Review: Acrylic Technology Preview

Acrylic Technology Preview, Free
Microsoft
Redmond, Washington
(425) 882-8080
http://www.microsoft.com/products/expression/

Late in 2003, Microsoft acquired the small Hong Kong company Creature House, and with it came the vector-based drawing program Expressions. Now, a year and a half later, the next version of the program is out, rebranded with a Microsoft code-name but still clearly the same application. Anyone can download a copy of the beta without obligation (though it does require you to go through the annoying Microsoft Passport registration process), so I grabbed a copy and chucked it on to a spare box to have a look.

One of Microsoft's key product strategies has always been "throw lots of crap against the wall and see what sticks." Scott Hanselman has documented this strategy when it comes to painting programs, listing 11 attempts from the stagnant Microsoft Paint to the mysteriously-vanished Office PhotoDraw. After playing with Acrylic for a few hours, I'm left to wonder just why it was that they bought Creature House. Was someone really in that great a need of another projectile to aim at the wall? OK, it's a reasonably nice painting program, but there are two big strikes against it in my mind. First, it doesn't do anything to really advance the state of the art that I can see. Second, it's recognizably not a Microsoft program, but someone else's application with a Microsoft label pasted over the top.

Sure, Acrylic has plenty of spiffy tools. You can save most anything as a brush stroke and use it to draw with later. You can nudge things around, you can adjust the colors and gradients easily, you can deform vectors and paths. You can work on multiple layers and share things like strokes between images. The couple of sample images that ship with the application (that's one of them in the screenshot) show that it's useful for all sorts of informal illustrations. But, you know - there are plenty of other professional illustration programs that can do all of these things. So unless Microsoft is going to put this thing out at a real loss-leader price, I don't see that it's going to grab any particular market share based on features.

As for it not being a Microsoft program: there are certain things I expect from  Microsoft applications, notably conformance with the Windows user interface guidelines. Here, Acrylic falls down badly, and in some cases pointlessly. Take something as simple as moving around in a maximized image (Acrylic is an MDI application). Any reasonable application would put scrollbars to the right of and below the image. Instead, Acrylic lets you scroll by dragging on the rulers above and to the left of the image - which is cute but nonstandard and nondiscoverable. Or take the floating tool windows. At least, they look like tool windows, but they don't dock to each other like those in Microsoft's other applications. Instead, they play bumper cars to stay out of each other's way. Why didn't Microsoft rewrite this thing to take advantage of some of the look and feel that we associate with other Microsoft applications? Probably, I suspect, because it's still being developed by some little team off in Hong Kong.

There are other things you can ding Acrylic on if you want: performance is pretty terrible (to be expected in a beta, but worrisome; I'm always suspicious of blithe assurances that performance issues will be cleaned up in shipping code), and the selection of formats for saving in is uninspirational. But the bottom line for me is that there just isn't any terribly good reason to consider this application unless you don't have any professional graphics program that you're using now. And if you don't, I'm not sure why you need one in the first place.

  Click for larger screenshot

Mike Gunderloy is the lead developer for Larkware and author of numerous books and articles on programming topics.