Have you heard about the latest upgrade of the tool from Microsoft called Expression Studio??? Please read description below:
Microsoft® Expression® Studio opens up a new world of creative possibility. Its professional design tools give you the freedom to make your vision real—whether you’re designing for standards-based Web sites, rich desktop experiences, or Silverlight.
If you think and design visually, Expression® Studio is a perfect tool to enable you to create compelling, impactful and expressive designs for the desktop and the web. The visually rich technologies in Silverlight® and .NET offer amazing possibilities to bring your creative ideas to life using a range of design tools purpose built for the task.
Expression Web
Expression Web makes creating compliant standards-based Web sites faster and easier.
With a state-of-the-art design surface that generates clean CSS, you can make design decisions on the fly, knowing that you're seeing a faithful representation of the final browser-rendered page.
Drag and drop controls simplify adding rich media, such as Silverlight from Expression Blend™, Flash, and Windows Media. And advanced Photoshop file import gives you complete control over imported layers.
Code Support
And if you like to work in the code, Expression Web has you covered there too. With support for a broad range of essential Web technologies, such as PHP, JavaScript, XML/XSLT, and ASP.NET you can use the same tool for both visual design and coding.
If you work on a team with developers, use Expression Web to do what you do best - design - and make it easier for developers to do what they do best. Hand the project over to Visual Studio developers, knowing that you design will stay intact while they extend the site's functionality.
Find out more about Expression Web here »
Expression Blend
Expression Blend is the tool for interaction design on the Silverlight and .NET platforms and enables user experience concepts to be delivered with full fidelity, from the initial prototype to the completed project.
Since its introduction Expression Blend has helped remove the barriers and bottlenecks that have traditionally existed during the design and development process and Blend 3 has evolved the workflow further, enhancing the designer’s productivity while enabling maximum creativity within the time constraints designers work under on a daily basis.
Visual designers can continue using the efficient workflows that you’ve built around Adobe Photoshop and Adobe Illustrator, once imported your assets retain their full fidelity and editability. Rapidly turn static Photoshop graphics or visual elements drawn in Expression Blend into rich data bound controls such as a custom sliders, scrollbars and listboxes.
The ability to quickly bring an application and static graphics to life is powerful. Complex interactions can be encapsulated into simple reusable elements called Behaviors that as a designer you can easily apply via drag and drop, without writing any code.
Building great applications requires both great design and great development for the application to reach its full potential. The powerful design and development workflow between Expression Blend and Visual Studio allows you to share projects, code, assets and designs for higher productivity and quality. No conversion, no recreation of graphics in code is needed, simply a silky smooth two-way workflow from designer to developer and back again.
Powerful tools and streamlined workflows are more important today than ever. Expression Blend delivers a solution where your concepts and ideas can live through the entire project, end to the end, helping reduce wasted time and resources and deliver applications that exceed your client’s expectations for design, interactivity and usability.
Find out more about Expression Blend here »
SketchFlow
Rapid prototyping and iteration of your ideas is now possible through SketchFlow. SketchFlow prototypes are fast, easy and inexpensive to build, making it possible to create, explore and compare multiple ideas before moving forward with a solution.
Traditionally prototypes are generally redundant after the concept phase and discarded. SketchFlow enables you to leverage any of the previous conceptual work, every asset and component created is reusable in your production project – no asset need go to waste.
You are able to rapidly evolve your prototypes utilizing the full functionality of Expression Blend 3 with no limit to the scope of a prototype. Mock-up functional, data-driven user interfaces with data binding and sample data. Apply rich interactivity with Behaviors, without writing code, using extensible libraries of packaged interactivity building blocks. The ability to integrate with existing workflows by importing Adobe Photoshop and Illustrator files at full fidelity; preserving layers, vectors and even most text formatting accelerates your workflow further.
From simple prototypes that are wireframes featuring low fidelity visuals to prototypes that are high fidelity, fully interactive and data driven, SketchFlow gives you the flexibility to experiment, evolve and demonstrate your concepts and ideas to clients in the most effective way possible. You have total flexibility and total control from concept to completion.
Find out more about SketchFlow here »
Expression Design
Expression Design is a professional design tool for creating graphics content that can be used within the authoring applications in Expression Studio: Expression Blend and Expression Web.
Expression Design with its range of powerful importing, slicing and exporting capabilities is the perfect complementary product to Expression Blend and Expression Web. Target both WPF and Silverlight projects in Expression Blend, export individual or multiple graphics as well as complete layouts as XAML (Extensible Application Markup Language). Expression Web can utilize JPEG, GIF, PNG and Silverlight assets as well as full HTML compositions you exported from Expression Design.
A fully featured professional design surface gives the user visual creativity and the assurance that the underlying code being created is clean and purposeful. Users have confidence that what they see in the export dialog is a direct reflection of the final output of the finished project.
Find out more about Expression Design here »
Expression Encoder
Expression Encoder 3 provides the power of industry leading encoding, in a simple approachable interface to make it easy to prepare video for use in a variety of ways, including Silverlight on the Web.
Video in a wide range of formats can be imported, simple edits made and graphic overlays added before a simple set of controls allow you to choose the right setting for your needs. The resulting encoded video can then be housed in a range of customizable player skins ready for instant deployment to the Web or a range of devices.
Finally, you can use the brand new Expression Encoder screen capture application to record from your screen with webcam and microphone support to produce demo and training materials, again encoded to meet your needs.
Find out more about Expression Encoder here »
Here's a short description of Adobe CS4:
Productivity is the new killer feature
Independent research shows that Adobe® Creative Suite® 4 delivers significant increases in productivity, resulting in a potential return on investment of several thousand dollars per workstation per year.
Products included with Adobe CS4 are:
* InDesign CS4
* Photoshop CS4 Extended
* Illustrator CS4
* Flash CS4 Professional
* Dreamweaver CS4
* Fireworks CS4
* Acrobat 9 Pro
* Adobe Bridge CS4
* Adobe Device Central CS4
* Version Cue CS4
Microsoft and Adobe Tools for designers and developers are both excellent products but if I have to choose between the two, I would rather choose the Microsoft Expression Studio due to the following reasons:
1. Its product integration with Visual Studio .Net is very tight. You can open source code of your project in both Visual Studio and Expression Web.
2. Microsoft make it easy for developers to develop their project using their tools. One thing that is important for me is PRODUCTIVITY and this tool has lots of it.
3. Support and tutorials for the product even if still new is already vast.
They are both good products indeed.
I still use Adobe products from time to time though particularly Photoshop. :-)
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