Microsoft’s major challenge to Adobe’s creative suite now officially enters the next stage of its life cycle, with Microsoft Thursday announcing the release “Expression Studio 2,” the latest version of the software giant’s suite of design tools aimed at professional designers and focused on the market dominated by Adobe Systems.
“The Expression Studio 2 supports Silverlight and offers an application design tool that matches the app dev tools found in Visual Studio.”
Microsoft’s Expression Studio 2 includes five products:
-
Expression Web 2, a Web design tool that adds support for PHP (Hypertext Preprocessor) and Adobe Photoshop. Comparably, Microsoft is stirring its Expression suite for Web developers towards more generally adopted Web standards with a more genuine embrace of PHP in addition to ASP.NET, with the final release today of version 2.
-
Expression Blend 2, an interactive design tool featuring Silverlight support, vertex animation, and an improved user interface with a split design/XAML view.
-
Expression Design 2, a graphic design tool supporting exporting functionality, including the ability to export slices.
-
Expresssion Media 2, a digital asset management product aimed for photographers and other professionals. Support is added for file formats like Raw. Geotagging functionality also is featured, as is support by Microsoft Office 2007 and Microsoft Office for Mac 2008.
-
Expression Encoder 2, a video encoding tool that has become part of the core suite.
In a blog post highlighting the product’s final beta last March, Microsoft Senior Vice President S. Somasegar listed the new suite’s major components: “Expression Web allows you to design PHP documents in addition to ASP.NET 3.5, opening the door for a new range of designers to create their standards-based designs using Microsoft tools. Expression Blend has an improved interface that speeds up your workflow and facilitates navigating your documents more quickly with the new breadcrumb toolbar. Expression Design includes an advanced slicing feature that helps you target individual slices as separate formats, including Silverlight canvas, WPF canvas, WPF resource dictionary, HTML comp, XAML, PSD, and PDF.”
“Expression Media makes digital asset management easy by allowing you to import more than 100 different media formats using drag-and-drop, including digital camera RAW files, and then share the resulting catalogue with fellow team members,” Somasegar continued. “Finally, Expression Encoder has higher quality and faster encoding for Silverlight and the ability to perform simple video edits.”
“The release of Expression Studio 2 flies information with the latest platform releases, such as Silverlight and Windows Presentation Foundation and is a very exciting milestone for the industry,” said Eric Zocher, general manager for Expression Studio at Microsoft, in a statement released by the company. “Great user experience is at the heart and soul of our Expression family of tools and is fundamental to enabling developers and designers to collaborate on building and delivering dynamic, connected applications that help customers achieve results.”
Although Microsoft released Expression Studio 2 to the Web May 1, buyers will be able to purchase the entire studio from retailers such as Amazon.com and Best Buy starting in mid-May for $699, the company said.
The Microsoft Expression Professional Subscription will become available in June. The subscription includes the full Expression Studio suite along with other Microsoft programs such as Visual Studio, Windows Vista and Microsoft Office, for $999.
“The new release marks the first time that Encoder is in the suite as a full-fledged product,” said Wayne Smith, Microsoft group product manager for Expression Studio.