Expression Media 2: anybody out there ?
in Product reviews , Tuesday, March 18, 2008
Just spent half an hour scouring the web for any mention of Expression Media 2 (EM 2, or iView Media Pro v4 as it might have been). Microsoft have released a public beta of EM 2, but it seems to have excited almost no interest.
It's really difficult to see what the development team have been doing for nigh on 2 years. EM is still totally dependent on QuickTime and the Mac OS X support for RAW formats, so unlike competitors Extensis Portfolio or Adobe Lightroom, it cannot preview Olympus E-3 files. It has gained a hook to Microsoft's Google Earth clone. Yippee. Always wondered where I took my photos. Oh, and I can catalog Office 2008 documents. Wonderful.
Changes to the light box view to support a second monitor are great, but they seem to have dropped the ball when it comes to single monitor support. There are still vestiges of a once great piece of well supported software in there, but all the evidence is that the customer base has collapsed.
Incredibly, there's still nothing quite as good out there for Mac at least, at least assuming you have file formats supported by OS X. I'm going to try Photo Mechanic again. It does seem to do a lot of things I use iView for, and it does seem to be edging towards full DAM functionality.