Slashdot Mirror
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."
Then what is it for? The whole point of going to beta is that it has some end-user function. If it's still locked into a proprietary file format, it doesn't offer anything. I've downloaded it already, and although it is kind of nice that MS is offering something slightly better than Paint, it doesn't offer anything good in the long run. It would appear that MS is trying to show that it is trying to improve, rather than doing the work itself.
As far as your accusation that he has no idea what he's talking about, his points are valid. What is honestly the point of Acrylic other than showing off MS's lack of vector graphics editors? It doesn't do anything. And besides, it's just going to expire in a few months. This is just another MS attempt to shove something under our noses that is not worthwile and then yank it back when it actually turns into a reasonable program. MS could easily have given us a JPEG exporter or the like, but they did not. This is all just a media blitz.
Due to financial difficulties, the light at the end of the tunnel has been turned off.
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
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.
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.
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.
Yes. Some class snippets in his own blog:
s p?id=15353
Read that review in which a graphics pro a) takes the time to learn it and b) does a critical analysis of the app.
Yes it's different than photoshop. It is different than Illustrator. It is different than [insert other graphics app here] It is a unique product.
What you probably do not realize is that Acrylic is based on Creaturehouse Expression 3.3 which is generally regarded to be a pretty good, innovative graphics app. http://www.creativemac.com/articles/viewarticle.j
It's obvious you have NO CLUE about this app or how to use it. And no, you can't save only as an XPR file type. Why don't you go back to the drawing board and pay attention. And finally, this isn't competing against your Adobe product, so you might as well take THAT out of the equation. PS...read the release notes about performance...THEN post a real blog.
Your extreme anti-MS bias destroys what might otherwise have been a useful overview. You 'reviewed' only the pixel editing half of this program -- to the point that one wonders if you are even aware of its vector-editing features. You completely miss the unique strength provided by integrated vector and pixel editing which is the basis for its claim to fame. You compare it soley to Photoshop yet it compares much more directly to Macromedia's Fireworks, a pixel & vector editor. Incidentally, Fireworks is seldom seen as a Photoshop competitor nor visa versa.
This is what is wrong with the blogging world. There is no way to keep people like you from making complete fools of themselves. Your review is total garbage. You have not gained the right to review anything other than the smell of your own farts. Stop being such a troll...you retard.
I would be ashamed at having such valid points in my own blog.
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
UID 703910 says Slashdot is not a blog in any meaningful sense of the word.
When Slashdot first appearer it was clearly the type of site that people called "weblogs". Just some links and minimal comment functionality.
The comment functionality got beefed up, and some blogs became more substance-oriented, but the weblog roots of this site really show through (especially when compared to BBS sites.)
Business. Numbers. Money. People. Computer World.
You know if you read the forums you can see alot of the beta testers don't like the pixel painting parts of this program. Everyone seems to agree that its really only good at vecotrs.
From my experience its an excellent vector based editor but as for the pixel aspects of it, it seems to be to complicated and slow. Then again I haven't played around with it to much but I would say its kinda week in the pixel category.
Its also lacking certain options that generally come standard in most graphics programs like when saving brushes or editing tools. But overall its a pretty good program. Its in Beta and so certain things arn't going to be up to par. You can still do some amazing things with it. By the time it comes out they will probably have a better user interface and the pixel aspects of the program will be faster.
However, it does seem that MS is pushing the pixel aspects of it. I don't know why considering I think thats it is the weaker point.
Interestingly enough, someone hacked the GIMP interface to behave more like Photoshop. GIMPshop has versions for MacOS X, Linux and Windows. Worth a shot, anyway.
I think this is MS's answer for Photoshop fans that don't need all the features of Photoshop at the extreme price. If MS can deliver this product for say $120 USD or less, they _could_ get a lot of Win32 Photoshop users to convert that do not need to pay $400+ for Photoshop.
For me personally, Gimp does everything I need under Win32 and Linux. There is no need for me to spend money for features I will never use.
Also, Acrylic was _very_ slow on my AMD 2800+ with 1GB of memory. Just bringing up the preference dialog had a very noticeable lag. From what I have seen, I don't think Acrylic is at Beta level just yet. MS has a lot of work to do on this app to make the general UI to be much more responsive.
If Tyranny and Oppression come to this land,
it will be in the guise of fighting a foreign enemy. -James Madison
Almost everyone who says GIMP sucks is quite simply too stupid to learn a new program. Having been a GIMP user for a few years now, Photoshop drives me NUTS! GIMP, to me, is MUCH more intuitive. The basic fact is that the "best" interface is the one you know. Don't knock GIMP because you haven't bothered to learn it. It's not GIMP's fault, or the GIMP developers' - it's yours.
Furthermore, few of the arguments saying "GIMP doesn't have the features of Photoshop" are much better. They center around claims like "no CMYK support" and "no support 12-bit color" and "bad workflow for photographers." These might actually be important to a very select few of you, but for the most part they're simply unimportant. That's why they haven't been added to GIMP yet. I'm a photographer myself, and I use exclusively GIMP. I use the RAW plugin - which relies on dcraw, the RAW converter Adobe has lifted for its own RAW plugin - which works brilliantly. Once your image is converted, let's face it - what you need is a stable, fast tool for doing photography things. Who cares about 12-bit color - after conversion from RAW, photoshop doesn't use it either! I don't care about 500 plugins for making a glow around text; I just want levels, curves, and a few other tools for adjusting color and retouching images.
GIMP is stable - I've never had it crash EVER in recent versions - and has all the features almost anyone would need. If you can't use it, maybe you're just too dumb to learn. The number of people for whom it works really well seem to contradict these arguments of "anything is better than GIMP." I, for one, will take GIMP over Photoshop any day.
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?
He got flamed on /. for flaming Microsoft!
Strange times.