Design

I just discovered ArtRage by Ambient Design a few days ago, thanks to a mention of the software by the Tao of Mac. Ambient Design was founded by people who left MetaCreations in 2000, so if you are familiar with any of MetaCreation’s products (Kai’s PowerTools is now also available from Ambient Design), you will find the interface of ArtRage to be familiar. It fills the screen when it launches, taking over your Mac / PC.

I’ve only just started playing with this app that allows you to "sketch" with Oil Paint, Pencils, Crayons, Chalks, or Felt Pen tools, as well as use an eraser and palette knife to manipulate what’s already on the canvas, but, as an artist, I really like it. It feels intuitively more pad and paper like than most of the creative programs out there. I wonder if it can work with a pressure sensitive drawing tablet like the Wacom tablet I have stowed away in my closet…

You can download ArtRage from this page. It is free and will run on both Windows and Mac OS X. Check it out.

UPDATE: Marc Orchant wrote me a minute ago with this added info: “ArtRage is also bundled in the Tablet PC Experience Pack as InkArt. The program was originally developed as an entry in Microsoft’s ‘Does Your App

Think in Ink?’ contest.” Thanks, Marc!

Its creators style DENIM "An Informal Tool For Early Stage Web Site and UI Design."

If you’re not exactly clear on what that means, here’s my take: DENIM is a program for whipping up quick prototypes of web sites and user interfaces. DENIM lets you draw rough sketches of your user interface just like you’ve been doing on paper for years, but saves you the step of translating that into a digital mock-up by letting you immediately add hyperlinks and interactive navigation.

The U.S. Department of Justice has requested additional information from Adobe and Macromedia, potentially delaying the companies’ planned $3.4 billion merger. The government is apparently interested in getting more information about competition in the graphics software market, in order to determine whether or not the deal could create a monopoly or stifle efforts to compete by smaller players. While Adobe and Macromedia may dominate certain sectors with products like Photoshop, Acrobat and Flash, the deal is likely to be approved, since there is still significant competition from both major players (i.e., Microsoft’s Acrylic) as well as smaller vendors (i.e., Corel’s Paint Shop Pro, Ulead’s various tools, and, of course the GIMP). Adobe has said it still expects the deal to close this fall.

Microsoft is beta-testing "an innovative illustration, painting and graphics tool that provides exciting creative capabilities for designers working in print, web, video, and interactive media" called Acrylic. Apparently Microsoft’s attempt at capturing a chunk of the design market, Acrylic is the result of Microsoft’s acquisition of Creature House and their vector graphics program Expression back in 2003. While not uniformly bad, Acrylic’s reviews — conveniently round up by CGexplorer here — haven’t exactly been effervescent. "If MS is trying to target the low-end user market, mainly people who want to do simple photo editing for family pictures and such," one blogger wrote, "then Acrylic is going to be too complicated for them even if its priced much cheaper than Photoshop. However, if MS is trying to create a product that is for the professional market, Acrylic doesn’t have anything positive to offer graphic designers that they don’t already have with Photoshop."

The beta version of Acrylic can be downloaded from Microsoft, but you’ll have to register for Passport (or use BugMeNot) — and have XP Service Pack 2 — for the privilege.

There’s not a lot to say yet about LiveQuartz, an image editor currently in beta. It’s still pretty rough around the edges, and isn’t about to give Graphic Converter a run for the title of low-end graphics champ. However, there are a few features worth noting, including the fact that it’s a Tiger-only program (it relies on CoreImage technology). It’s also one of the first shareware programs I’ve seen that comes as a Universal Binary file that can run on Mac OS on either PowerPC or Intel processors. We’ll watch this one, and see whether it emerges as more than just a testbed for CoreImage and the Universal Binary. In the meantime, if you’ve got Tiger running on an Intel machine, you may as well download it and check it out.

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