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August 16, 2005
Night of the Living Acrylic
Night of the Living Acrylic: The commercial press, with its amazing syndication powers, had a bunch of "MS Acrylic targets Macromedia, Adobe" articles this month... Cold, Hard Flash (above) caught my attention this weekend with his reaction, and Red Herring got into it today, and Tinic Uro handled it from the point of view of his own work in the universal runtime. But I think this journalism may be modeled more on the Sports Pages than on a technology & business overview -- everything is intrinsically zero-sum, one team wins one team loses, and they're of course both playing the same game with the same rules don't even ask. I've looked at it a different way -- of course Microsoft will need a graphical editor for its new, graphics-intensive operating system! Of course they would employ the easy editability of vectors, particularly when the final result is more pixel-based than just a flat stroke/fill approach. Microsoft has to grow Microsoft's way, just as Macromedia has to grow its own way, Google has to grow its own way, and so on. Microsoft Vista will be an important part of our computing environments in the future, and their approach is based upon deep integration across the OS. Macromedia (and, coincidentally, Adobe) take a different approach, trying to stay open to multiple user environments. Both groups realize the advantages of remote services, attractive interfaces, mobile delivery, particular techniques like vectors or XML or whatnot, but it's the audience needs which actually differentiate the companies' approaches. Back in the days of shrinkwrap desktop software the straight "marketshare" approach may have worked, but if you're reporting football scores today, it's good to mention whether you're talking NFL, soccer, rugby, or Australian rules.... ;-) (I've got a personal attachment to Expression, because I highlighted its first appearance at SIGGRAPH in 1994, a few years after Mark Zimmer started detailing his vectors in Painter, and just a bit before I first saw the "painterly vectors" in SmartSketch, and I wish more reporters opened up the stroke panel in Fireworks sometimes..... ;-)
Posted by John Dowdell at August 16, 2005 04:39 PM
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Tracked on August 24, 2005 09:22 PM
Comments
Yes, Fireworks does have a robust set of stroke options, unknown to most designers. It would be nice to have the advanced options in the propeties panel, or another panel, somewhere more accessible than a three-click deep menu.
Posted by: Kevin at August 17, 2005 07:47 AM