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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?
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.
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.
...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.
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.
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".
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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 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 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
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