Microsoft has launched the second CTP (Community Technology Preview) of Acrylic, a product aimed at competing against Adobe, Macromedia and Corel.

As a main novelty, Acrylic introduces support for XAML (Extensible Application Markup Language), which means that the product will be especially useful for graphics designers who will employ Windows Vista.

Acrylic is able to combine bitmap images with vectorial images, which ensures a flexibility few programs in this domain have.

Compared to the first version of Acrylic, appeared in June, Microsoft has included more brushes, colors and file saving options. Acrylic's initial version has been downloaded for 200,000 times. Acrylic is now integrated with Microsoft Office, and it supports copy paste type operations.

Based on the House Expression Acrylic technology, Acrylic is able to import now .tif, .psd, .jpg, .bmp, .png, .gif formats and it can export tif, .psd, .jpg, .bmp, .png, .gif, .ai, .eps, .pdf, .xaml images.


You can find the review for the first version of Acrylic here and in a few days we will post our review for the new CTP.