Extreme makeover: Microsoft Expression Blend

Microsoft Expression has a special holiday treat for designers: The new beta of Microsoft Expression Blend is now available for download.

The Expression team has been working very hard over the past year to give Sparkle an extreme makeover. New UI, new property inspection system, better workflow for UI design tasks, and a great looking product!

From the Expression Team blog:

“What’s new in the beta?

Enhanced Properties panel UX

• Context-sensitive UX makes finding associated properties a snap
  
• Improved UX for event & property triggers
  
• Support for editing almost all WPF properties such as bitmap effects
  
• Built-in search to help you find properties without the need for scrolling
  
• Ability to bind data such as a brush resource to any property using a rich UX
  
• Unique value editors make it easier to set values without leaving the mouse
  
• New editors for collections
  
• A new plug-in model that 3rd-parties can use to add their own custom editors
  

Redesigned shell

• Improved docking and panel management
  
• New icons enhance usability
  
• Darker theme brings focus to the design workspace
  

Improved artboard

• Drag & drop to create elements via a rich asset gallery
  
• Snap to grid and snap to alignment makes it easier to layout your controls
  
• Enhanced context menu allows you to group into layout containers and set common layout properties
  
• Right-click > View XAML allows you to quickly find the associated XAML for an element
  

Improved resource management & control template capabilities

• Resources panel allows you to edit resource values used by your project
  
• Support for dragging & dropping resources between dictionaries to re-factor your project
  
• Built-in set of controls which are designed to be easy to edit and reconfigure
  

Support for Microsoft Visual Studio editing

• Shared project format with Visual Studio allows easier development-designer workflow
  
• Create event handlers in Expression Blend and edit your code in Visual Studio”
  

Give it a test drive, and send your comments.

Amir

 

Links

• Download Microsoft Expression Blend Beta
• Expression Blend team blog

Getting Real

Thanksgiving weekend has been pretty cold in Washington, so I took advantage of my lazy holiday and grabbed a copy of “Getting Real”, 37Signal’s book on agile web development. The book actually blew me away with its simplistic, yet effective approach to summarize many of the lessons I learned the hard way. I didn’t put the book down until I was done with it, and it was a true holiday treat!

37Signales is a small group of web wizards producing the best set of simple, yet effective, project management tools I have ever worked with. The beauty of these products emerges from their ability to be perfectly minimalistic and task centered. Every product is a self contained set of basic functionalities that solves one problem. Whether it’s business chat, to-do list or collaborative writing, the creators of these power applets are strong believers in empowering users to do more by giving them less features. And they are right! Despite the availability of hundreds of note taking applications and PIMs, my favorite application is notepad, because it provides a free-form canvas for me to define my own layout, keywords, etc… and worry only about the contents of the file and where I am saving it. What enabled notepad to be this powerful to me is the freedom that it gives me to dump my thoughts without worrying about fonts, bullets, colors… My second favorite note taking application is OneNote, and it comes second to notepad since it’s got too many features that I don’t usually use. You can think of 37Signals products as one giant product with a pay-per-feature option.

The book strongly advocates the concept of “less is more”, by working it through both the development process (less rules, less routine, less meetings, and less specs), as well as the final product (less options and less features). While I strongly believe that this approach works perfectly in small teams and startups, it would have been interesting for Jason Fried to talk more about what large companies should do to “Get Real”.

Cheers,

Amir

Links:

• Getting Real, the book (They have a free online version!)
• 37Signals
• Signal vs. Noise, 37Signal’s blog
• Video of Jason Fried’s talk at CTC’06