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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
Indeed. Please tell me all tools of which you are aware. All tools not on your list will be unsuccessful. Your lack of knowledge will determine the fate of untold hundreds of tools!
Tic-Tac-Toe, Global Thermonuclear War, and relationships all have the same winning move.
It was about "design" as in "interactive user interface design", not as in Illustrator, Inkscape, Photoshop etc.
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.
Creating fancy or professional graphical interfaces doesn't fit in with Microsoft's new future of big square blocks for everything.
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.