Bitch of a day. Spent half of it putting a bicycle together, and the other half busy losing seven gigs worth of work thanks to my usesless shrivelled cabbage of a brain and my inability to remember to check the integrity of a data transfer. It’s now 21.05, I have more work to do than I can shake a dead ferret at and I’m still re-installing all my apps.
Bollocks.
This week I have been mostly knackered.
The above image was part of a few I messed around with as part of the beta testing group for Microsoft’s new ‘Acrylic’; a vector andpixel graphics programme built around the foundation of Expression 3. Despite my misgivings about the almighty Micro$oft outputting a graphics package I was pretty pleased to be asked to be on the private beta testing cycle, which is now public. I also, sadly, didn’t get much of a chance to join in due to work commitments.
What I did find though was this is a superb vector programme, with a lot going for it in a time when Adobe have pretty much cornered the market with the big guns such as Flash, Illustrator, Dreamweaver, GoLive & Photoshop. I haven’t got the energy to go into too much detail tonight, but I will say that apart from Flash, which still has a real edge on natural drawing due to the adaptive eraser making good clean nodes and it’s execellent handling of gradients, this is the best vector tool I’ve tried. I can’t get on with Xara’s clunky UI and Illustrator has had me baffled for years now. The B & W image is the result of turning everything off but the lines and it’s an interesting part of the process to capture. I’ve not seen this in any other prog, tho’ that may be because I haven’t looked much.
I’ve also spent a lot of time doodling while waiting for builds to load up today:
I guess I can say now that this is the thing that’s been keeping me at work all hours just lately. It’s due for a fourth quarter release this year. I haven’t mentioned it before as a) I don’t really like to discuss current projects while I’m still working on them and b) although I never bitch and whinge about work and have nothing to hide I don’t think I’d be toooooo comfortable if everyone at work found my site while googling for previews. 
I’ve just boosted my RAM up to a gig and got a new hard drive twice the size of my current one. Opening programmes is so much easier now… phew.
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