The first thought was..

Damn how ugly Windows XP looks like and the GUI really is something to throw into the thrash bin..

Yeah. The color set and big, circusy button thing in XP totally disgust me. I forced my wife to put her machine in "classic theme" as I didn't want that ugly crap in my household.
I will DL this on my windows machine and give a report.

Well, kids, this is one time we can't blame M*cr*s*ft for the butt-fugly UI.

I've been using Expression since version 2 and it's always been ugly.

Once you get past that, though, and figure out how to get everything to work, it's a REALLY cool application.

I posted this link in the comments regarding the Slashdot blurb about Acrylic from the other day . A lot of folks making comments seemed a little clueless about how Expression worked and what it did (especially the idiot who reviewed the application and submitted the item to Slashdot initially), so I slapped a quick page together. The "Creature House Expression" entry on Wikipedia has some good background info and links to tutorials.

[[[Oh, and confidential to Ivan: there's no capital "S" in Photoshop! ;o) ]]]

I tried it out yesterday at work (at microsoft) and I liked the drawing tools, but honestly it felt like a souped up version of "Paint"...

- Jeff Yamada
www.suborior.com

If you don't spend time with the app and get past the UI you'll never understand what this application does that few—if any—others are able to.

Complain all you want, but without exploring the application you'll sound just as clueless as the reviewer who submitted the piece to Slashdot, and who got his arse handed to him on an up-turned trashcan lid.

If you're smart enough to be running the Mac OS, go get the Expression 3.3 beta. The compressed file comes with versions for both OS X as well as Classic Mac OS. Apologies-by-proxy if you have to sign up for and jump through the .NET flaming craphoops like I did back when M*cr*s*ft first offered it. Seems, though, I read that may not be necessary anymore...you'll have to check for yourselves.

The headline of this post is almost comical! Photoshop Killer... Muahahahaaaa! OK, so the app DOES offer a few nifty features, but it's so archaic in the way it does everything that I find it just above a disaster to use.

Maybe a "Painter" killer, but not a Photoshop Killer. Even calling it a Painter killer is a stretch. How about a Corel Killer.

Get your fix of design software tips, tricks & commentary.

have you seen some of the gallery on there? like this one for example

there is some really beautiful stuff in there, this app must have some very nice brushes to work with.

"Its nice to just have a select range of tools that you use day in day out, but sometimes there will be app's that have a great tool that the bigger apps like illustrator or photoshop will adopt in future versions."

Could I have drawn those flowers and the greenery I did in Photoshop or Illustrator, as I did in Expression? Yep, but not nearly as quickly.

Adobe should have bought Expression when it was up for grabs, just like they should have bought Painter.

"Adobe should have bought Expression when it was up for grabs, just like they should have bought Painter"

Oh yes! I'm still wondering what will Corel do with three raster editing apps.

(and Macrobe with all the apps, if the merger is accepted)

Thanks for the link Ivan. After about 30 minutes of playing, I found a few interesting things. According to the help, Acrylic supports Illustrator 8 and earlier, and Photoshop 7 and earlier. My Photoshop cs files open up as a flattened image.

I thought this one was kind of funny. Photoshop has Image:Mode:Grayscale, Acrylic has:

I like how Acrylic combined Levels and Curves into one dialog:

I found the adjustment layers here:

...of Acrylic is Jeff Schewe's article on the PhotoshopNews blog. In it, he explains a bit about what sets Acrylic apart (the vector-painting), but he concentrates on how it compares to and contrasts with Photoshop's pixel editing feature set.

Guess which app is clearly the winner in this respect...

After really having a long full-size look at those screenshots accompanying the article, my loathing of the UI has much  less to do with Expression/Acrylic per se; I've learned to deal with that and I'm comfortable with the fact that it's different than the Adobe UI I use 90% of the time. But seeing all that M*cr*s*ft-supplied bright blue in the palettes, main menu and window header would drive me absolutely crazy. It's simply way too harsh on the eyes. If I was ever forced to work on a Windows system, changing those headers from blue to gray would be my first order of business.

If the little colored buttons in the Mac OSX UI are called eye candy, then the Windows UI is like ripping open those little single-serving packets of Sweet-n-Low (sodium saccharine, for those outside the U.S.) and pouring the contents directly onto your corneas.

Being one of the Winusers on this here site, I'm often left salivating over some nifty functionality that all you Macusers get to play around with. This time, I've been screwed by the MS set. [Not that this isn't a feeling all Winusers are used to.] Friggin' Bill Gates and his obsessive need to strongarm people into constantly upgrading an OS whose current iteration is already slated for obsolescence in another five-or-so years [out of the box]. I'm referring to the fact that you're required to run WinXP to play with Acrylic. I'd perhaps understand limiting the software to a post-98 edition or something, but I'm running Win2000 and [from what I've seen] there's not a whole heck of a lot of differences betweeen the versions.

Grrr. Just grrr.

A little cold comfort with these sour grapes, anyone?

Here's another review if anyone's interested. It's a bit shorter than the others, but still good. I'm only guessing here, but I think Microsoft will clean up the UI quite a bit in the final release.