Microsoft has released a beta of a program they originally bought when they acquired the Hong Kong based “Creature House” company. The new software covers both vector and pixel based graphics. The program was called Expression but under the Microsoft banner it’s called Acrylic and is a free 77 MB download from Microsoft’s site. The beta will cease to function in October so you get roughly six months of free use however it doesn’t save pixmaps in anything other then it’s default format.
The recommended hardware is also pretty significant, suggestions are Windows XP SP2, a Pentium 4 processor and 512MB of ram. They have also stated that the beta is not optimised at this stage and is fairly slow as a result. Looking though the forum posts for Acrylic shows people describing Acrylic as unpolished and a “glorified MS Paint” and others making note of it’s very good pedigree. One forum user even speculated that Acrylic might be Longhorns answer to MS Paint. Time will tell how it turns out I guess, but I doubt the competition is quaking in their boots just yet.
