Hi all…
Last month I was attending to some lectures here in Brazil about web development, ajax, graphics, marketing, new technologies, tendencies of the future and matrix special effects (bonus lecture), and one of those lectures was presented by Microsoft talking about their AJAX solution called Atlas, wich is AJAX implementation by Microsoft standards. Just in case you want to know more about it, check: http://atlas.asp.net/ — a quick tip: it doenst work with Opera… talking about Microsoft standards huh? ¬¬ Safari, firefox and IE are ok.
Anyway… nothing very new, nothing exciting, but you know… Microsoft IS KNOWN to make and dictate standards these days with everything they get into. So, one thing they mentioned in their lecture was Microsoft Expression.
What is Microsoft Expression?
Its 3 applications to take and make them market leader in web development. The 3 products are:
- Graphic Designer: a mixture of Photoshop with Illustrator, more or like Macromedia Fireworks. You have an easy and simple interface with rich and powerfull tools.
- Web Designer: it’s the old Microsoft Front Page revamped. New interface, more tools, better support for their own languages (.NET) and CSS (standards maybe?).
- Interactive Designer: wich helps you create streamlined applications, animations and stuff alike. Its like flash and director put togheter in one software.
Now I ask you, what do you think people?
Personally…
- Graphic Designer is ok, seems quite a good program with lots of features but its hard to imagine people migrating from Photoshop or Corel to use this… maybe its better than Fireworks but I never used fireworks to know. But thinking now, what we have today? Cellphones that have MP3, make calls, play videos, read email, open webpages… so basically its kinda logical that we have a Vector + Pixel-based in one software instead of 2 separated application. I wonder how this program will compare/compete with Fireworks.
- Web Designer is bound to fail. If it follows Internet Explorer’s CSS standards it’ll be horrible. I think people want quality software, and that means not ignoring standards. The other think that seems to be horrible, is that it’ll will have autocomplete feature but only for .NET ! Well… if they really wanted to get a marketshare here, where is (at least) PHP and JSP autocompletion? I read the page and found nothing… geez thats bad.
- Interactive Designer, now thats the reason of my post.
As I said before, Microsoft is known to make and dictate standards with almost every software they make (Office for example). While watching those demo videos of Interactive Designer, it seems to have all the pros of director and flash in one program! From what I’ve seen, you can see lots of things like:
- Good font support without the nightmare flash can be for starters. (rendering problems, blurry font, missing font, text not appearing due to fonts not embed correctly)
- A VERY nice program interface. Timeline, actions, behavior, drawing tools… almost a Flash clone, but timeline is very similar to Director
- Context spell-checking
- Interactive video
- dot syntax programing
- And the best of the “show”… XYZ object transformation, 3D camera, surface materials, z-space animation, and surface texture mapping.
In other words… you have the option to use and make 3D hardware accelerated animations and games! Just to mention, how many 3D engines we have seen in flash? Lots of people try it but it lacks support for a lot of things, mostly surface texture mapping. There are some 3D engines for flash out there, but they can’t handle it with acceptable performace 
Of course, it has it’s downsides too. If I remember correctly, people will need a plugin to make all these things works (I may be wrong about this plugin). The real problem is that to make this work, people WILL need WinFX Runtime Components wich is coming from Windows Presentation Foundation… Windows Vista will have this integrated, Windows XP users will have to download, older OSs I dont know.
rant: everything is a foundation today? Windows Presentation Foundation, Windows Communication Foundation, Windows Workflow Foundation… Apache Foundation
Anyway… WinFX is about 24mb to download! So that’ll would be a real problem. Having to download the animation/website is ok, but 24mb its now ok to all users! With flash, you download the animation/website and the plugin if you dont have it, but its no more than 2mb right?! I think not many people will be willing to adopt this, and download 24mb to see a website. :stunned:
But… The question thats going through my mind right now is:
**Where are we going with Flash or Director? **
Flash is taking steps becoming the default “Web Application Development suite” leader.
Director wasn’t updated from MX2004 to the new Macromedia Studio 8… AND one of the most frustrating things you can see in Director is the Lingo syntax and the horrible javascript implementation and documentation.
So, imagine 2 or 3 years from now… Windows Vista will be on the market, WinFX will surely be embed inside it and IE7 will play all the animations with Microsoft’s new toy. All with the new looking effects, 3D and stuff without the hassle of making users download any plugin.
And if you see that Windows XP is the default OS of about 90-95% desktop users in the world, chances are that Vista becomes a leader too… and so does Interactive Designer.
What is the future of Flash?
■■■■ long post! But I had to write these things and know what are your thoughts!
Peace,
Michel
PS: Sorry for any grammar/spelling errors! 
