Microsoft Expression Studio

As Adobe has gradually tied together its design tools into a single suite, it was inevitable that Microsoft would have a go at the lucrative design and content development market. Expression Studio, with web, design, media management and timeline animation applications, is a first foray into this territory. Interest in beta versions of the suite has been high, but now the final version is out, it’s become clear that Expression Studio and CS3 are heading in different directions. The key difference is a new technology called Silverlight, which we’ll explain in more detail below. But is it enough to make Expression Studio a must-buy?

We looked at Expression Web in April and found it a competent but not quite compelling alternative to Dreamweaver. Expression Web is really FrontPage given a thorough refresh. It borrows heavily from Dreamweaver in both look and feel, but with one critical difference, which sets the theme for the rest of Expression Studio – Web includes ASP/.NET coding support. This makes bolting together ASP apps with a web front end easier in Expression Web than it is in Dreamweaver. This matters because, as we’ll see later, Microsoft’s web app technology is the main driving force behind Expression Studio.

Expression Design is the vector graphics tool in Studio. As with Expression Web, it owes more than a nod and a wink to its competing product. But in this case, Illustrator has been around for much longer and does a lot more, and it shows. Some of the differences really make Design an unlikely choice for – well – design. For example, there’s no CMYK support, which immediately makes it useless for colour separation preprint. There’s also no way to import SVG or Illustrator files. What’s left is a basic bitmap and vector editor with layers. You’ll find it’s good enough if you’ve never used the real thing, but a frustrating experience otherwise.

Expression Blend owes a lot to Flash and, once again, can be extended with Visual Basic and C+ coding. If you’re used to Flash, you’ll find a lot here that’s familiar, with the usual timelines and event-specific actions – although Blend makes these slightly easier to work with, thanks to a stylish charcoal and grey interface that feels more intuitive than that offered by Flash. Blend can also work with Wavefront 3D objects and textures, which is promising, because 3D rendering and animation is one area almost completely absent from CS3. There’s an option to create standalone apps, although in the context of Studio as a whole, this feature is some way short of what Adobe’s Apollo can do. Even so, we were impressed by some of the examples, which had a far more polished feel than Flash projects usually do – although this may say more about design traditions than about any inherent limitations with Flash itself.

Bringing up the rear is Expression Media, which is Microsoft’s take on Adobe Bridge. The similarities are obvious, down to an identical star/colour rating system. Like Bridge, Media can read RAW files and also has a good go at working with other kinds of media, including video and sound. Unlike Bridge, files have to be imported into a catalogue, but it’s easier to add metadata tags to files and, where possible, these will be saved within the file itself.

A further nice touch is that compatible video and sound can be previewed as a thumbnail within the thumbnails window, although we think it would’ve been better to make the previews click-to-start rather than having to use the spacebar. Also included are some very basic contact sheet, web gallery and PDF creation tools. But they don’t impress – the galleries aren’t even up to the standard of the rather modest ones included in Photoshop.

So what does it all add up to? It turns out Expression Studio isn’t taking on CS3 directly so much as trying to squeeze past it on a side road. Studio is more of a set of basic – sometimes very basic – add-ons for Microsoft’s proposed new web framework. In effect, it’s a design tool for coders of ASP/.NET/Ruby/Python applications, rather than a content creation tool for designers – although the behind-coding approach means that a designer can create a front end and hand it over to a team of coders to fill in the working details, which is actually no bad thing.

Perhaps just as significant, the pricing is also a sign of how committed Microsoft is to ensuring Expression Studio’s success. For £450, it marks a significant saving on Adobe’s similar package – Web Standard CS3, which retails for £828. As usual, UK overcharging applies, but regardless of this, Expression Studio is a bargain.

We’ll guess that the real aim of Studio and Silverlight is to function as a toolkit for designing social networking and media distribution frameworks, with a big helping of ecommerce on the side.

But the usual problems that afflict Microsoft products – limited support for competing file formats and a half-finished feel – are very obvious here. And at the same time, the suite seems to have been rushed out before all the elements are in place.

More importantly, however, is the fact that Expression Studio is a very positive development for those in the web design business. Adobe’s buy out of Macromedia has given them a near-monopoly of industry standard tool sets and design applications, hence the high pricing. Hopefully this will encourage Adobe to reassess its development and pricing policies.

Overall this is a strategic launch by Microsoft – and while it’s an important release for those in the web design industry as a whole, it will only really shine with Silverlight 1.2.