primarily a vector editing program, you ought to be comparing it against such tools as Macromedia's Fireworks and the like.
Or against Inkscape, which is open-source, and is getting to be a reasonably stable, full-featured piece of software. It runs on Windows and Linux.
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