james expresses himself

Three posts from James on the expression announcements from earlier today, under the heading opening the kimono on Microsoft Expression:

• Part 1: Blend, Design, Web
• Part 2: WPF/e
• Part 3: Media & Encoder

I've been waiting for a CTP of WFP/e for quiet a while - ever since seeing an early demo at PDC in 2005 - while having the tools that enable rich and efficient collaboration between designers and developers is going to be a big part of improving software development productivity, another reason why WPF is so important.

As Somasegar put it in his blog:

Our goal is to unite the various roles that are part of the software development process and in the case of user experience we are very focused on bringing creative professionals into the fold.

I've seen the frustration of user interface (eek, should that be user experience?) designers not being able to get their concepts and designs reflected in the final code, and seen what a time sink the current state-of-the-art can be. All this in a world when increasingly the competition can match your features that really matter to customers and it's becoming how those features are implemented and how users can interact with application functionality that really matters. You can see this trend all over the place - from the increasing use of AJAX, through the new ribbon in Microsoft Office System 2007, to the (re)emerging area of connected rich clients or rich internet applications.

That said, the most important bit of the announcement? Why it's the encoder of course ;-)

A while back we moved to the pacific north west from the channel south east. At one point before the move we thought we were being mighty adventurous, then we started hearing rumors of another family with children at the same school who were also moving to the US. Over time, more and more people asked us if we knew the Clarke's, nope we would say. So it turns out that James & Co. moved from just about 3 miles from us in the UK to around 8 miles from us here in the US and while I'm working in building 2, James is in the philosophically much more interesting building 42.

Anyway, I digress, I was just going to point out that I've been a little frustrated with our current home-brew method of sending video clips back to family in blightly, so it's just as well James moved over too, since he's contributing to the solution, announced today :-) 

Although, I'm not sure where my little clips of video would rank on his usecase prioritisation... 

 

tags: expression | wpf/e | design | web | video | wpf | development | productivity