Expression Studio 2 is available

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Jon
on May 1, 2008
in expression and news
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Literally 12 months since Expression Studio, we release Expression Studio 2 - the product team pulled out all the stops to meet their goal of having quick development cycles for the products. Making sure people using the Expression products get the latest tools and technologies in their hands as quickly as possible.

Alongside the new release we also have a brand new Expression Web site which contains all the pre-sales information, links to trials (which are available today), upgrade information, specs etc.

On the community side, back in March at MIX 08 we launched the new Expression Community site, which houses our forums, community news and is more of an informal place to hang out with your peers and ask questions about the products, technologies or techniques when building content with the Expression tools. There’s an incredibly strong team looking after the Community Site, many of whom work directly on the products, so don’t be shy in asking questions!

If you just want to get to the products you can click on the links below to get to the trials:

Expression Studio 2 (the complete deal)
Expression Web 2
Expression Blend 2
Expression Design 2
Expression Media 2 (Windows)
Expression Media 2 (Mac)
Expression Encoder 2

Behind the scenes at MIX

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Jon
on March 26, 2008
in event
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This year I was luckily enough to be onstage with Scott Guthrie during the Keynote at MIX 08. I was presenting the Rich Advertising section - squeezing in a demo that was about 2 minutes too long for it’s allocated running time ;)

If you’d ever wondered what it was like behind stage at one of these events, particularly one that is being broadcast live… well, it’s like mission control…

Behind the scenes at MIX 08

And I thought wiring up my home theatre system was complex !

(Photo courtesy of Pete Barr-Watson)

Reinstalling Vista on MacBook Pro

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Jon
on March 25, 2008
in boot camp and drivers
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I’m bad. There I’ve said it. I’ve been running Vista since Beta 1 and haven’t done a fresh install since!

I was getting low on hard drive space, I’d just started a new job… and I thought lets not do a bit of spring cleaning this time instead let’s start a fresh and do a clean install.

I backed up the partition then formatted it - total eradication - well there was no going back now and… well overall it went pretty much like a dream.

I was reinstalled with a fresh copy of Vista SP1 within the hour. No driver issues (or so I thought, more on that in a minute) and over 20GB of space reclaimed on the drive. It’s amazing how much clutter one accumulates over the years :)

So I did a couple of things this time round to help make sure the machine stayed in tip top shape. The first was to download AutoRuns which is simply a superb start up monitor that’s easy to use and easy to understand exactly what it is you are turning on/off. It’s amazing how much junk gets installed with your applications that you know you’ll never need. The worst offender for me was Acrobat. All I wanted was the application and the printer driver… I also got 3 startup items, 2 items in the explorer shell and 3 in IE… 30 seconds with AutoRuns and everything is back to normal :)

The second thing I did was change the size of the Shadowcopy area of the hard drive. I haven’t got a massive drive and my machine backs up files on the fly using ViceVersa Pro so I didn’t think it necessary to give up so much precious hard drive space to ’shadowcopies’.

Take a look at how much space you’re using.

Open a ‘cmd’ window with ‘admin’ privileges, then type:

vssadmin List ShadowStorage

This will list out the details for your drive… surprising isn’t it! So if like me you don’t need to use all that space you can change it quickly and easily.

I decide that 4GB would be enough for me as that still leaves me with enough ShadowStorage for a couple of System Restore points. So to change how much space is allocated simply use the following syntax in a ‘cmd’ window:

vssadmin Resize ShadowStorage /On=[drive]: /For=[drive]: /Maxsize=[size]

So in my case it would be:

vssadmin Resize ShadowStorage /On=C: /For=C: /MaxSize=4GB

Perfect !

Everything was working great… then I realized the one application I hadn’t reinstalled was the ATI Catalyst Control Center and Drivers. Which as I’ve got a Rev1 MacBook Pro with the ATI Mobility Radeon X1600 Card means trying to display anything on an external monitor is a simply a torture session.

So off to ATIs website… but… could I remember which version of the Catalyst Drivers I’d been using… NO! I knew there were no Vista mobility drivers available and I’d installed XP drivers with success previously - but which ones… 8.3, nope, 8.2 nope, 8.1…. 7.9 *sigh*…

I was sure 7.9 were the right ones… I reconised the different installer when it came up.   the only difference was SP1 was installed… I had that sudden sinking feeling!

So I started searching and after a bit of digging and rummaging around found the light at the end of the tunnel I was looking for.

driverheaven.net

The website lives up to its name by providing a MOD program for the regular Catalyst Desktop Drivers that allows them to work on the Mobility versions of the X1600 card (many other cards are support as well). Literally within 4 minutes of finding the site I’d downloaded, unziped, read the instructions, installed, and rebooted! I was back in business with the latest 8.3 drivers installed.

Full control again over my external monitors :)

Life is good once more.

FREE Expression Studio for students

Published
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Jon
on March 20, 2008
in expression
. 0 Comments

Free? Nada? Zip? Zilch?

I was chatting to a couple of design students the week after MIX08 and they hadn’t heard about ‘Dreamspark’ so I thought I’d just highlight this fantastic initiative again.

Dreamspark gives students access to: Expression Studio, Visual Studio 2005 Professional Edition, Visual Studio 2008 Professional Edition, XNA Game Studio 2.0, SQL Server 2005 and Windows Server! For FREE.

And right from the start we’re supporting  11 countries with more to follow: United States, United Kingdom, Canada, China, Germany, France, Finland, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland and Belgium

If you’re a student don’t miss out and find out more here.

It’s great seeing Expression Studio included in this great initiative and getting out to the student audience so early in it’s life!

Dreamspark logo

Are you thinking of going to MIX08?

Published
by
Jon
on February 20, 2008
in Uncategorized and event
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There’s good news and bad news.

Let’s deal with the bad news first. The bad news is that Mix 08 is totally sold out so if you’ve not got your ticket you’ll have to wait until next, book early! Well done to the Mix team for putting together a great schedule.

The good news is that visitmix.com will be hosting videos of many of the sessions. Not the same as seeing them live and interacting with the other delegates and speakers but definitely better than missing out altogether.

Keep your eye on visitmix.com for all the latest news.

Silverlight to power ‘Jackass 2.5′

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by
Jon
on December 15, 2007
in Uncategorized
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On December 19th, Blockbuster will premiere the first full-length feature film release to the web, Jackass 2.5, directly to online audiences using both Windows and Mac via Microsoft Silverlight

Jackass 2.5 will be made available for FREE, to anyone in the United States 17 or older.

As you can imagine this is one of the largest projects in Blockbuster history, made possible by using the rich media CDN from Limelight Networks and Silverlight. I think shows how rapidly Silverlight is maturing from its new born status back in September to where it stands today.

This is a massive first step by one of the biggest players in the movie rental market and it will be interesting to see the direction they, and other companies can take this in the future.

Jackass 2.5 - www.blockbuster.jackassworld.com beginning December 19th through December 31st, 2007 - Enjoy!

Designers throwing things over the wall…

Published
by
Jon
on November 29, 2007
in expression, expression blend and workflow
. 0 Comments

The workflow for both desktop and browser based apps using Expression Blend and Visual Studio is very much in the mould of the ‘designer’ builds the visual look and feel of the application in Blend and the ‘developer’ codes against those UI elements in Visual Studio. In some workflow scenarios the designer/developer are different people, in others, particularly if you are coming from a background of Flash, they are the same person.

The Blend/Visual Studio workflow doesn’t favour one or the other.

I think Ryan’s comment about ‘throwing things over the fence’ is generally true of a traditional designer/developer workflow when a Photoshop comp is thrown over to a developer to be made into a functional application, in this scenario the end result would almost certainly look different from the designers original visualisation and the smallest change would often involve a fair amount of work. Thermo, from it’s early showing definitely seems to be going in the right direction to help solve this sort of dilemma.

Expression Blend and Visual Studio, well it’s just different from the traditional model. There is no throwing over the wall, it’s more… a very slick passing of the baton :)

Both products use exactly the same file formats, open the same project files, and the designer and developer can work on the same project at the same time seamlessly. The end result at the UI layer will look exactly the same as the designers original vision as there is not slice and dice, no trying to stitch together in code what the designer created with pixels in the first instance. The exact same visual the designer created in Blend (Design, Illustrator), is the exact same visual that is delivered as part of the final project, now it simply has some code behind it to make it interactive.

In my case my workflow is simple.

I have Blend open as my Interaction Design tool (either Expression Design or Illustrator if I want to do more serious graphical work), Visual Studio as my code environment and my browser as my test environment.

Once I’ve tested the project once I leave it running in the browser. After I’ve written or changed code in Visual Studio I literally hit browser refresh to check the interactions and see if I like the changes. Exactly the same from the design side, if I’m not happy with the look and feel I simply go back to Blend, make the changes I need, save, and hit browser refresh and look at the updated application.

The visual aspects of the application are decoupled from the code, there’s no set limit on what you can do in each environment, and when you do handover from design to code the transition is seamless.

I see this as much more of a design/developer continuum than just throwing things over the wall.

Make my logo bigger

Published
by
Jon
on October 30, 2007
in design, designer and general
. 0 Comments

Occasionally you see something that simply nails an idea so perfectly - this is one of those times.

Who needs designers when you can just use the ‘make my logo bigger’ cream - works on both printed and web material ;)

Just check out the video at ‘Make my logo bigger‘.

And the sad thing is we’ve all had to fight this experience in real life.

Thanks to the guys at Agency Fusion for making my day.

The right image, the right place, the right time

Published
by
Jon
on October 30, 2007
in design and general
. 0 Comments

I’ve only just seen this and although it’s been kicking around for a while I thought I’d share it.

Often getting the maximum impact for your design is a combination of many things, understanding the market, the right message , the right look and emotional attachment, some times the ideas that seem so simple have the greatest impact.

The Red Cross wanted to raise awareness of the devastation that an earthquake can cause and if we’re honest words don’t really capture the huge impact, in reality neither do images of some far away place that has been hit by a quake. Those images have shock value, but not the emotional attachment… so how about a graphic example of how a quake would impact you…

Image

The power of using the right image to deliver a message!

You can read more at coolhunter.net

MIX winding down for 07… looking towards 08

Published
by
Jon
on September 25, 2007
in event and mix07
. 0 Comments

MIX has changed dramatically since it appeared on to the event map as a single event in Las Vegas in 2006.

This year MIX blossomed into a worldwide extravaganza which started in Las Vegas in late April, to then spread out across the globe at 17 other events.

  • MIX 07 - April 30 - May 2
  • Sweden - May 24
  • Italy - May 30
  • Hong Kong - June 5
  • Hungary - June 11 - 12
  • Netherlands - June 13 - 14
  • India (TechMela) - June 13 - 16
  • Switzerland - June 18 - 19
  • Korea - June 19
  • France - June 21
  • Silicon Valley - June 22
  • Australia - June 25 - 26
  • South Africa - June 26 - 27
  • Singapore - June 29
  • Taiwan - August 30
  • UK - September 11 - 12
  • Tokyo - September 19
  • Germany (XTopia) - October 10 - 12

    Having been at Microsoft for just over 12 months working as a User Experience Evangelist (UXE) seeing this kind of investment this early in Microsoft’s entry in to the creative market has been a fantastic thing to witness first hand. No toe in the water here, it’s been jump in with both feet and really embrace the market.

    For me personally it’s been a great experience getting to meet so many people across the globe from so many differing backgrounds, pure .Net developers, ActionScript gurus, pure Flash animators, Photoshop masters, Ruby and Python experts… this for me is what has made the events so - eventful - such a diverse range of people brought together at one event. MIX, really does live up to it’s name!

    It’s been a packed six months, I can’t really believe it’s only been that long but from sitting in as part of the audience at MIX in Vegas, hearing and seeing the amazing reaction to the announcements that day to presenting sessions at 6 of the different ReMIX events around the world, it’s been a real buzz being part of this adventure. I mean, little did I realise when I saw Wayne Smith deliver his Expression piece of the keynote in Vegas that I’d be on stage doing the same thing in keynotes in Sweden, Italy, Hungary, South Africa and the UK! A few late nights, and the addition of a few gray hairs :)

    So why post about MIX now? For me MIX is only over now. MIX:UK is the last MIX event I’m involved in this year and it just seemed a good reflection point.

    MIX:UK itself was a blockbuster. A sell out event. In reality it was over subscribed so no doubt we’ll be looking for a bigger venue next time!

    It was a hugely ambitious project for a first time event, 4 tracks, 36 sessions, 58 speakers, the obligatory party - with a full on Guitar Hero 2 competition. What I feel worked really well in this event was that of the 4 tracks only 2 were owned by Microsoft, the other 2 tracks were run by the community, 1 track for designers, 1 for developers. In the spirit of ‘mixing’ it up the owners of those tracks had full autonomy over who they invited to speak - so we had sessions that included Ruby, Python, work by Flash designers, and session titles such as ¨a nice cup of tea¨ and ¨swaggily fortunes¨, yes MIX:UK is definitely the right title for this event. Response to the event has been great, you can read some of the feedback, reviews, summaries etc on the backnetwork, or if you’d prefer a quick summary in a different format then you can can listen to the BBC podcast here (updated BBC link).

    This is what makes the MIX events so great, they’re literally the physical embodiment of Microsoft’s reinvention, from a company that seemed to be inward looking and risk averse to one that is trying new things on almost a daily basis, Silverlight, Surface, Photosynth, Seadragon and in terms of technology is now practically an open house!

    The change has been massive and it’s just the start… and the place to be to witness the next stage of the evolution… MIX 08 Las Vegas March 5-7 2008, see you there :)