Microsoft Releases Expression Professional Subscription

by Don Burnett

Microsoft has released the Expression Professional Subscription program. The package gives you the following products..

 

• Expression Studio
• Visual Studio Standard Edition
• Office Standard Edition
• Office Visio Professional
• Windows XP
• Windows Vista Business Edition
• Virtual PC
• Pre-configured virtualized server environments..

 

COST: The Expression Professional Subscription will be available for purchase in the first half of 2008 for US$999 ERP.

REVIEW: There are a few "gotchas" here that you need to know about, but this is a great value proposition for your designers..

Okay let's talk about the what you gets and the why's...

Expression Studio- (Does this include updates to 2.0 and later if they are released in your subscription year? I'd expect so but don't quote me on that.)

Visual Studio Standard- Because you probably need to get into it even if you don't code in it so you can share projects.. (Looks like no version control with this package, that question is still up in the air?).

Office Visio Professional- This is a great tool for diagramming things including work flows and processes.. I believe there is a 3rd party XAML exporter for it already. This is a great tool that most interaction designers use already.

Windows XP- No doubt for backward compatibility testing. Remember WPF and Silverlight applications run on XP, it just doesn't have any hardware acceleration for XP's graphics.

Windows Vista Business Edition- Now this is a little confusing to me as to why they included the Business SKU of Vista. There are several things missing from it as a designer that you'll want, including MPEG-2 dvd playback. There is no MEDIA CENTER functions built into this version and it doesn't playback all compressed data types like Mpeg-2..

With this edition you'll have to buy this separately from 3rd party vendors. Vista Business is not the best solution because it limits the playable/encode capable datatypes without buying more encoding software.

Also if you are developing a XAML based Media Center application here you are out of luck because it comes with NO built-in Media Center. You'll have to upgrade to ultimate anyway.

Virtual PC- Again some people use this but I hear it has some issues with WPF 3D. I know some agency folks who have Macs who run a virtual Windows PC, but this is not what this is. It's virtual PC for the PC. Which lets you create "separate" virtual environments to work from and test with. They are supposed to include pre-made images to get you working and testing.  It's very obvious that one of the developer guys decided on this addition to the subscription. I am not sure if developers really understand how designers test things including designs, even at Microsoft.

Last time I had heard however that Virtual PC doesn't implement the latest DirectX, so if you use this to develop applications you probably won't be getting full speed or hardware accelerated graphics to develop your WPF graphics on. I am not sure WPF 3D works either in this configuration completely either.. Survey says "great idea", not ideal implementation.

Creating a separate testing and design environment is a good idea, but if you have actually tried to develop with this there are certain "gotchas" there..

Whoever put this subscription idea together, it's a good one, I just think there wasn't enough review of the technical specifications behind it and decisions about what it should include. Of course no one asks me about this kind of thing.. Virtual PC is not something you'll be wanting to test your 2D and 3D animation design on. You won't be able to check accurate Frames Per Second rates and be sure that the screen is updating properly. For a designer that's very important, for a developer *NOT SO MUCH* so please don't test install and use Blend in Virtual PC it's a bad idea for designers.

But if you know all of these things it sounds like a great idea and gives a designer a whole stable of software to work from. Now if they'd just take my suggestion and add Office Live Workspaces to this subscription I'd think they'd have a real winner on their hands.

You can use this free online tool to collaborate with your clients, do art approvals, project tracking all in one free online location.  Don't take my word for it though, sign up for it today for free.. That's one thing no one else has or is giving as part of their services free collaboration and project management for your clients. Play on par with your clients as if you were a bigger organization.

Overall Impressions:

All in all it's a great value for a business wanting to equip their designers.. I would like to see them expand this kit with discount coupons for third party products like Techsmith's Morae Usability testing software. Which would be a great value add to this kit..

Technorati Tags: Expression Studio 2.0,Subscription

Why I like Slicing in Expression Design 2.0

By Don Burnett

 

This is so cool it's some of the easiest slicing I have ever worked with, whether it's for web bitmap formats or XAML.. Select an element on the screen, select "Create Slice from Selection"..

 

Set your editing parameters for the slice..

You can even specify the layers that are getting sliced as part of the slice contents..

Slice Layers appear on the Layers menu for manipulation..

Many formats are supported including HD Photo format, PSD and PDF..

 

And that's it, simple easy to work with, cool and quick to use..

Technorati Tags: Expression Design 2.0,Expression Studio 2.0,Easy Image Slicing

Next Week I'll be Mixing it up!

by Don Burnett

Well Mix 08 is upon us... There are a number of things that I expect to be announced that Microsoft employees have already blogged about and let the cat out of the bag about so to speak... I figured it would be fun to collapse all of those announcements here (those that are public right now anyway), so for those not going because it's sold out, and for those that are going to know what the cool things we already know about that we can examine more in-depth.

Internet Explorer 8

Over at Josh Allen's Mix Blog, we learn that Dean Hachamovitch will be keynoting the event and introducing us to Internet Explorer 8.0. Sounds like from reading the IE blog also this one has a super-standards rendering mode that kicks!

Expression Studio

A new version which supports all current released products. You don't have to be a mind reader on this one, because Microsoft has been sending out Expression Blend 2 preview releases for sometime now. After reading Scott Guthrie's blog, I am sure we can expect one to support Silverlight 2.0 as well. If there is a new version expect an "IMMEDIATE" review from me of it all.

PHP Support

Besides IIS 7 support FASTCGI, the web server now supports PHP and it looks like corporately Microsoft is going to support PHP corporately in addition to asp.net as an alternative development environment. It's nice to see Microsoft embracing open standards like PHP officially now, for both authoring and delivery.

Silverlight 2

The big announcements are already at Scott Guthrie's blog blog, but it sounds like we can expect a fully featured 2.0 this time (not the under developed 1.1), with things like data binding and an SDK full of controls including things like a datagrid. It's kind of exciting to see this but it sounds maybe more feature filled that WPF, so there may be something WPF has to actually catch up with some of the features that are present with Silverlight. Microsoft is a big support of the 3rd party controls market for Visual Studio, so I expect they left a few out on WPF expecting the third parties to fill that gap. It's nice to see they might not be taking that approach with Silverlight.

In case you haven't seen what any of this stuff looks like the following images have been posted to other folks blogs:

From Shawn Burke's MSDN Blog (Visual Studio 2008, support Silverlight):

 

And the Silverlight 2.0 Controls Toolbox  from the Danny Douglass Blog (note all the cool new content controls):

 

 

The real reason to come to Mix 08: Community

These are all cool reasons to come to Vegas this year, but it's not the only reason. In the past year we have had a lot of exciting things happen. We have seen the entire Mix community grow from infancy to a serious marketplace. It's really exciting to see where this has came in a year.. I have made many new friends along the way.. I will be blogging and hopefully giving you a "ground level" view of what's going on this year at the conference and hopefully some interviews with folks making a difference in the community.. Each year I have been so far has given me insight, access to a lot of new ideas and great new technology that brings folks together.

If anyone wants to get with me, during Mix I love meeting people for coffee, food, oxygen (SMILE)... you can email me don@donburnett.com and I'll send you my cellular phone # so you can TEXT me to get in touch with me during the conference. I love meeting folks, networking and having fun..

Technorati tags: Mix 08, Internet Explorer 8, Expression Studio, PHP Support, Silverlight 2

All Content Copyright © 2007 and 2008 Don Burnett and Respective Rights Holders. All Rights Reserved.

What I love about Expression Studio (yes I am an Expression GEEK)

By Don Burnett

 

Someone asked me the other day why I am so jazzed about Expression Studio and why my own focus has went away from using products like Adobe's Creative Suite.. Well, it's not that I don't like Adobe products, but I think the collaboration/integration effect of Expression Studio's products has won me over for UI development and here's why..

Expression Design

Everyone in the world remembers Fractal Design Painter which became Creature House’s Expression 3 late in the game. It was the first program that was vector based to do everything people wanted with bitmaps and in my humble opinion it competed very well with Adobe Photoshop and Illustrator for people doing vector based design. Expression Design still does that extremely well today. Somewhere along the path to Expression Design 1.0 it seemed to lose its identity because of the interface makeover to be in-line with other Expression products, but when I ask people out in the field, if they remember Fractal Design Painter, all of the sudden customer acceptance goes up 1000 % with designers. I think Microsoft should make that lineage of the product more “known” to customers. Because at first glance, customers don’t think much of the product. When they find out it goes back to Painter and all the cool texturing and natural drawing things that it can do, then folks get really excited very fast. Those I have taken that point with really embrace and like the product and do things with it. The old product had a really “steadfast” community around it. It would be nice to get some of these folks back talking about it.

Check out this review (it’s glowing) http://www.unleash.com/kurt/expression3/index.asp ... The highlight of that review is the sentence “In a nutshell, Expression 3, like its predecessors, is a natural media vector-based drawing tool. Unlike most paint programs that use bitmap images, Expression uses vector graphics to create effects that seem impossible using programs like Adobe Illustrator or Macromedia Freehand.”  I believe that is very true even today with Expression Design. I have high hopes that Microsoft will be promoting that fact in marketing..

Expression Media

Yet another product bought into the fold. Formerly I-View Media Pro.. One of my first jobs was with a company called Media Station. We did Disney’s Animated Storybook series for Windows and Mac (Lion King, Pocahontas, Winnie the Pooh), and others for Universal, Mattel and others. I worked for both the art and engineering departments and one of my duties was asset cataloging, version control, and making sure the right graphics and animation made it onto the CDs… I so wanted a program back then like I-View Media Pro, because back then we did this with terabyte hard drives and the old version of MS-Access. There was no XML or programs that would do this. I believe this is a really great program, and whether you are a professional developer, a pro photographer, or just someone who has a collection of media, this program is very “right sized”.  Mac folks love this because they have been already familiar with and using I-View for years.. It fills in between iPhoto and upper range products like Light Room and Aperture. But not just on the Mac, there is nothing else like this on Windows..

Expression Web

I have been a Macromedia Dreamweaver user for years, since 1.0. I got tired of paying for updates (or having my company do it) which really didn’t add extra features and just re-scrambled the interface into something that didn’t work better than the previous version and fixed bugs. My development experience has been that I gravitated towards the benefits of ASP.NET and Dreamweaver only partially supports ASP.NET functionality (not fully 2.0 or later compliant). Plus there was a lot of very “legacy” stuff in Dreamweaver that I had to get around to support the latest standards based web functionality.

Expression Web is a great product, mainly because it’s standards based and supports today’s standard web pages and the rendering is beautiful on IE and supports Firefox and Safari wonderfully. The only thing I kind of miss is the user driven EXTENSIONS architecture that Dreamweaver, but it seems like that might be changing with 2.0 and above.. Having a completely standards based program means extensions aren’t as necessary anyway.   I think this product really lives up to its advertising.. I reworked my portfolio site completely using it. I have had people compliment me on it. It’s a dynamic site with full JavaScript and XML support. If I add a new project to my portfolio, all I have to do is make a new entry to an XML configuration file and insert the metadata in for the project description and point at the paths for the screenshots. Expression Web made that all easy, and the CSS functionality is great..

Expression Blend

The product team doing this powerhouse really pays attention to what people are doing with it and I love it. The interface makes things incredibly easy and the  product just rocks. I would love to see Microsoft market the “extensibility factor” and adding custom controls with this and do some partner marketing with folks like Identity Mine who are doing custom control add-on's for Blend. Visual Studio built a huge “custom controls” vendor market around its product. This is very possible with Blend and something I’d like to see more happening with this. It’s looks like we are at the beginnings of this, I'd like to see more from the Visual Studio 3rd party control vendors.

Expression Encoder

Another great tool, it does just what we need. I don’t want it see it change..  I would love to see more people do live stuff with it, and I am looking forward to seeing case studies about how it was used with MSNBC for the Olympic games..

Expression Studio is no longer a new product, and I am seeing people get really excited about it and doing some really cool things with it. A lot of the situation is just getting people using it and liking it, I believe adoption is spreading significantly.  I think it’s a powerhouse set of products that in many ways do things better than Adobe’s CS3 and have many specific features that Adobe doesn’t and it can really enhance designer and developer workflow.

That's my take on things...

Technorati tags: Collaboration, Integration, Adobe, Microsoft, Expression Studio

New iTunes Supports Windows 64-bit and 64-bit Vista Systems

By Don Burnett

MacWorld Suprises

A few suprises came out of thin air at MacWorld, one being a new version of iTunes that supports 64-bit Windows Vista releases.. Looks like Apple has learned how to program 64-bit Windows in the past few months. My first experience with this was downloading the Terminator:Sarah Conner Chronicles Episode 1 (free right now on iTunes). After downloading and playing the episode in full screen mode it seems Apple has most of the bugs out of iTunes, Quicktime and 64-bit systems. Though Quicktime did crash when I closed the file using the close gadget in full screen,the release seems pretty solid outside of that.. Also if you haven't been on the moon somewhere Apple announce an ultra thin portable MacBook, called "Air" with a solid state hard drive as an option, no optical drive built-in but wireless peripheral support and a host of other features.

One of the members of Expression Studio is shipping with the release of Office 2008:Mac (Media Edition) and that is the new Expression Media product. Digital asset management is a serious subject these days from everyone who does professional photography to interactive and RIA design.. Some more exciting news when paired with this is Gekko Images of Sydney Australia has came up with a series of how-to videos and podcasts that covers how to improve your designer workflow, version control of assets, file format conversion (including many RAW formats including Adobe DNG format) for both the Mac and PC versions of Expression Media. The format conversion is worth the cost of the product alone.

These videos rock, Gekko offers specialized training and workflow analysis, including professional audits of your company's workflow process, group training (up to 10 people), 2 day training, One-on-One Training. Also a standard phone support package for assistance off-site is offered.

 

The group training package is especially exciting as it brings together the following topics:

Introduction:

• Principles of DAM workflow
• Overview of the application
• File importing
• File Sorting
• File Transfer
• Archiving
• Metadata / search
• Project integration

Advanced:

• Advanced tools overview
• Advanced cataloging
• Query Building and archiving
• Worflow integration (batches, scripts, droplets)
• Custom Scripts / Workflow automation
• Web Galleries, FTP & PDF Maker
• Collaborative Workflows (Notes, Reader, Catalog management)

Contact Gekko for further details...

Note if you are on a 64-bit Vista install and you go to the Apple download page to install the new iTunes,  it will recognize that you are on 64-bit Vista and send you to the proper 64-bit setup download option.. The 32-bit installer will now suggest the 64-bit version if you somehow try to install the wrong version. pretty neat huh!

Can you say EEE PC?

Okay what costs $349, is ultramobile, has a solid state drive (droppable), a very portable display and can run XP (if installed), Expression Studio (including Blend and WPF) and did I say costs only $349 dollars right now?? It's Asus' EEE PC. I found out how great this would be as a simple ultra-mobile design on the spot product, thanks to Bill Steele's Blog and how much he really liked this for long airplane rides..

I am probably going to snap one of these up shortly. It will be end-of-year before this device ships with Windows. The hard drive while bigger than some iPods can fit XP on it, but misses some of the size requirements for Vista. But it's ULTRA cool for $350... And you can do .Net 3.5 and WPF with it.. Not to mention Expression Blend.

 

Technorati tags: Gekko, Training Videos, Digital Asset Management, Expression Media

Silverlight on the Apple Mac- The Story Continues

by Don Burnett

Since the 1.0 version of Silverlight has shipped on the Apple Mac platform, it has become a very popular plug-in, not just with users but with third party developers. It's hard not to see the potential for the plug-in's great cross platform video solution Silverlight presents. Sure it's new, and there are a few things they are still working out on it, but for most people it's a trooper.  The Mac community has been clamoring for a way to natively on OS X encode Silverlight Video and output it directly on the Mac, especially in broadcast arenas. The Apple platform is famous for it's digital video solutions in QuickTime and  Final Cut Pro is one of the most used professional editing tools out there.. Having said that, to create Silverlight video, until now you could only go part of the way, producing a WMV output file. To create Silverlight video then you'd have to import video into Expression Media Encoder (either .MOV (QuickTime) or .WMVs). That still left no native way of producing Silverlight video natively in OS X until now..

 

Enter Flip4Mac's Silverlight Support..

 

 

 

 Flip4Mac makes a set of well known Components for Quicktime that allow it to play and manipulate Windows Media Video and Audio formats.  The latest beta supports encoding to Silverlight directly and will add the well known media player and media skins that are available with Expression Media Encoder. This is exciting news for those looking to create Silverlight Video and not having access to a Windows box to do it.

Check out the new support today at Flip4Mac.com right now..

 

Technorati tags: Flip4Mac, Native Silverlight Encoding, WMV components for the Mac, OSX, Silverlight Video

Announcing the New Webcast

by Don Burnett

Coming Soon to this Blog...

Conversation, "How-to's", special guests and what you really need to know about what's going on in the ever expanding .Net Designer Community..

There will be a bi-weekly pod-cast, with every month an alternating video-cast.

Technorati tags: Designing for .NET, webcast, podcast, videocast, wpf, silverlight, Expression Studio, Expression Blend, Expression Design, Expression Media, Expression Media Encoder, bi-weekly, monthly.

Wild Week of Cool Stuff

by Don Burnett

Well it's been a great last week for me. Follow me for a moment..

Monday: Halo 3 Launch Event

Thursday: Microsoft Across America MSDN Event- William J. Steele was in town to give a great presentation on LINQ, WCF, and Silverlight.. I hadn't really thought a lot about LINQ, but after Mr. Steele's demonstration I realized it's importance. It's data mapping and connectivity capabilities are very impressive. It virtually lets you represent data as objects from just about any source out there (LINQ to SQL, LINQ to Objects, LINQ to File System, and LINQ to Flickr). It makes queries and business logic a lot easier to abstract your data to a much higher level, and the days of talking to a data reader. No more talking to a data reader. There was also a great talk on the history of messaging on the platform and how WCF solves a legacy of issues with messaging. It was a fantastic few hours of information.

Friday: UX@UM was an unparalleled success. We opened a dialog about user experience design among the development and design communities at University of Michigan. We are working to get all of the content from the presentations (including streaming video). There was much interest in standards based web development and extending that functionality with the Silverlight plug-in.

Silverlight Deployment?

David Tesar has released a great deployment guide if you are adding Silverlight to your corporate environment. It's a MUST DOWNLOAD and will give all that you need to know to deploy safely in a corporate or academic setting.

Technorati tags: Silverlight Deployment Guide, User Experience Design, Expression Studio, LINQ, WCF

Expression Blend 2.0 September Preview

by Don Burnett

The Expression Blend 2.0 preview is out! A lot of of new features have been added including one very special one I have been waiting for as an animator. To celebrate Microsoft has added a new page to the Expression Studio Website just to showcase the new features of Expression Blend 2.0.

Here's a run down of the new features:

ANIMATION (YEAH!)

• Vertex Animation
• Improved Animation property editing
• A graphical editor for animation interpolation

SCENE EDITING

• The Breadcrumb Bar- Improved navigation into template and style hierarchies.
• Quick switching in and out of templates without having to follow the entire hierarchy, even across multiple documents.
• Drag-to-Duplicate
• Enhanced transform support for multiple selections

PROJECT and XAML EDITING

• XAML Split-View (See XAML graphics and edit them too! at the same time no more switching from design view to XAML view)
• Font Embedding and Subset Creation for WPF project (Windows Platform Applications)
• Drag & Drop (says it all!)

USER CONTROLS

• User Control Creation
• Draw Controls on the Artboard and turn them into user controls

Technorati tags: Expression Studio, Expression Blend, Blend 2.0, September Preview

UX@UM Michigan Expression Day 2007 Sold Out!

by Don Burnett

Introduction
User Experience based design and development is a hot topic today. It's on the words of business and advertising but it's also in a few unexpected places, including Academia.. I have been working with local and regional User Experience Evangelists from Microsoft and with University of Michigan folks to bring a special day of user experience exploration and training to University of Michigan. I am pleased to tell you that the event is SOLD OUT.. If this event interests you and you can't make it to this event or you are a U-M person who wants to attend never fear. We have a wait list and we are planning on working with the University to make another event like this available soon If you are a U-M person click here to get on the waitlist. If you are not a U-M person and want to attend a local event like this send me an email, and we'll get you on the waitlist for a similar (but non-academic) event. don@donburnett.com.

Event Information

Friday, September 28
9:00 am - 5:00 pm

UM Duderstadt Center
3336 AC/BD

Devote a day to take your user experience knowledge to the next level. We've brought together top user experience evangelists--whose applications are used by people around the world--to present a special UM-only program on best practices for creating standards-based sites and demonstrations on how you can leverage rich media and interactivity with Microsoft Expression Studio.

Speakers

Chris Bernard is a user experience evangelist for Microsoft. He works in software design, development and business domains to communicate Microsoft's position on the importance of user experience in software design. Prior to his work at Microsoft, he was creative director at a large technology-focused professional services company. Chris brings over 14 years of expertise in design, consulting, strategy, business frameworks, design research, analysis, synthesis, planning and implementation. His mission as a design professional is applying principles of contextual research, cultural, human, physical and social factors to the products, services and systems that he develops. Chris has an M.S. in Marketing Communications from the Stuart Graduate School of Business and a M.D.M (Master of Design Methods) from the Institute of Design. Both schools are affiliated with the Illinois Institute of Technology. http://chrisbernard.blogs.com/

Eric Burke is a software engineer who was on the team responsible for Yahoo! soon to be released Yahoo! Messenger for Windows Vista, done all with Microsoft WPF technologies. Eric has had much experience with developing applications that have enhanced user experiences. He will be discussing the design process with Chris Bernard.

Josh Holmes is an Architect Evangelist with Microsoft. Prior to joining Microsoft, Josh was a consultant working with a variety of clients ranging from large Fortune 500 firms to smaller sized companies. Josh is a frequent speaker and lead panelist at national and international software development conferences focusing on emerging technologies, software design and development with an emphasis on mobility and RIA (Rich Internet Applications). Community focused, Josh has founded and/or run many technology organizations from the Great Lakes Area .NET Users Group to the Ann Arbor Computer Society and was on the forming committee for CodeMash. http://www.joshholmes.com/.

Ken Arbogast-Wilson is founder and creative director of WTW Design Group, a southeast Michigan firm focused on design, marketing and advertising. Ken has a BBA from the University of Michigan and an MBA from Michigan State University. He has been creating singular designs for more than thirteen years. Ken has expertise in concepting, design, drawing, copywriting, editing, marketing planning, communication consulting, and anything involved with new technology. In addition to running WTW Design Group, Ken manages media development and production for the University of Michigan College of Architecture + Urban Planning. Prior to that, Ken worked for a variety of companies including M-CARE (UM's managed care provider), Cellular One, and Marshall Field & Company, Chicago. http://wtwdesign.com/

Don Burnett is a technology evangelist, project manager, interactive designer, and nationally recognized technology blogger specializing in rich media application development for web and desktop. Don's past work for creating, designing, and deploying multimedia applications and products include Disney Interactive, SegaSoft, Universal Interactive, and MediaOne. http://blog.donburnett.com/

Agenda

8:30 am-9:15 am
Check-in and refreshments
9:15 am-9:30 am
Welcome
Ken Arbogast-Wilson
Keynote Session
9:30-10:30 am
The Importance of User Experience Design

Chris Bernard

10:30-11:30 am

Introduction of Expression Studio, WPF and Web Demos

Chris Bernard, Josh Holmes, Don Burnett

11:30 am-1:00 pm

Lunch on your own

How-to Sessions

Option 1
1:00-2:00 pm
Designing Windows Experiences
Don Burnett
Option 2
1:00-2:00 pm
Designing Rich Web Experiences
Josh Holmes
Panel Discussion Sessions

Option 1
2:00-3:00 pm
The Value of User Experience Design in Education
Chris Bernard
Option 2
2:00-3:00 pm
Integrating Expression with Your Tools Arsenal

Don Burnett

3:00 pm-3:15 pm

Break

Capstone Session

3:15 pm-5:00 pm

Design Process for Yahoo Messenger with Expression Designer Tools

Chris Bernard and Eric Burke
Closing remarks
Chris Bernard and Josh Holmes

Technorati tags: Expression Studio, User Experience Design, University of Michigan, Expression Day 2007, Microsoft, Silverlight, WPF, Web 2.0, Design, Development