As noted in my previous post, I had the opportunity to work with Silverlight and Microsoft’s new Expression Suite. This was at the recent Microsoft AiR training I attending in February 2008.
This was the first Silverlight application I had worked on. I was the designer on a team with one of our developers Jordan Snyder (Here at EffectiveUI).
Here is her post on it – Jordan’s Post
You can gain her developer perspective and insight on this project from her post.
You can demo the application here: DEMO
It is still pretty buggy, but you can get the idea of it.
Here is an instruction manual, which explains how it “should” work. I would recommend going through this manual before attempting to use the demo. It will at least provide a deeper insight on how it is “intended” to perform.
Although as Jordan said, it is still in some super pre public beta alpha omega or something version.;)
First off, I want to mention how awesome it was to work with such a talented developer who was so adaptive and shared the objectives of the project.
We both had our struggles as we were using pre public beta tools and the Silverlight 2 platform, which was pretty unstable at the time. Our application is still only 50% functional really, and missing a lot of “nice to haves.”
Please note that my post is based on Pre Public Beta’s of the tools, so many items have been fixed or adjusted and may not stand true anymore.
We named the project NetStep. It is an online collaborative audio step sequencer. Kind of a long description, but that’s what it does. The idea of a step sequencer is not new at all, but we wanted to add the collaboration abilities for remote users to this system. ideally, 2 people would be able to collaborate on the same composition from 2 completely remote locations anywhere around the world.
I did the majority (85%) of the design directly in Blend as I was slightly unaware of the more ideal process for designing using Expression Suite. This had its limitations and definitely hit in time. You should do most of the design in Expression Design (I hate they named the app “design”), and then export the XAML as needed. The tools in Blend were effective enough to do most of the design as you can see.
The lack of bitmap editing (cropping, filters, effects) and limited handling was slightly frustrating, unlike Fireworks where you can work with both vector and raster with a fair set of editing options. Both are no Photoshop of course, but if you need to make that many edits to a bitmap, then PS should be the app choice.
After getting my head around the application and using XAML, it started becoming a more effective approach. Creating XAML resources and understanding how that language could amplify the robustness of the design and how the developer can actually participate with the design when needed in later iterations, was becoming very apparent. Although we never did get a repository going for shared items due to time and experience (or lack of), it still went smooth since it was only two of us and such a small project. By having both dev and designer in the same repo, this would have demonstrated a great connection in that dev/designer gap using XAML.
Creating animations and states for controls was slightly odd. You almost had to work backwards in the fact that you had to know which attributes of the graphic were going to change, be it fill color or strokes for a button for example. This app had some buttons with over 8 states, so you had to know all of the attributes that would alter, so you could recall them (reset them) on “return” states, like MouseOut from a MouseIn if you are planning on duplicating animations for states, which you should to ensure consistency. I duplicated the MouseIn state and reversed the timeline for the MouseOut. But If I changed another attribute in the MouseOut, it would have to be updated in the MouseIn after the duplication.
Another thing that was odd and not desirable is that the animations are separate sequences. You could not watch the whole sequence of states for a button play though for example. You would have to open the MouseIn sequence, play it, then open the MouseOut, and play it, so it was difficult and time consuming to be able to see the whole sequence flow through. There is no “Test Movie” for these animation either.
As for the interface of the suite, I really did like it. They (Microsoft) has definitely taken into the account of the user and what designers would be looking for in a Professional level design suite. Although Design is still not as robust as some of the Adobe tools yet, I think they are headed in the right direction. The interface is smooth and functional. Not at all what I expected from Microsoft. The team behind Expression is open and very ambitious in getting their tools to perform and meet the expectations of designers, especially in a realm where Adobe has conquered.
we also used Expression Media to do some re encoding of the audio files for the samples. It was fairly easy to use and straight forward. Doing batch encoding was a snap. Had some buggy issues, but it was pre public beta. We worked it out though.
Silverlight 2.0 also had some audio issues right off the back on how it handles and audio. There were some delays and at times not even playing the tracks. As this was noted, they wanted us to proceed with our idea knowing that it may not even work. I’m not sure how far they have reached on correcting this major audio issue, but I’m sure it is getting better.
Hopefully we will get this application moving again and see how Silverlight is progressing as a new RIA platform.
