After the succes of Adobe/Macromedia’s dreamweaver, illustrator, photoshop, fireworks and flash Microsoft decided they should not be left behind. So Microsoft is coming with the expression family. The expression family consists of 3 products, the graphic designer, the interactive designer and the webdesigner.

Expressions Acrylic graphic designer
This one seems most like a combination of photoshop and illustrator. It’s said to combine all the power of vector based design and all the detail of pixels. It uses both types in one document making up for something long missed in both photoshop and illustrator.

Expressions Sparkle interactive designer
A mix of fireworks and flash, add interactivity and buttons, animations and images. Now the real question is how usable is this still? With native 3d support and all the other options will you get lost in this? I guess we’ll see.

Expressions Quartz web designer
So, microsoft had frontpage, which has been the laughed at by all webdevelopers. Horrid code for even the simplest of things. They decided the could do better. With Quartz web designer one can build website according to w3c standards and easily incorporate php/asp and other languages.

Now why should you use these three products once they come out? Well, if everything works as planned the step between design and development should become less of an issue. All work created in the graphic designer program or the interactive designer one should be easily incorporated into the webdesigner one. And by making sure everything uses common file types a link between the expressions family and the .net suite should be all to easy.

My real concerns with this are, how well will things made on this platform run on for example linux pc’s. Just look at html code that works properly in Internet Explorer but isn’t supported in any standard.
And secondly, what about usability? How many buttons will that be. If you look at flash you’ll see that it has quite a high learning curve already. Something like a motion tween is for beginning users hard enough. How will the interactive designer deal with this? Seeming like a mix of both flash and fireworks, well, there’ll be enough to learn.

See the demo

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This entry was posted on Thursday, December 22nd, 2005 at 10:57 by Sonja Duijvesteijn and is filed under Webdevelopment. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.