Haven’t written much lately. Work’s kept me very busy, very busy. General thoughts follow in random order:
* Tried out the new Microsoft “Codenamed Acrylic Beta” (it’s a beta, and did they mention that Acrylic is the code name?) I found the interface a step backwards, inconsistent, core features missing, and more complaints. It’s a Adobe Illustrator knock-off, but I hear Microsoft bought it off of somebody (duh) and…what? They can’t complete unless they charge $20, or include it in the OS–which I would say is a mistake.
* Thought of writing a new Jabber Idea post based on server-side message storage accessible via IMAP, but I couldn’t really add enough value to the concept to make it worth my time. So…consider this paragraph my idea.
* Stumbled upon Infrastructure.org today (thx Nolan). I feverishly read page after page (scanning past the unixy details I didn’t care to read). Stunning. I have decided Monday (workload willing) that I will begin work on my own version. It will be Windows-centric of course, since that’s what I do. But! But, it will be exclusively open-source or freeware biased. I’ll include concepts and utilities that are included in the OS, but I think I might end up skipping some MSFT technologies for which I don’t care (or for that matter, wish to learn), and instead search for an F/OSS alternative. The end result might turn into its own website, as infra.org did, who knows.
* No motivation this weekend, didn’t get anything much useful done. One productive thing I did was migrate from my old circa 1990 Sony AV receiver to a used Yamaha I got off of a friend that lo and behold, knows what a DVD player is, and can speak the Dolby Pro-Logic tongue. Amen! (Damn, I’m cheap.)
byebye. too lazy to link the interesting things above, you’ll have to google.
Re: Acrylic
It’s based on “Expression”, which was a program written by a company called Creature House. Microsoft bought it a while back, and even at one time offered a free download of a previously unreleased upgrade of Expression.
I own a pre-Microsft version of Expression, and downloaded their upgrade. It’s a nifty graphics program. It’s vector based, like Illustrator. But Expression has a nifty library of painterly effects that you can apply to the vectors. And you can alter the definitions of the applied stroke styles on the fly.
You can almost think of it like CSS for vector graphics. By modifying a few stroke styles, you could change a graphic from an impressionist watercolor look to a modern hard-edged appearance. I’m not really an artist, so I never got much use out of it. But I always thought that it was an amazingly cool product.
I haven’t looked at Acrylic (and I don’t know if I’ll bother), so I don’t know what changes MS has made from the original.