“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."
Microsoft's has made available a new photo editing software, Acrylic. The new program is based on Expression, which Microsoft purchased in 2003. Microsoft describes the software--currently available as a 77MB free download--as bringing together pixel-based painting and vector graphics features.
Acrylic appears to support opening and exporting to Photoshop and Illustrator file formats, as well as other standard graphics formats. In addition, the application appears to be able to export to Adobe's Portable Document Format, or PDF.
However, Acrylic would not currently save pixel-type data to formats other than its native XPR file type.
The test software, or beta, also has a limited life; it will expire Oct. 1.
Microsoft has recommended relatively high system specifications for Acrylic, saying consumers should preferably run the software on an Intel Pentium 4 machine, with Windows XP Service Pack 2, 512MB of memory, 500MB of disk space and a pressure-sensitive graphics tablet supporting the WinTab interface.