Expression Blend gets some honest praise

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Expression Blend gets some honest praise

RSS It All — Thu, 01 Mar 2007 10:29:42 GMT

Adobe is currently showing some folks how to go from Adobe Illustrator to Adobe FLEX in terms of workflow

re: Expression Blend gets some honest praise

Steve — Thu, 01 Mar 2007 18:51:10 GMT

Makes sense - however you've got to remember people are already using Illustrator. It's the industry standard vector tool, designers worldwide are trained in it and use it daily. Blend may well offer a better solution but shifting people away from industry standard tools they are already skilled in is going to take a lot of work.

re: Expression Blend gets some honest praise

scbarnes — Fri, 02 Mar 2007 02:12:53 GMT

Steve,

Yeah, I've been using Adobe Photoshop since 1.0 days, so for me to switch its going to take a lot - I think a lot of the creative folks are loyal to the products simply because they have specific reasons that are valid.

Express tools aren't there to replace per say, they are also there to compliment and provided a bridge between Adobe Creative world into WPF.

My workflow for example was to go from Adobe Photoshop, Into Blen and then into Visual Studio (So i went from Photoshop Layers to Visual Studio in a vey rapid manner).

One of my specialities in the Adobe Flex world was skinning, it was my thing and going from Adobe Photoshop to Adobe Flex Builder - well - it wasn't seamless, in fact its the same workflow as going from Adobe Photoshop to Notepad in that fashion.

I say this not to beatup on Adobe, but to ilustrate that to be relevant, Adobe need to probably wind back some more on the end result features and more on the hands on tools.

re: Expression Blend gets some honest praise

Phillip Kerman — Sun, 04 Mar 2007 03:54:22 GMT

I really don't know what the big deal is. I have yet to have a project where simply importing and integrating assets was a huge part of the job. Sure, there are glitches sometimes and I wish the graphic artist did something differently... but you look at the total time on a project and this import stage is way less than 1%. So... if the artist is faster/better in one tool then that's where you'll see best productivity regardless if it means the import process is slow.

Maybe MS has some awesome solution, but as stated, making people switch isn't easy. Most of the great solutions I've seen to make importing easy are half-baked and assume A LOT about how people work. They assume people will change their workflows. Even if it's better and faster, switching is difficult. Not just because people are stubborn but there's an upfront cost in learning.

re: Expression Blend gets some honest praise

Doug Karr — Sun, 04 Mar 2007 04:37:38 GMT

Having worked with or for many media companies, I never met any creative professionals that didn't work off of OSX. From the Expressions site, it states: "Expression Blend is the professional design tool to create engaging web-connected experiences for Windows."

If it's for Windows, it's not ever going to get to the desktops our graphic artists are using.

Adobe; however, and Flex... are cross platform and cross browser - that's a huge gap that Microsoft has to fill.