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APRIL 17, 2002 Creature House Expression 2.4.1
Performance and usability Expression 2 is a real pleasure to work with. It's also quite simple. Colors are selected from a color wheel. Drawing and editing tools are selected from a familiar-looking tool palette. Strokes appear in an easy to navigate palette. It's quite easy. [an error occurred while processing this directive] But I do have one major and one minor problem with this program. On the minor side, the program's interface is a little bit quirky. For example, palettes snap a little bit under the menu bar. And highlighted values in dialog boxes have to be deleted before you can type into the boxes to fill in your own values. On the major side, this program is incredibly slow. And with good reason. It uses tons of points for each stroke, and by the time you've filled up a page, you're working at a snail's pace. It's slowness also seems disproportionate. I'm on a dual 1 GHz Mac, and I'd have to wait 10 or 15 seconds for the screen to redraw when the only thing on the page is a traced bitmap image. In fact, it's so slow, that its performance really begins to overshadow this program's otherwise excellent features. I'm not a programmer, and I don't know how this issue can be rectified, but multithreading and AltiVec optimizations would certainly be a good start. The bottom line I love the creative tools in this program, especially the painting features. I also love its trace bitmap capabilities, though I'd like to see some more depth in this area. The one major drawback is its performance, and, for tis reason, I'm neutral on this program. If you really need the creative features this program offers, you can buy it and hope for some optimizations down the road. If you're iffy about the whole thing, I certainly recommend downloading the evaluation version and taking it for a spin. Expression 2 (2.4.1) is available now for $149 for the boxed version and $139 for the download version. Upgrades from Expression 1 run $99 and $89 for boxed and download versions, respectively. For more information or to download the demo, visit http://www.creaturehouse.com. Dave Nagel is the producer of Creative Mac and Digital Media Designer; host of several World Wide User Groups, including Synthetik Studio Artist, Adobe Photoshop, Adobe InDesign, Adobe LiveMotion, Creative Mac and Digital Media Designer; and executive producer of the Digital Media Net family of publications. You can reach him at dnagel@digitalmedianet.com. Prev 1 2 3 Related sites: • Creative Mac • Digital Media Designer • Presentation Supplement • The WWUG Related forums: [an error occurred while processing this directive] 
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