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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."
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.
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.
Well, it's primarily a vector editing program, you ought to be comparing it against such tools as Macromedia's Fireworks and the like. It has both pixel and vector editing features, but the guy does not explore that aspect at all.
He keeps comparing the pixel editing aspects with photoshop, completely ignoring the other side. And half his/her rant is spent on crazy stuff pertaining to how s/he could not download it?
If you notice, the reviewer has failed to mention vector editing in any form or comparison - makes you wonder if they are even aware of that.
And yes, I agree with you - it's probably nothing more than a stunt by MS, but if you are reviewing a product, at the very least be aware of _what_ you're reviewing it against. If I took up a street Miata prototype and started comparing it against the virtues of Ferrari, folks are gonna laugh at me. Both are entirely different, and made for quite different purposes.
...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.