Acrylic

[Alan Horkan]

On Wed, 17 Aug 2005, Cyrille Berger wrote:

> Date: Wed, 17 Aug 2005 14:57:16 +0200
> From: Cyrille Berger <cberger at cberger.net>
> Reply-To: "Krayon (KImageShop)" <kimageshop at kde.org>
> To: "Krayon (KImageShop)" <kimageshop at kde.org>
> Subject: Acrylic
>
> It seems Microsoft is willing to have a real image manipulation application :
> http://www.microsoft.com/products/expression/default.aspx

Acrylic is the name for their current limited beta which they will soon
start charging for and is only slightly different from Microsoft
Expression 3 (formerly Creature house Expression) which they were offering
for free.  It is a Vector Graphics program so it seems odd that they are
selling it for its raster graphics functionality but I think Macromedia
Fireworks shows how a largely vector based engine can make for a very
flexible raster graphics program.

It is interesting to see they will be supporting XAML which is something I
believe Open Source developers will need to defend against by developing
flexible import filters.  XAML or the "Windows Presentation Foundation" is
close enough to SVG that I could probably hack together something ugly
based on the existing SVG importer but it would be extremely ugly.

In case anyone in interestd in trying out Acrylic Microsoft claims to
require windows XP but I vaguely recall reading that with the correct
compression software you could unpack and install Expression on Windows
2000 and if you search the web you should be able to find out more.

Slashdot had a story on Acrylic a while back and people don't seem to be
particularly impressed but it has always taken microsoft two or three
versions to get things right so we'll se what happens.
http://66.102.9.104/search?q=cache:18dj-kAtC0cJ:slashdot.org/article.pl%3Fsid%3D05/06/11/1851231+slashdot+acrylic&hl=en

At the risk of being contraversial I think the best way to compete against
software like Acrylic is to bring a full suite of free and high quality
software like KOffice to Windows.  I realise as Unix users and already
busy developing krita no one is particularly enthusiastic about doing
windows development but the move to QT4 may present opportunities to
increase portability which I hope you will take and make it known you are
open to the idea if only interested developers would help out.  Cross
compilation could take out some of the hassle of reaching a wider audience
and it seems to work reasonably well for Inkscape.

Sincerely

Alan Horkan

Inkscape http://inkscape.org
Abiword http://www.abisource.com
Dia http://gnome.org/projects/dia/
Open Clip Art http://OpenClipArt.org

Alan's Diary http://advogato.org/person/AlanHorkan/