We all have them, mine I hope is better than most. I have been in process selling, moving across the country, trying unsuccessfully to buy, eventually renting a place, and moving in. Today after being in my new place almost a week I finally have internet access and although 90% of my possessions are in boxes in the garage I am finally feeling the semblance of being settled in Los Angeles.
It’s been way too long since my last post which was my first video tutorial for Expression Blend and aside my personal issues so much has been going on. On Friday we had our launch event in San Francisco for Expression 3 and Silverlight 3. It’s so awesome to see how much this product has evolved so quickly. I am learning more and more about it every day and I continue to be impressed with the incredible amount of thought that the team has put into this product. From Sketchflow to behaviors to the sample data to Photoshop file import with an amazing amount of control maintained it really is something else.
I don’t know if you would consider it funny or sad but these, what, three months I have been tied up in the transition since my last post have literally rendered it obsolete in some ways because of the product update, I’ll give you a for instance. In my demo of Blend 2 it was still necessary to transition to Visual Studio or another code editor to write a function to play the storyboard. Now there are a couple of differences here for one there is a ControlStoryboardAction behavior that lets you play, stop and so on that you can simple drag and drop into your project so there is no need to write any code at all and secondly if you were for some reason adverse to using the behaviors Blend 3 now has a built in code editor with intellisense right in the tool so there is no need to switch to Visual Studio or what have you for editing the code behind file. Now my example was already about as simple as you can get so the idea that it is now even easier makes me giggle.
If those small differences and improvements in productivity weren’t enough to bridge the gap between designer and developer there is also the addition of Sketchflow to the tool. Sketchflow is a different type of project that allows you to prototype an app, demonstrate interactions and transitions, layout screens in a “sketchy” style that allows you to concentrate on the structure and flow of the app prior to engaging the level of effort it takes to create a polished design. With a feedback tool that allows for cross platform cross browser collaboration with clients and team members regardless of their location. It really is a tremendous addition to this tool set.
All of this, plus Expression Design, Web, and Encoder for $599. It really is an awesome update and I am looking forward to REALLY beginning my transition to the Expression tool set and creating more demos and tutorials. As a part of that I will be launching a new look for the site as well. So lets really get going here and see how far we can go with Blend and Expression Studio.
J.
Get the ball rolling!