Microsoft seems to be making its move into a market that it’s left alone for a long time: It’s new software, code named “Acrylic,” professional design program that combines pixel-based painting and vector graphics. It is supposed to be somewhat based on the Creature House Expression product Microsoft bought in 2003. There’s a new Community technology Preview available.
I used to use Expression back in the day, a great natural media vector application. Glad to see Microsoft is bringing it back. I subscribe to Computer Arts magazine and they gave it a great review. I’m sure most people on this board will tear it apart though, since they do that with everything that has the Microsoft name attached to it.
“I’m sure most people on this board will tear it apart though, since they do that with everything that has the Microsoft name attached to it.”
What can I say, they’re an easy target. First they see flash as something they would like to kill off, next it’s PDF’s. Microsoft knows all too well that one way to keep their OS in use is to lock you in with file formats, backed with patents. Then make it IE only / .NET only and whatnot. If I as a consumer would like to co-exist with others in the computing world, yet not want to be married to Windows, I’d naturally oppose this, wouldn’t you?
There’s a definite difference between rational opposition to Microsoft’s actions and the “huh huh, M$ sux” Anything-But-Micirosft kiddies.
The only ones touting certain MS technologies as Flash or PDF killers is the tech press, not MS.
If anyone actually looked at the technologies, they’d see that they are platform APIs and tools to support new capabilities in Vista. There is some overlap in capabilities, but the MS tech was built speciffically as the next-generation of current OS functionality, not as competitors to Flash, PDF, et al.
The press may as well say that because Windows has a Rich Text edit control, MS has created a <insert your favorite word processor>-killer.
The press may as well say that because Windows has a Rich Text edit control, MS has created a <insert your favorite word processor>-killer.
[couldn’t resist]
I disagree.
MS has NOT created OpenOffice.org
[/couldn’t resist]
Which proves my point. MS has not created Flash or Acrobat/PDF either yet the press touts platform technologies as application competitors.
I dimly remember seeing something about a 3rd-party XAML tool a while back. Never having heard of Acrylic before today, I imagine such poor wannabe’s toiling in their garage, but in hindsight it seems totally forseeable that Microsoft would “leave nothing to chance”, that XAML would be nicely supported from in-house.
i just hope they change the interface and make it one that is workable with…
Of course, i was trying it after checking in a magazine that touted it as a photoshop replacement (well, it’s a bit far from it).
The notion that we who spend time on ‘boards such as this love to ‘Pile on’ the ‘evil empire’ is silly. If Microsoft was to put out a truly great piece of consumer-level software (haven’t used VBStudio – and SQL Server looks good), I think we’d give ’em props – from my POV, as a pre Win XP user (W2K), I’m very doubtful of their ability here. As a casual user of Excel / Word, why is it that even I can list a dozen things to make those applications better? Take a minute to compare the way Pages (Apple’s spankin new word processor) handles styles, flowing text, tables, image editing, system integration to Word… In Excel, why can’t I drag ‘n drop my cells around? Why on God’s green Earth does my data (especially dates) get so completely Borked? (go easy on me, remember, I’m a casual user – this is the default behavior)
Virus (Factoid-there is no plural for ‘virus’, so forget about the commonly used ‘virii’) / Spyware aside, NT / 2000 served me very well in school. As a student of Computer Animation, applications such as Softimage3D (my first true love – oops, and owned by MS at the time!) and 3DStudio Max (someone, please, poke my eyes out!) couldn’t have dreamt of running on Apple’s OS at the time. For all the warmth and fuzziness, the only thing reliable about OS 9 and below were that they WOULD crash – and hard.
Of course, this has all changed with OS X – Apple’s stuff is inspiring to my work as an artist / web developer.
With Vista / Expressions Studio (did I get that right?) MS has a chance to garner some serious respect – it wasn’t long ago that tales of Longhorn’s mythical promise dominated tech-related ‘boards. It SEEMS they have let that slip away. My point is that MS has given us more reasons to hate / fear them than they have for us to embrace them – only they can change this.
By the way, for natural media, look no further than Corel’s Painter, Alias SketchBook Pro (used for my TomCruiseIsNuts.com illustration) or the free (and excellent) ArtRage
In Excel, why can’t I drag ‘n drop my cells around?
You can for a long time now, at least as far back as Excel 2000. You need to click on the border of the cell however. You can do the same thing with columns and rows.
Uhm, the plural of “virus” is “viruses”.
They should make a Cocoa release of the program when Apple moves to Intel. I would of thought Apple would of took on Photoshop, but it seems like MS is now.
They should make a Cocoa release of the program when Apple moves to Intel. I would of thought Apple would of took on Photoshop, but it seems like MS is now.
Just what part of Acrylic would be connected to Intel? Do you think that Acrylic is written in assembler (and as such it would be tied to I386) or what? If you do then it is time to lay off the drugs for you.
Pain to transfer some windows application to mac after Apple moves to Intel will stay 100% the same (except for the parts written in assembler, which are getting really rare in these times) as it is now that it is PPC based. It is not hardware platform that is the problem, problem lies in OS Libraries APIs, but Cocoa (which is Mac only) is far from being the only one.
Super it offers B-Splines…..I use them in Shake.
The interface of Acrylic sucks, it has a weird look and feel to it, and still quite a number of bugs. There are better software packages available for Linux besides gimp, dia, tgif, etc. which are already pretty good. Since I’ll be using Linux anyways I could care less about hyped up Acrylic.
Since I’ll be using Linux anyways I could care less about hyped up Acrylic.
Yet you still waste our time and the space on this board posting a reply. I always imagined there’s some website Linux user’s go to every night where they log the number of Microsoft related news threads they trolled in with messages about Linux to appease the mighty GNU/Linux overlords RMS and Linus.
“Masters, I posted useless Linux comments in 10 stories today on OSNews and ActiveWin that related to Microsoft”
(voice of Emporer from Star Wars)
“Good my son, one day the whole world will run GNU/Linux and your training will be complete.”
“It is supposed to be somewhat based on the Creature House Expression product Microsoft bought in 2003”
Well that’s typical
If they take it and improve it that’s cool, but they do seem to have a penchant for buying their new products
Now that MS is going after adobe’s market, who’s going to be next? Autodesk’s AutoCAD?
If I was Adobe and Autodesk I will look forward to release commercial versions of their products on the linux/mac platforms, and instead of waiting til their butcher turn, extend the market to punish ms where it hurts (less sales of windows workstations)
You talk about wasted time and still post back with your dork star wars reference.
Anyway.. This is a power play.. they are going to force adobe’s hand. I agree with the Autodesk comment: “If I was Adobe and Autodesk I will look forward to release commercial versions of their products on the linux/mac platforms, and instead of waiting til their butcher turn, extend the market to punish ms where it hurts (less sales of windows workstations)”.. Especially since OS X is running on X86 now.
acrylic will be part of the new MS development studio or something like that. will be used to create interfaces i hear
I don’t think Acrylic is a rival to Photoshop (not yet, at least). It’s more like a natural painting program (think Corel Painter), but uses vector strokes instead of bitmap ones. This was the unique selling point of its predecessor Expression.
However, watching some of the demo videos on their website, it seems that Microsoft have expanded the program’s scope and are pushing it much more as an integrated (or hybrid) bitmap and vector graphics tool. Some of the features encroach on Photoshop territory, but there’s also a lot missing. Given time though, it may indeed offer features to match (or rival) Adobe’s program. I can certainly see it as a rival to Illustrator.
I’m not a Microsoft fan, but neither am I an Adobe fan, and if this keeps both companies on their toes as they compete, that’s not necessarily a bad thing.
Closer to Illustrator than Photoshop.
IF they(MS)make it a Photoshop/Illustrator killer or rival that would be great. I get sick of going from PS to Illustrator to do things. It’s rather stupid if you ask me and a waste of time. When basically Photoshop and Illustrator share almost the same UI.
It could turn into a good design app, an alternitive to Adobe.
Why don’t you use Canvas ?
I haven’t seen any comments yet from anyone who’s actually tried this yet.
I was quite excited when the first beta was released about a month ago, downloaded it immediately (I use Windows and Linux about equally, and actually think Microsoft makes some good software), installed it, and played with it for about two or three days.
To me, it just seemed to be lacking a lot of features. It seemed more like a semi-featured shareware program than something that Microsoft would be putting out. Disappointed, I deleted it and vowed to try it in a year or so when it will hopefully have matured.