Microsoft takes on Adobe / Macromedia
— Microsoft are pissing in a small pond with new design tool Expression. But will it turn the water a funny colour?…”
I stumbled across Microsoft Expression this afternoon, quite by chance, really. Expression is a three-product graphics suite for designers. It borrows enormously from Macromedia Studio and a bit of Adobe Photoshop.
It seems to me to be quite a bald response to Macromedia’s buyout, but as usual Microsoft has an angle.
That angle is XAML, the UI language based on the XML standard that Microsoft will ship with Avalon.
XAML, which from what I’ve seen bears comparison to XML-based code for Macromedia Flex applications, is the output format from Expression’s Interactive Designer, the more unusual package in the suite.
Also on offer are Graphic Designer and Web Designer, sold to us via the kind of (literally) kaleidoscopic visuals that presumably appeal to funky design types.
Sample downloads weigh in at upto a rather hefty 140Mb.
Can’t wait to hear the price!
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Who you gonna call?
Hello you, I'm Mike Padgett. I'm not a Princeton curator, Knoxville mayoral candidate, Kentuckian pastor or Arizona journalist, I just share the same name. In fact, I am a consultant working in user experience and information design.
I also enjoy travel, concerts, films and walking.
I'm originally from Yorkshire, England but nowadays I live in Belgium. My current favourite Belgian beer is Black Albert.
Shameless self-promotion
Over a year in the making, Dopeology.org is my latest personal project: a topology of doping in thirty years of European pro road cycling.
I collected information from thousands of sources, then I modelled and published it via a lightweight user interface.
February 27th, 2006 at 17:30
Have our expectations been reduced to only expecting Microsoft to continue with Paint and FrontPage? The web is serious and MS have perhaps realized it could make them a $ or 2 if they could produce a product that could build small footprint pages. I look forward to a new wave of internet entrepreneurs producing bloated, over animated, unreadable crap. Long live the experienced designers and developers.