Slashdot Mirror
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."
Alright, I'm sorry to be such a Mac user here, but seriously...Mac OS X 10.4 shipped with a graphics development design tool called "Quartz Composer" months ago (and it was announced almost a year before that). Could they really not come up with a more original name?
lmao. Yeah turn the developers into designers. All you need is a programmable grid for them to make everything orthogonal.
Please, mikeysoft, this move is killing all of us, dev. and design together. I wonder if MS actually asks designers and developers their feeling on this? Does it work?
"And you can't truly say that Outlook is an e-mail program. They actually redefined the market."
;-)
They are right. After all, they managed to integrate a calendar and address book into an email application. It's no longer just email, it's email and calendaring! See the difference? (No, I don't either.)
Microsoft Exchange/Outlook is useful only because it centralizes more than just the email. Scheduling and the ability to look up people in your company are both important features. The thing I don't understand is, where the heck is the competition? I mean, you're looking at a few special folders that Outlook interprets as "Calendar" and "Address Book" in an IMAP-type interface. Why can't anyone else do this? Always kind of boggled my mind.
And no, Lotus Notes doesn't count. LN isn't email, it's an automatic, self-corrupting database that happens to support email. A bit like EMACS is a complete LISP environment that happens to support text editing.
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
I happen to be employed as a designer/developer, at least when I'm not reading Slashdot. I'm a front-end interface developer and I do everything from concept design, graphic design, and animation, through to development and deployment.
Granted, there are better designers and developers than I, as I'm unable to specialise in either, but not many designer/developer teams can create the kind of responsive, intuitive and attractive user experiences that I do. Something goes missing when you start having to communicate your ideas to someone who doesn't understand both sides.
I will agree that people like me are rare however.. Most designers look at me strangely when I start talking about code, and most developers have absolutely no sense of aesthetics or design.
I'm not saying that it's not useful. I'm saying that:
1. It's not really "email redefined", it's "email with calendaring bundled".
2. It's so stupidly simple, I don't understand why no one at least copies it. Hell, it wouldn't be that hard to come up with something with more powerful features. (e.g. Better email searching, searchable address book, labels vs. folders, smart calendar that can helpfully generate reports to help you plan your day, etc.)
It just amazes me that Microsoft has managed to get a strangehold on the email market with a fairly straight-forward produce, and the only industry response is a new version of Lotus Notes. Am I missing something here?
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
oh, let's bash this new product that we have no direct experience with!!! ...
... oh wait, this is /.
not exactly the mark of an educated person.
no one is trying to "turn developers into designers". the point of all this is to have graphical tools that fit in with the existing visual studio environment... so developers and designers are all using common ground to develop applications.
maybe it will suck.. maybe it'll be decent. time will tell... but don't jump the gun quite yet.
How the hell have you people been programming for the past decade? :( I've only been doing this for a couple years, Cocoa, RoR, php, some C command-line Unix stuff, but I know what to expect from a GUI development platform.
Gee, wiz, that's great. We, like many developers of Windows software, have been using the DevStudio tools. The visual designers they have supplied have been pretty shit at doing design work in, but that's not the main problem. The main problem is that they sometime corrupt your code. That's REALLY bad. Now, when this happens, a developer sometimes has to get in there and push pixels around. That's shit. Now they're presenting XAML and the code/design separation and that is a good thing. And I dare say no computer platform had reached the Avalon level of GUI-creation in the year 2000. Sorry, but that's just not so.
But, hey, I'm glad you're on a platform you like. I have NOT been on a GUI-development platform I like for the last twn years and now this makes for a great change. (Granted, it's only the last two years I've had to do any real Windows GUI work, the code I wrote before then was either 2D/3D game engines or 3D CAD rendering enginges.)
I think you've got it backward. I think what they're trying to say is Designers!, Designers!, Designers! are Developers! Developers! Developers! too. They've noticed that a good part of the time spent making software is the UI/Designer people who don't usually know how to program trying to direct the programmers, who don't usually know how to design. Programmers hate fiddling with making the UI elements do what the designers want them to do- they'd rather be solving the big problems. If only the designers had a tool for designing UIs that worked like the tools they know and spoke a language that the programmers could do something with...
Allowing contemporary developers and designers a more effective method of communication is incredibly valuable. Yet more importantly, I think this tool finally marks the industry's official acknowledgment of "interactive designers".
By "interactive designers" I'm not referring to developers who are self-taught photoshop gurus, or designers who know how to alter a script. I'm talking about professionally trained graphic designers who have been schooled in human behavior (psychology / sociology) and software development.
I was totally blown away by the Sparkle demo that was posted to Slashdot last week. Nevertheless, Sparkle is just a tool. It's not going to teach developers the idiosyncrasies of visual communication, and it's not going to teach designer's programing logic. It'll set some boundaries and drastically speed up prototyping.
However, once companies start utilizing tools likes Sparkle, AND start hiring legitimate "interactive designers"... we should start to see some see some really cool shit. "Design" is not something that should be separate from development. Designers and developers / engineers need to be on a design team from stage one.
It's common practice to a) engineer and or conceptualize functionality before considering interactivity and ascetics, and or b) design pretty concepts that are impractical to develop. Both of these approaches don't make any sense.
If you ask me, a software development "dream team" would be composed of adept developers with some schooling in industrial design, and adept graphic designers with schooling in human behavior and computer science. When they'd start a new project, they would enter ideation, design, and development stages together... and they'd have some tools like Sparkle readily available. Because, well, Flash and Photoshop interactivity prototyping is a soul sucking vortex that needs to die. Seriously.
Yet, this won't start to happen until interdisciplinary education becomes common place.
"Things are more moderner than before- bigger, and yet smaller- it's computers-- San Dimas High School football RULES!"
Agreed, open source is a wasteland of creative application design. While the concepts are unique and innovative, usually most get wrapped up in lousy, generic and sterile environments with major usibility issues. Mostly this is because they try and make it work on ALL platforms rather then focusing on one platform.
I am a software developer, but I do have an eye for creativity. I wrote my own library of classes to allow me to create more expressive and innovative interfaces for applications. I can easily duplicate UI found in iTunes or Picassa with it in a few hours. One of the things I struggle with using Microsofts Visual Studio is application design and how rigid (or rediculous) MS made UI design. Dialog and control design for VS has been anything but easy or enjoyable.
I have been very excited about Windows Vista if only for their new presentation layer and XAML support which does effectively separate GUI front ends with backend code. It will allow companies to more easily separate the GUI and pass it off to their art or marketing department while keeping most of the backend developers excluded from the UI design, which in many cases is ideal.
But it will also allow for a more streamlined design environment for those developers that have bridged the gap between GUI design and code design. Those developers who can use Photoshop or any other vector/pixel based graphics editor will be able to create more expresive GUI and with MS supporting more Flash like feature in GUI (like animation with "storyboard" support), I think applications on Windows will become very interesting in the near future.
I don't think MS wants to eliminate the graphics designer position in software development, they have effectively separated the two aspects of application design allowing for designers and developers to do both their jobs well without having to coordinate or synchronize production, which can hold up application progress.
MS seems to be catering to all, those companies with separate design and coding departments, and those with only a few developers doing everything. This should be a welcomed change in the Windows software development market.
I haven't thought of anything clever to put here, but then again most of you haven't either.