Microsoft recently release the first public beta of their Expression Interactive Design tool (aka Sparkle), and I finally can get a chance to play with it and publicly talk about it. The most important thing to remember with this tool is that it is not geared towards the developer. The code name Cider product is the analogous tool on the developer side of the house and is supposed to be part of the Orcas release of Visual Studio. To be honest, I’m a developer who dabbles in the graphics world. I am not the person that the Expression Interactive Designer is really for, but neither is the Cider product. I’m sort of in between both worlds. I feel almost as comfortable with Adobe Illustrator as I do with Visual Studio, but where I totally understand how to write code, aspects of the graphic arts can really stymie me. To make matters worse, I’m a vector sort of guy, so tools like Photoshop and the whole raster thing are like working in Java for a .Net developer (sort of familiar, but frustrating because things just work different then the way you have learned to expect).
The install is relatively easy and painless, since I already had .Net 2.0 and Visual Studio 2005 already install. Oh, I’ve installed the CTP in a Virtual PC machine, since it isn’t even a beta, but a community tech preview. If you like to play with these early releases, running them in a virtual machine is the safest way to avoid having to wipe and reinstall your main machine (your daily driver). Running in a VPC can be a bit slower, if you don’t follow a couple important rules, have plenty of RAM (2GB minimum) and run the VPC off a second hard disk (external USB 2.0 drives with 7800RPM are perfect).
Once you get it installed and start it up you will notice a very nice a clean UI somewhere between Adobe’s and Macromedia’s look and feel. The first complaint would be that it is too much like their tools, which lack the more natural UI feel Microsoft product can have (think Office 2003). I really like the flyout window style of Visual Studio. IMHO it is a much cleaner UI environment then the multiple floating windows used in Illustrator and Photoshop. Unfortunately, Interactive Designer suffers from the floating window mentality. I sort of understand why they did it (to make it easier for the Adobe guys to switch) but they should offer the ability to switch between the 2 modes, like they do in Visual Studio.
Another quirky thing is that the color picker defaults to the HSL format (Hue, Saturation, Luminosity), which isn’t the normal default of other products. RGB and CMYK are more common, but CMYK is a print only thing, so I can understand why they don’t use that here. To make matters worse, there doesn’t seem to be anywhere to save customized preferences (like defaulting to RGB). There is also a bug (already reported) where RGB doesn’t accept the normal hexadecimal format (0-255) and instead only uses 0.0 thru 1.0. As per my newsgroup post, this is a known issue, and will be fixed, so that you can use both.
The last important item is regarding the plugin architecture. Since this is not a Visual Studio based product, it seems that the plugin architecture will be different then the Visual Studio extension SDK. Which is a shame, because in a perfect world, I should be able to write a plugin for Cider that works in the Express products. But, instead someone that writes a plugin for one product will have to have 2 installers, one for VS based products and one for Expression based product, even though a plugin might make sense for both product lines.
Remember, this is just a CTP, and not close to the final product. If you are interested in seeing the future of graphics development, I highly recommend checking it out, but not on you main machine. Seems like this has the potential to be a very good product, but then again, I’m not the guy their main target audience. If you want to help drive the future of the product, I recommend subscribing to the team blog, posting comments on the discussion groups, and checking out the Expression Community.
Technorati tags: Expression Interactive Design adobe illustrator macromedia flash macromedia-flash svg graphic artist