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Microsoft Kills Expression Suite — And Makes It Free, For Now
mikejuk writes "Microsoft has announced that the Expression suite of design tools is no more. It has been removed from sale immediately and it has been placed on a maintenance only status until it reaches its end of life. Expression was Microsoft's offering for designers and competed directly with Adobe products. You can now download the components of Expression — Design 4, Web 4 and Encoder 4 — for free but you can't buy them. Of course, knowing that you are using 'doomed' products, even for free, takes some of the icing off the cake. The central component of the suite the UI designer Blend is to be integrated with Visual Studio 2012 probably along with Update 2. It looks as if Microsoft is giving up on trying to get designers to use its tools."
They should just open source it
It's a shame.
But Blend is the secret-ish weapon. However anyone who's used Blend extensively for WP and Win8 dev on large projects, while it has it's short comings, it rocks. We're seeing our WP and Win8 projects delivered considerably cheaper than our other platforms, prototype designs built as apps, not on paper, allowing us to prototype during the design phase.
that Microsoft even had a design suite. I guess that shows how successful it was.
This is what will happen next:
Like earlier versions of MS Office, in the days when WordPerfect was king, Microsoft made these versions free.
Guess what! It worked.
There are free alternatives and better paid-for ones, but they're all grassing for attention.
We now have a situation whereby professional desktop document editing has become synonymous with MS Office.
A true, tried and proven modus operandi.
When applying a gradient fill to an object it was not possible to adjust a gradient after applying. As a professional graphics designer I can say that a gradient never looks perfect the first time and always needs adjustment. Instead with Expression Design you had to apply the whole gradient again, hoping that this time it would look perfect (which never happened). This made the whole software the least productive tool ever for our job. We really tried, but Expression was simply unusable for us, I even suspect that the totally useless gradient tool is the reason why Microsoft developers decided to make the Windows 8 icons monochrome.
Signature deleted by lameness filter.
This was a failure in marketing, not technology. When this came out, it took me a while to differentiate the products because of the first word in the name being the same. I finally figured out to just drop the word "Expression" and concentrate on the second word. I think it was a huge mistake trying to use the term to group a disparate set of products. They should have called them Microsoft Design, Microsoft Blend, etc. and then packaged them as "Microsoft Designer Suite". Blend is actually pretty cool.
Used Expression suite to make a custom embedded system on a pretty large project. It was good to integrate photoshop files from the graphic designers and convert them to controls. The UI turns out looking really professional - none of those stock standard UI controls and all beautifully rendered.
The main problem with the suite was that, in practice, the design flow is really one-way. If there was a change to the UI, you pretty much had to re-import the graphics, re-select the graphic items and group them into controls again.
For the next product iteration, we went back to WPF mixed with Windows Forms for old or 3rd party controls.
If a potential customer does n't even know that the product exists, especially one who uses their other development tools thats a big massive fail in my book.
Creating fancy or professional graphical interfaces doesn't fit in with Microsoft's new future of big square blocks for everything.
The original Expression app that MS bought years ago was a great start on a different style of drawing/painting app. The vectored brush shapes were innovative. MS bought it, gave it away for awhile, and that was the last I heard of it. MS really doesn't have any credibility with designers.
The potato it is uninformed.
The real reason this is news is because it means some day, when Microsoft kills the now-free product, Slashdot can publish the headline "Microsoft Finally Kills Free Expression" without being a troll or libelous.