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...
1 comment:
I too have fallen in love with the sleek black vector based IDE's that are Blend and Design! I remember, ohh it was just about a year and a half ago, trying Microsoft Acryllic? Spark?? and thinking.. what are they thinking? Now I just happened to try Expression Design, after using Fireworks for nearly 10 years I was wanting some more Vector based tools, tried Corel X4 (nice but nothing stellar although their trace bitmat options are cool), then I tried Adobe Illustrator CS3 and had issues with the install on my Vista Laptop (as I did with the entire CS3 suite) then on a whim I thought I would take a look at design. Interestingly the only reason I even thought of Expression Design is because of my awesome experience with Expression Media, slick application and kills Adobe Bridge in performance and UI.
Design simply amazed me, and afer 3 days I'm 100% positive that I'll pick up the entire suite. Now if only we can get them to Vectorize the Visual Studio 2008 Pro IDE lol
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