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Microsoft Unveils New Design Studio
shibashaba writes "NewsFactor is reporting that Microsoft has just released a new design studio consisting of the Acrylic Graphic Design, Sparkle Interactive Design and Quartz Web Designer Software. Supposedly the goal is not to compete head to head with the proposed Adobe/Macromedia merger but to turn developers into designers. According to Jupiter Research, The days when a designer worked alone have been traded in for an interactive world in which designers often work hand-in-hand with developers. "Microsoft is trying to address what it believes is a legitimate and longstanding problem in the design market."
OMG QUARTZ!!!! Do your stuff Apple lawsuit ninjas!
*cue myriad legions of ninjas with briefcases and Apple logos on their masks vaulting over the top of Microsoft headquarters and hacking away at the unsuspecting trademark*
Here's Microsoft's page about it: http://www.microsoft.com/products/expression/en/de fault.aspx
I hope not, 'quartz' was the codename for DirectShow and the runtime library is still named 'quartz' as well.
Proud Mac user
Good for you.
Web2.0: I love when people Flickr my cuil and digg my boingboing until my google is reddit and I start to yahoo
MS dev studio is probably one of the exceptions to this rule, they tend to have arguably the "best" development suite on the market, so to say they really are the market leader in Quality and ROI in the dev area.
I think he was pointing out that Apple's had an app that does this for a long time now.
One of the worst products I ever worked on was one that was "designed" by a "designer" who wouldn't have known "third normal form" if it came up and bit her on the ass and said "Hello, I'm third normal form".
It was a web-based UI that was "designed" by someone using Visual BASIC as their design tool, and then we had the "opportunity" to try and build the damn thing in Java in a browser-portable way.
I'd rather walk on broken glass than work with that person again.
The UI we ended up with bore no relationship to the underlying data organization, and was basically all over the map when it came to unrelated items glommed together. Gee, it was pretty, but it was also totally unusable.
I'd have to disagree with you - it *completely* matters for a designer to understand what they are designing for; if they don't, the result is going to suck, and suck hard.
-- Terry
You can download a free version of Microsoft Expression "Acrylic Graphic Designer" if you feel like trying it. Here is a link... http://www.microsoft.com/products/expression/en/gr aphic_designer/default.aspx
you might find this more helpful. Or maybe less helpfull. Basically what they are saying is there should be no redundant data in a table. Meaning if you shouldn't have 'city' and 'zip code' in a table unless one of them is the primary key, because city and zip code are tied together. Otherwise you'd not be in 3rd normal form, which is, uh, not that important...
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
Normalizing a database is important because it eliminates chances of bringing the database into an inconsistent state. You don't want contradicting data in your tables. When there is only one place to put some information, it can't become out of sync with the "same" information in another place. This has a subtle link to user interface design: Users get confused when there are several places where they can enter the same information, unless you make it abundantly clear that the interface presents different "views" on the same data.
I agree 100%.
from the summary: "Microsoft is trying to address what it believes is a legitimate and longstanding problem in the design market."
the legitimate and longstanding problem in the design market is that so many developers think their designers. And so many people who have absolutely no concept of good design think their designers.
I've seen this first hand, far too often. Working in the digital prepress field, the ratio of jobs coming in from design firms/ professional designers compared to Janine working out of her basement on her shiny new dell has radically shifted.
We're stuck getting low res RGB Jpegs placed in powerpoint, RGB blacks that convert to horrible CMYK and customers who don't know what resolution is and don't even own photoshop.
We've even received the occasional paintshop pro file. the guy was a 19 year old kid who was trying to have business cards and mailers printed to advertise his webgraphics talents. After talking to him for 5 minutes, I realized he had no clue. No idea what resolution was. No idea what the difference between CMYK and RGB was. He also thought that PaintshopPro did everything that photoshop did. I was ready to kick his ass.
but now I'm getting off my point...
my point: The problem with the industry is lack of design skills with the designers, whether they're developer-gone-designer or designers with no skills.
...spike
Ewwwwww, coconut...
Not quite. In the classic example, it means you don't store a customer's address in the table of customer orders. If you do, you can wind up with several orders containing the same customer data (for a customer that has more than one order pending). If they change their address, you have to make sure to change *every* copy; worse, if the customer has no orders pending, you have *no* copies of the address.
Putting the data in third normal form would require setting up one table for customer info, another for orders, and each order would contain a foreign key -- an account number, for instance -- to link the order to a customer record. If the customer enters an address change, you update *one* record in the database, and all orders get the new information. Each bit of information is stored in one and only one place, and it will never get into an inconsistent state.
There are other "levels" of normalization, first through fifth, but 3NF is kind of a "sweet spot"; lower levels result in inconsistency in common cases, while higher orders tend to be more effort than they're worth.
There's clearly an untapped reserve of users who need cheap, easy to use design tools. Adobe & macromedia are at the very high end of the market. Their tools are powerful, expensive and intimidating. Sure they have some entry level versions of some tools but these are individual tools, not integrated suits of tools.
Microsoft has cleverly spotted this opportunity.
Also, Microsoft already has much of the necessary technology in various office addons that most people don't even know about (e.g. MS Publisher, photo editor), various stuff from their research department (mainly photo editing), and other stuff like their movie editor. And finally with some acquired components you can build a pretty interesting suite that is not so capable as the high end offerings from Adobe and Macromedia but cheap and usable. That's a good position to start from and over time they'll be able to add features to make the product more interesting.
Ideal for home users that want to edit their holiday pics, ideal for small businesses wanting to make a brochure, etc. In fact good enough for the majority of people who own a photoshop license, a dreamweaver license or an illustrator license. It's amazing how many people buy stuff they don't need. At the office we have a few photoshop licenses. The most advanced thing that ever happens there is to crop a few photos and create some transparent gifs, that sort of stuff. All the artwork we use in our website is actually delivered by professional design studios. Only recently the use of the gimp was promoted for this kind of stuff.
The world is full of users for who photoshop (or it's lightweight derivatives) is overkill or who do not need the full capabilities of illustrator or who do not need to develop complex webpages in inDesign or dreamweaver and who generally feel intimidated by all of the previous tools. Yet these people want to create stuff. They don't want to shop for this tool or that tool. Instead they want the tools on their PC when they buy them. People are lazy, most of them never buy software after their new PC is delivered.
And who happens to have a big influence on what is preinstalled? Right, Microsoft. Imagine how many people will toggle that nice MS Design Studio checkbox on the dell site (hell, why not it's only XX $ and I'll be able to do foo with it). Imagine how many companies will be tempted to spend a few dollars per desktop for this. It's easy money for MS. Even if it's only 1 percent of their users, that still is a huge amount of money.
You could argue that they are abusing their market position. You could also argue that other companies have simply failed to fill this gap in the market for years. Adobe only recently started to make consumer versions of their tools. You need to buy them individually and the full suit of tools is for high end users with big budget only.
Jilles
Sigh - the *stuff* is new. The idea is not.