Posted by scobleizer // Tue, Jan 24, 2006 9:57 PM
Manuel Clement called us over yesterday to see the latest build of Microsoft’s new Expression Interactive Designer (aka Sparkle). He had some interesting news for us. Today Microsoft is releasing a beta to the public! Here you get to see the latest version, understand how they build things in it, and get an in-depth demo.
Why should you care? This changes a LOT about how designers and developers will work together to build applications in the future. Watch the video to get a hint for how.
You can download the Community Technology Preview (CTP) here.
Don't miss the first Sparkle team video we did a few months back. It's one of our most popular videos here on Channel 9.
Oh, and wish Manuel happy birthday!
Tags: Expression
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Awesome video! and Happy Birthday Manuel! 
EDIT: Question to the sparkle guys, When adding TabControls, is the
SelectedIndex routine to switch tabs just temporary now? I mean, it
would probably get annoying if you had a lot of tabs. Can it just
switch to that TabItem's panel when you click/double click on its tab
like in visual studio?
Cheers,
Aditya
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Just awesome technology! This technology will go a long way in improving trust and respect between UI designers and developers.
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Robert had a question near the end of the video about whether the SmoothMove control is available-I originally posted it here and totally stole the idea from the Microsoft Max guys (though I have no idea how they did theirs). They have some serious design skills, I hope they don't mind.
And the crash in the video that was blamed on me? Fundamentally impossible- every single line of code that I write is absolutely flawless without the slightest possibility of an error. It must have been one of those processor gnomes.
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 | peterbl wrote:
And the crash in the video that was blamed on
me? Fundamentally impossible- every single line of code that I write is
absolutely flawless without the slightest possibility of an error. It
must have been one of those processor gnomes.
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The crash
at the end was totally my fault . I should have waited for the first
search to end in order to execute another one! And it's true guys:
Peter Blois writes the best code I have seen
By the way, I uploaded the Flickr Browser project at www.elementsofpassion.com.
Make sure you get a free Flickr API key and paste it in the file called FlickrKey.txt in order for the sample to run correctly.
You can get a key from http://www.flickr.com/services/api/key.gne
-Amir
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This is our first CTP of Sparkle but we're taking feedback, bugs and any crashes you happen to find seriously. Send feedback, hit the forums and submit any crash reports!
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Looks very nice, folks. Sparkle imports/displays audio+video... Can a browser object be called for display of a regular web page or several within the vector based window?
The reason i ask is because we were awarded a patent on the Flash based fly-through interface system at http://www.2Goto.com, but The player.swf can't import standard HTML pages, so we can't fly through real information... Like 30,000 search returns at the same time.
Would love to build a working demo-wanna help?
Thanks,
Dave_Matthews
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Is that a picture of "Napoleon's March" from one of Edward Tufte's books on the wall behind Manuel?
If so, I think you've selected a great source for determining the best way to "Envision Information".
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| mawcc wrote:
Is that a picture of "Napoleon's March" from one of Edward Tufte's books on the wall behind Manuel?
If so, I think you've selected a great source for determining the best way to "Envision Information". |
Yes it is
Napoleon's March is the best static information visualization piece to date.
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Question: Is that a screenshot of Apple Motion on the wall in the background? I wonder what other forms of "inspiration" might lurk...
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Very cool guys! Installed winfx and Sparkle after vid with no issues.
After about 15 minutes I have these:
1) Love the splash screen. Nice understated and interesting movement. Can see we are in a different ball field here.
2) Love the pen. Did a cool little free form object and colored it and rotated it. Looked like a cool little cell shaded graphic.
3) Could not figure out how to drag the connectoids to change the shape around. Could stretch and drag, but not move individual connectoids.
4) No right click menus on surface seemed a bit odd.
5) Could not see any tool menu besides the pin, pencil thing. Where are the controls?
Great stuff. Can't wait to see some interactive tutorial or something. Cheers!
--
William
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Minh
Does this make my head look fat?
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WPF/E spotted in the wild
Edit: I just thought of something -- and I'm being totally serious here -- but isn't WPF/E best implement in Flash?
Seriously... great technologies... But as Robert pointed out, deployment is going to be a problem. $29 / copy for Vista would help.
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good video.
nice product! can't wait to try it out.
note to manuel - i really like the way you used the dual monitor in this video.
the flow between the screen and the speaker is much easier.
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| bgmccollum wrote:
Question: Is that a screenshot of Apple Motion on the wall in the background? I wonder what other forms of "inspiration" might lurk... |
The design process includes competitive analysis. You research the market, users, tools. It is healthy to be aware of the existing solutions to problems your target user.
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I loved the video, immediately downloaded the bits, and tried it out. I'm really impressed with what I saw. The zoomable UI is great. I do have some remarks:
- the zoom-function doesn't affect palettes that are undocked
- the docking of undocked palettes doesn't always work smoothly
- I don't really like the way palettes collapse when you resize them and they become too large
But still, very impressive for a first demo version!
| staceyw wrote:
Very cool guys! Installed winfx and Sparkle after vid with no issues.
After about 15 minutes I have these:
1) Love the splash screen. Nice understated and interesting movement. Can see we are in a different ball field here.
2) Love the pen. Did a cool little free form object and colored it and rotated it. Looked like a cool little cell shaded graphic.
3) Could not figure out how to drag the connectoids to change the shape around. Could stretch and drag, but not move individual connectoids.
4) No right click menus on surface seemed a bit odd.
5) Could not see any tool menu besides the pin, pencil thing. Where are the controls? |
You can find the controls on the Library palette.
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Showing data in design time is somehow sold here as it would be something that wasn't available before Sparkle. You can do that too when creating standard winform controls now.... It's nothing new!
Great video and great tool
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It's unforetunate that when using a non-default theme such as Royale XAML controls default to the 'Windows Classic' theme.
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[quote user="mclement"]The design process includes competitive analysis. You research the market, users, tools. It is healthy to be aware of the existing solutions to problems your target user.[/quote]
How is Motion part of your competitive space? It is a motion graphics package, where Sparkle is for building UIs for application. Unless your true intentions for Sparkle have yet to be announced...?
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The CTP download page says only XPSP2 is supported, so I gotta ask: are XP x64 and Vista (5270) not supported?
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Internal Server Error - Read
The server encountered an internal error or misconfiguration and was unable to
complete your request.
Reference #3.476c0d2.1138199707.250f214
What's the deal?
Sheva
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| bgmccollum wrote:
[quote user="mclement"]The design process includes competitive analysis. You research the market, users, tools. It is healthy to be aware of the existing solutions to problems your target user. |
How is Motion part of your competitive space? It is a motion graphics package, where Sparkle is for building UIs for application. Unless your true intentions for Sparkle have yet to be announced...?[/quote]
Well first of all we have been working on Expression Interactive Designer for more than 4 years - way before this particular tool was released. We just keep up to date on what's out there.
The team is passionate about AUTHORING TOOLS, period. We love them. We live and breath authoring tools, we use them all the time to do tons of things (beside sitting down and making Expression tools).
Designers do what they do because they have to: it is like breathing.
I compare it to making music - you do it and you can't stop
SO ... We have authoring tools all around us - regardless of whether or not they are tools to create "Application User Interfaces".
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| Sven Groot wrote:
The CTP download page says only XPSP2 is supported, so I gotta ask: are XP x64 and Vista (5270) not supported? |
I believe this specific version of WPF / WinFX has some known issues with some CPUs - please look at the readme.
As for Vista 5270, I have it running on the laptop I am using now, and it seems to work fine.
-mano
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Avalon has been exciting me for a long while now, but lately I've become a little bit worried about a few things regarding WPF and the workflow:
1) 3D performance - There seems to be some speed performance issues with 3D rendering. Is it going to get significantly better in the final release? Right now it seems to be outperformed even by old technology such as Shockwave3D when it comes to pushing polygons.
2) Graphic designer workflow - I really don't like that you have to *export* as XAML. That kinda goes against the whole workflow foundation concept IMO. I should be able to save my design, edit some things with an external editor, and just continue within the graphic designer. Exporting/importing each time is not a very nice solution. What's the plan here?
3) Interop with today's major graphic design file formats (PSD, SWF, AI etc). Why aren't there any converters to XAML? That really is key to winning over the design industry. And from what I can understand there aren't even any plans on releasing such tools.
Also see my comments regarding this at:
http://blogs.msdn.com/mswanson/archive/2006/01/05/509566.aspx#comments
It'd be very interesting to hear your thoughts.
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Hm, seems the code on this forum doesn't like Opera browsers too much... All my formatting was apparently lost.
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Really nice beta - any news when we might see a beta of Quartz
Thanks
Mike
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