Creature (House) Comforts

Once upon a time, in a country far far away, I bought an ix3D Ultimate Rez graphics card for my G3 mac.

It did a good job of pushing the pixels at high resolution and even accelerated some games (Bungie’s Marathon series IIRC). It also came with nice software bundle including Expression 1.0, an interesting ’natural media’ illustration application hailed at the time as a vector equivalent to Fractal Design’s Painter.

I never really got to grips with Expression. Whilst it’s Skeletal strokes technology is certainly impressive I always found it hard to to do normal common or garden illustration with it. It’s interface is just a little to clunky, ideosynchronatic, and just plain hard to use. Perhaps there is too much focus on the Skeletal Strokes. Perhaps I never gave it chance.

But just when I thought it might be time to remove version one from my hard drive…Microsoft release a freeware copy of Expression 3! I didn’t know they’d bought it. It’s great to see expression on OS X, and free (it’s marked as a beta), but I wonder where Microsoft is going with it in the long term. Would they really attempt to compete in the illustration market against Freehand and Illustrator? I suspect the purchase has to do with the Skeletal Strokes technology, and that this release is a part of the deal with Creature House. Time will tell.

I’m off to delete version one from my classic applications folder…