Just returned from the Microsoft Expression Studio 4 launch in New York City. The event took place as part of the Yahoo.com sponsored week long “Internet Week”. Right out of the gate all the new features found in Expression Studio 4 or impressive.
Bill Buxton delivered his best performance I have seen to date as the keynote speaker, then we jumped right into all the applications with the development teams taking turns on the stage diving into all the new cool features and enhancements.
Expression Studio 4 contains:
- Expression Web 4
- Expression Encoder 4
- Expression Blend 4 w/ Sketch Flow
- Expression Design 4
Expression Web 4
Several enhancement really make this web design & development application a serious choice over Dreamweaver. The new Super Preview feature is stunning, Live browser viewing an layering of your page not only allows you to see how your hard work will render in various browsers but unlike most Safari is live and not just an image. In addition, something others do not have you can work and edit your code while using Super Preview…this alone is an amazing advancement. especial now that Adobe has seen fit to stop making its distant runner-up Browser Lab no longer a free tool.
The second major feature that I love is the addition of a massive detailed SEO page review / checker. This was stunning to have in the application and the Expression team placed an serious amount of time and research into hundreds of SEO elements. All this is backed up by an help feature for those that might not understand SEO elements, that’s more like an knowledge center.
Expression Encoder 4
Some of the new enhancements for Encoder really struck me. They have added several new codec’s including V1 and H.264. More advance features in preparing you video for encoding, including some stunning side-by-side viewing and change detection. This new version also makes it very easy to place trigger tags and advanced elements into your videos. Another new feature is the ability to make screen recording for training and sharing, this is a very cool feature and with all the advancements makes a very powerful video tool.
Expression Blend 4 w/ Sketch Flow
There is a lot of seriously cool additions to Blend, especially the addition of some amazing new actions and behaviors . Several new feature in Sketch-Flow continue to make it the top prototyping tool. The ability to import your design team work files directly from Illustrator and Photoshop, while maintain layers and features perfectly is also a home run. For those of us work on Window 7 Mobile project , however, we still have to hold on to the previous version but an update is already in the works for this feature to be added to version 4.
