Today I got an email from a fellow blogger asking my opinion on the new Microsoft Expression product line (Sparkle, Quartz, Acrylic) and I have to admit, I had no idea what she was talking about. I did a little bit of peeking and found something amazing. Microsoft has got something big up it’s sleeves to take over the FrontPage mantle and carry it into the professional realm to fix the design shortcomings of Visual Studio.
I cut my web designing teeth on Frontpage. I was an ASP geek, modifying Sharepoint stuff, making asp/access based sites, etc. I have to admit that Frontpage had a very shaky start but eventually became a pretty mature, usable product. As recently as a year ago I still used it at work because I was unable to FTP through my corporate firewall but Frontpage Server extensions allowed me to transfer files all day long. Macromedia Dreamweaver eventually won me over and Frontpage was a distant memory.
Now that Adobe has purchased Macromedia and the products are being commingled, I think this is spectacular timing for a user approached web design application. We all know Adobe Golive never really got the adoption it wanted, and there are a great many who still think Dreamweaver is an industrial strength application for the designer, not the developer. The line is getting blurrier every day, soon the tools are going to have to fill the rest of the gap.
One might incorrectly assume by the packaging of these products, that these products are designed specifically to take on the Golive/Adobe Elements type products. If you dig deeper you can see that the true target is the enterprise applications that are taking over corporate America. The products are broken down into three basic products.
Microsoft Expression Graphic Designer
Graphic Designer almost looks like a canned app to make the clean, slick ad types Microsoft uses already. Non-destructive live effects, infinite creative brush types, distortions, depth & texture effects, and more, give you all the tools to make the imagery that’s just not practical to draw by hand. It allows you to work with both bitmap and vector based images in the same image. New ideas like the ability to rotate the canvas itself to make the image more workable are a welcome introduction. Microsoft Expression Graphic Designer also supports pressure sensitive tablets.
If you want to use your new designs in applications and web sites, the ability to export your artwork to XAML markup is there to create user interface elements. You are even able to copy and paste these images into Microsoft Powerpoint with full transparency support.
From what I can tell, this is designed to pull in the web site design features of Flash and commingle them with Adobe Illustrator. I see a lot of capability here and since Adobe Illustrator is probably one of the most complicated applications I have ever tried to master, some ease of use in the Vector application space would be more than welcome.
The last aspect of this application is the painting and photo editing side. I don’t think it will ever topple Photoshop, but I am not sure it really has to. There have been several great applications that filled holes in Photoshop that never got the mainstream support they should have. Painter is one that comes to mind. When going through the information on this application, the last few slides really looked a lot like Painter to me. Artistic tools are seemingly prevalent and well thought out.
Microsoft Expression Interactive Designer
UI…The one part that most web developers get wrong. Notice I didn’t say web designers. I have found, especially in my new work capacity, that the big disconnect in enterprise wide web application design is the gap between the UI designers and the back end guys that make the whole site work.
Interactive designer looks like a tool for the .net geeks to use to fill that void. You design the interface and it builds the framework to connect it to your .net back end. I see a good hand full of flash in here. Things that you would use for the interface are the order of the day. It has timeline features for animation, typographic features for pagination, layout features for flow and design, and best of all it works seamlessly with visual studio. In my opinion this is the enterprise scaled tool that design teams need to truly bring RAD capability to Web Application Development. The tool itself supports C#, VB.net and XAML with full intellisense and syntax highlighting.
The real gem here, is the ability to deploy your newly design application as both a web application and a full blown desktop app. Talk about truly portable!
Microsoft Expression Web
When I read the first paragraph of the information on this app I see all the industry buzz words: CSS-based, XHTML Compliant, W3C Validation…A good place to start. I am curious how much of this is closely tied to Internet Explorer 7, but it sounds good. It seems to support all of the HTML and XHTML Schemas, but to what extent on what browsers? I still don’t see CSS2. I like the realtime validation against your schema though. I am VERY curious about the CSS Rendering modes. It seems to have Standard and Quirks mode to allow you to render your pages determined by DOCTYPE. Being that I create a lot of templates for a local .net Developer, the templates feature is of interest to me as well. Honestly my Dreamweaver use is mostly related to autocomplete and syntax highlighting. I rarely use it for more than that. I don’t really do any of the back end code. I don’t use it to generate any type of JavaScript or DHTML and I always preview in actual IE and Firefox. I would not be hard pressed to switch if it truly carries these features to fruition.
Full XML support is there, but that doesn’t surprise me. Microsoft has pretty handily supported it now for quite a while. One thing that does give cause for excitement is the RSS Feed support. I have really fallen in love with these little buggers. For large businesses who are creating large but highly customized and compartmentalized portals ala Sharepoint, feeds are a great, easy, no-nonsense way to share information among team sites without reinventing the wheel.
Of course it is based around ASP.NET 2.0, but I think it’s time industry people stood up and took notice of .net. It’s truly a great platform that is getting some hard press because of completely unrelated Microsoft products. If you don’t like IE fine, I use Firefox mostly as do 80% of my readers. But don’t dislike every Microsoft product because you dislike IE or Windows.
One feature I think is really awesome is ASP.NET Development Server. To be able to develop against ASP without installing a full IIS system on a machine is nice!
Final Thoughts
So where am I left after all of this? Well, I am definitely going to download the betas. I do .net Development for a living (although is taking over at my company) so I feel I am pretty capable of giving you the real deal on these. I have to admit I am pretty excited to see them. I have my gripes with Dreamweaver and would be open to a new tool. Frontpage did not leave a bad taste in my mouth and Microsoft Visual Studio is severely anemic as a design tool.
I think Microsoft is taking a great aim here. Three integrated products. We all know they will never take down Photoshop. And the serious graphic artists are going to keep Illustrator for the foreseeable future, but the world of web design is kind of the wild wild west. We have guys that use everything from notepad to Dreamweaver and every kind of freeware, open source and closed source package in between. It would be nice to see Microsoft hit a home run in the web development space.
Keep your eye on these tools.
Download the CTP and Betas here:
Microsoft Expression Graphic Designer
Microsoft Expression Interactive Designer
JB
Tweet
Very cool! I’m not sure I would have otherwise taken interest in looking at these tools, but now certainly intend to. I am an Adobe lover for all my graphic needs, however, I completely agree: Adobe has a ton of very complex tools and features, but Illustrator and Photoshop have very steep learning curves and it takes a heavy investment in time to be super productive with them. I often have people asking me how to do this or that graphically and it’s a tough sell to walk somebody through masks and filters if they aren’t already familiar. I’m really interested in seeing the UI with graphic designer, specificaly to see how intuitive they are along with what level of functionality. I would love to be able to tell my amature photo editing friends how to do something like model skin with layer masks (http://photography-on-the.net/forum/showthread.php?t=171753) in a couple of easy to find mouse clicks.