Microsoft’s world dominating force has finally left their Paint program, taking a sudden evolution in to Code Name: Acrylic. I don’t know if Microsoft thinks that it sounds cool or if they can’t find a “real” name for the program, but Code Name: Acrylic isn’t nearly as cool as it sounds.

General chatter has been that Acrylic would be a Photoshop killer, combining the good parts of Adobe’s flagship with Illustrator and be more web compatible. Essentially mixing Photoshop, Illustrator and Freehand/ImageReady/Fireworks, but it fails to be intuitive enough to get me to migrate. Looking similar to the beta, and being just as non-intuitive, Acrylic’s clunky interface hides what’s it’s features are more than shows them off. I know that MS is trying to differenitate itself from Adobe in this area, but how do you re-invent the wheel?

The vector and raster based functions work pretty well independantly. The vector brushes have some edge over my current Illustrator CS1, seeming to be more dynamic. Although creating brushes looks like it could be a chore. The “styling” that can be applied to vector images are nice, but creating new styling appears to be a chore (althought creating a brush in Photoshop can be just as time consuming).

The raster effects are okay, reminding me more of Painter, with the smudge actually doing a good job. While Photoshop can lag a litte when I am exerting maximum load on my PC, Acrylic’s brushes with effects added can lag really badly, which is a little fustrating.

Overall, it appears that MS spent more time working on the little things than the program as a whole. When switching between tabs, there’s a nice transition, a fairly smooth fade effect, which if that level of attention to detail had been paid throughout the rest of the product, I would be very impressed. It is rumored that Adobe bought Macromedia out of fear that Microsoft would, and have a bigger foothold in the Graphics/DTP world. Adobe did the right thing, yes, it eliminates competition, but it keeps Microsoft from putting out a better product. I would not switch to Acrylic, and neither should you.