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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.
The question is... Will it run on windows?
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 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.
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 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.
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.
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 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 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?
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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