Of course not! I'm not leaving theSpoke! I'm still keeping this blog for my personal sentiments and my new blog, located at Microsoft Philippines Community Site for my technical posts. You can check it out from here.
Most probably things that I posted there will also be mirrored here so this blog is still considered my main blog. :)
Cross-post from http://msforums.ph/blogs/jasin14/archive/2005/10/30/81227.aspx
No, I'm not talking about Microsoft's expressions (i.e. facial, social, etc.) here. I'm referring to an upcoming product line from Microsoft comprising of a Graphic Designer (code-named Acrylic), Interactive Designer (code-named Sparkle) and Web Designer (code-named Quartz).
Microsoft Expression™
As described from its website:
Microsoft Expression™ takes the many sides of your creative personality to all new levels. Professional design tools give you greater flexibility to create sophisticated applications and content. Innovative technologies enable faster and richer interface development for Windows applications or the Web. Compatibility between products increases all levels of your personal productivity.
You may have noticed that these 3 products are more likely for a designer, which is actually its main purpose. The first one is for imaging, the second for Windows applications and the third for Web applications.
Acrylic Graphic Designer lets you do image editing that claims to combine the best of vector-based and pixel-based (bitmap) capabilities.
Sparkle Interactive Designer, a user-interface design tool for modern application development using the Windows® Presentation Foundation, lets you create user interfaces with a rich design environment that allows you to include multimedia elements such as vector/bitmap images, 3D content as well as audio, video and animation.
Quartz Web Designer let's you create dynamic Web Sites that is rich in design.
These products, which are all part of the Microsoft Expression™ product line of designer tools, may be used in conjuction with Microsoft Visual Studio 2005. This will let us separate the tasks performed by the designers from those that are done by the programmers and developers.
As of this writing, these 3 products are yet being finalized and among them, only Acrylic is available publicly as a Community Technology Preview. You can try it out here, which is a hefty 133MB download.
To learn more, visit Microsoft Expression™ website.