It has been a couple of months now since MS introduced their image editing software Acrylic. Some say, it’s a way of MS scrumming to take some of Adobe’s customers. Well, it might be and might not. Acrylic is pretty much your normal image editing tool like Photoshop or any other but also has some unique functionality just like Photoshop or Illustrator. Photoshop is more robust than acrylic but it will be very unfair on my part to really compare these two products by functionalities since Photoshop CS is probably its 10th version while Acrylic is still in its beta to version 1. But even with that said, I think Acrylic does have a place in the media world. The main functionality of Acrylic that I find very useful and important, and which I might say was the cause for its inception, is the fact that you can export your images in “xaml” format. This format can be imported in MS Sparkle (an interactive designer tool for MS Vista platform). Xaml is an xml mark-up language with which windows presentation layers (Avalon) uses to describe its elements like buttons, combo box, etc. One of the down sides of using Acrylic is that it doesn’t have as many image filters as Photoshop but hopefully that will be amended in future versions.
Fig 1 shows an example I just did to demonstrate what can be done with Acrylic. (This image is a made-up sample in Acrylic and has no relation to any application at Fujitsu)
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