Initial Review of Microsoft's Acrylic BETA 283
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."
Based on Creature House Expression (Score:5, Informative)
Seems like simple M$ bashing to me (Score:3, Informative)
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
Acrylic/Expression (Score:5, Informative)
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.
As an avid user (Score:5, Informative)
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.
This is NOT a Photoshop-like app... (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Wow, so much nonsense in one blog entry (Score:3, Informative)
Instead, this just sounds like a fanboy who tried something he did not know what it was for and wrote a review.
And ofcourse it's not even going to come close to Photoshop, what was s/he thinking? Like another poster remarked, this is probably nothing more than a publicity stunt by MS. Or maybe it's their attempt at bringing a simple vector + pixel editing program to the masses, the folks who cannot afford MM Fireworks or Photoshop. That might make a lot of sense, too -- since MS is quite well known to start by capturing the SME market and move upwards.
But from what I've seen, while the program isn't particularly impressive, MS could work on making it quite nice, if they wanted to. Just my two cents, ofcourse! =)
Re:Pointless review (Score:2, Informative)
I can't imagine why this huy thought they would work.
Author's experience vs. Mine (Score:2, Informative)
2. "There's no way to move around the image easily. No scrolls on the side or bottom. " but in fact there are scrolls on the top and bottom, they just look a little different than the usual scrollbars
3."Another problem is that Acrylic is slow. " but it seemed fast to me.
4. "Overall, there is nothing outstanding about this product at this juncture." but I thought it had a much more intuitive interface and therefore was easier to use than other similiar software packages.
Re:Wow, so much nonsense in one blog entry (Score:3, Informative)
However, I did take a look at the included release notes which plainly state:
Known Issues
- Pixel painting has not yet been optimized and the performance is slow. Optimization work is currently in progress and drastically improved performance will be delivered in the final release.
- Importing of
.ai files can results in blank documents and under some circumstances application instability.
- Exporting to non-.xpr vector formats does not persist pixel layer data.
The reviewer comments: "Another problem is that Acrylic is slow" in the pixel manipulation part.The idea is to test stuff that isn't known to perform badly. To do so is hardly sporting ...
Re:Blogs as news now on slashdot (Score:3, Informative)
The real problem here is with editors. Content like this (crapful review) should not be posted on
This is all assuming that the editor did not read the article linked, because if he did read and still decided to post it, oh boy, this place needs a change in the staff.
My review. IANAGA (Score:1, Informative)
But I've never heard of this before, so it piqued my interest. I downloaded it (I think it's 'code name acrylic' so the final product name will probably be something like "Microsoft Vector Artist
Fair warning I am not a graphic artist, but I dabble a little. A lot during school, much less so now.
Anyways, the bloggers comments aren't accurate - the UI seems familiar enough if you've ever used Adobe Illustrator or Corel Painter you'll have no time getting around. There are some variations on the usual 'windows UI' - but they're more inline with other graphical editors (eg. As is customary the mouse scroll button zooms etc..)
It can export to
I really liked the behaviour of the freehand pen, the visual cue of seeing the harline withing the preview over where the ink will go is a feature more drawing progams should incorporate. I also like the option to toggle 'highlight new path' maybe there's a way to do that in illustator but I haven't figured it out - and it's a design flaw that bothers me when drawing a series of lines tightly packed.
I'd like to try this with a tablet. Some programs really behave better (What would be perfect for me is to have the width bahaviour be modifed by the stoke speed). Draw fast=thinniner, slowly draw = fat line, sit there the ink should 'bleed' a bit.
*** Things I didn't like,
Not enough variation in some of their built-in strokes. The titular 'Acrylic' stokes look way too alike, it's distracting for the tails of a 'natural media' stroke to look so identical.
*** I couldn't find a color mixer or a way to change the 'canvas' type.
*** some of the behaviours of the gradiant on a stroke seemed confusing. Is it 'head to tail'? why is it when I mix up the order of storke directions some are 'black to white' and other 'white to black'? This is probably because it's beta, so I can be pretty forgiving of that (at least it didn't crap out).
All in all pretty solid for a beta, I'm curious to see what the final product is like.
Re:Wow, so much nonsense in one blog entry (Score:1, Informative)
If any old product from creature house/fractal design should be compared to adobe photoshop, the one that became corel painter is probably a better match.
Reason he can't download (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Wow, so much nonsense in one blog entry (Score:5, Informative)
Or against Inkscape [inkscape.org], which is open-source, and is getting to be a reasonably stable, full-featured piece of software. It runs on Windows and Linux.
Re:XP only? (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Wow, so much nonsense in one blog entry (Score:1, Informative)