The Microsoft Expression Suite of professional design tools and innovative technologies will take your creative possibilities to a new level. Whether you are designing standards-based Web sites, rich user experiences on the desktop, or managing digital assets and content, Microsoft Expression applications will help. Microsoft Expression Studio includes the following products: Expression Web, Expression Blend, Expression Design, and Expression Media.
Microsoft Expression Web, code-named Quartz, is a WYSIWYG HTML editor and general web design program by Microsoft, replacing Microsoft FrontPage.
It is focused on the needs of professional Web designers seeking to build high-quality, standards-based Web sites for companies. It provides support for integrating XML, CSS 2.1, ASP.NET 2.0, XHTML, XSLT and JavaScript into sites. It requires the .NET Framework 2.0 to operate. Its sibling is Microsoft SharePoint Designer. Expression Web uses its own standards-based rendering engine, different from the browser-based FrontPage, which uses Internet Explorer’s Trident engine. Microsoft claims that Expression Web’s rendering engine currently provides the most accurate standards-compliant rendering on the market, especially CSS rendering.
Microsoft Expression Blend is Microsoft’s user interface design tool for creating rich graphical interfaces for web and desktop applications that blend the features of these two types of applications. Expression Blend is itself written using the .NET Framework 3.0 and Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) . Expression Blend is effectively an interactive, WYSIWYG front-end for designing XAML-based interfaces for WPF and Silverlight (Blend version 2.0 onwards).
Expression Blend was code-named Sparkle, and originally the product was announced as Microsoft Expression Interactive Designer, before it was renamed Expression Blend in December 2006.
Microsoft Expression Design is Microsoft’s commercial professional illustration vector and raster graphic design tool based on Creature House Expression, which was acquired by Microsoft in 2003. It is part of the Microsoft Expression Studio suite and is written using Windows Presentation Foundation.
Expression Design was codenamed Acrylic and was originally announced as Expression Graphic Designer until the current name was adopted in December 2006.
Microsoft Expression Media is a commercial digital asset management (DAM) cataloguing program for Microsoft Windows and Mac OS X operating systems. It is the next version of iView MediaPro (also see iView Media) which Microsoft acquired in June 2006, and is available as:
* Standalone
* As part of the Expression Studio suite of design applications
* As part of the future Office 2008 for Mac Media Edition
Expression Media’s key function is cataloguing digital assets. Professional and amateur photographers use the program to display and manage a wide range of formats from high resolution raw image formats to complex multi-layered Photoshop files and more common formats such as JPEG and GIF. It can also catalogue a wider range of other media formats including music and video, Adobe PDF, fonts, and rich media formats like Adobe Flash. The user is able to efficiently organize and categorize without being limited to assets’ actual folder locations, can add metadata including IPTC annotations, and locate assets which may spread over multiple folder and drive locations, including offline discs.
As well as cataloguing, Expression Media has a range of output functions:
* Print - formats include contact sheets, lists
* Web gallery output
* Conversion to other formats - eg raw files can be resized, output as JPEG, and attached to emails
* Slideshow
Expression Media was released to manufacturing along with other Expression products on 30th April, 2007. The RTM news was announced at Microsoft’s MIX 07 conference for web developers and designers. In September 2007, Microsoft released Expression Media Service Pack 1 for Windows and Mac which adds support for HD Photo.
Microsoft Expression Encoder (formerly Expression Media Encoder) is a Windows program for encoding digital audio and video media. It has a user interface and a command line control. Expression Encoder can be used to create video compressed in VC-1 targeting Microsoft Silverlight. It was released to manufacturing on September 6, 2007.
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