Wowbagger
The Infinitely Prolonged
For those who don't know: Microsoft's Expression products had been their attempt to break into the art scene of computer applications. Though, historically, they have primarily been used for rich application development by people who are designers, rather than developers. That could be about to change!
Microsoft made the first beta version of their new, revamped products available to certain customers, this week. I have been playing with it, now, for a few hours, and I must say: This whole thing has been more fun than video games, right now!
The tools included not only rival Adobe Illustrator and PhotoShop, but completely blast them away, in many respects!
Granted, some of these are going to be specific to Windows 8 application development, but that just makes the new OS even more attractive to target for! And, there are still plenty of features for those who wish to ditch their Adobe dependency.
* The new Modernification Filter can turn any nice looking icon into a flat, more generic, and single-colored version of itself.
* The innovative new Race Replacer can instantly change the color or other facial features of anyone in a photo, to make them look like they belong to a different race or ethnicity of people. This is based on years of research Microsoft had poured into this technology, for their own ads.
* Silverlight, as you may know, is being phased out, and replaced with a Microsoft-centric version of the Java runtime, they are calling Liquid Motion.
* Expression Blend can output code to either: C#, VB.NET, JavaScript, or Malbolge.NET.
* The new interface is optimized for use with the Kinect! This allows you to paint by waving your hands around, in the air!
* Users who don't have a Kinect can still use the product with a mouse and a keyboard: You right-click on the canvas to bring up the lower tools, and hover over the top to bring up the upper tools. If you swipe the mouse to the right, you bring up the left-side sharing menu. And, if you circle around the left side of the screen, you bring up the right-side cloud-sync options. Etc. Otherwise, all the options are completely off-screen, so they don't get in the way!
Sometimes, these gestures are confused for actually applying stokes on the canvas. But, you get used to that, eventually.
* Expression Media is back, as their equivalent of Adobe Bridge. But, it functions much more like a stand-alone application, rather than having any of that burdensome program integration features in it, to depend upon.
* There is promise that a future version will include the "dry paint" feature of their Fresh Paint app, but the two separate teams of developers have yet to communicate with each other on how to do that.
Now that we are entering the second quarter of 2013, I think it is about time Microsoft got their act together, and put out something to fit the direction of operating systems they have been running with, so perfectly well!
The new tools are so fantastic and fun to play with, this is probably the only reason why I haven't even bothered getting back to playing the new SimCity, for a while!
What new features are YOU looking forward to, in this legendary new suite of products?!
Microsoft made the first beta version of their new, revamped products available to certain customers, this week. I have been playing with it, now, for a few hours, and I must say: This whole thing has been more fun than video games, right now!
The tools included not only rival Adobe Illustrator and PhotoShop, but completely blast them away, in many respects!
Granted, some of these are going to be specific to Windows 8 application development, but that just makes the new OS even more attractive to target for! And, there are still plenty of features for those who wish to ditch their Adobe dependency.
* The new Modernification Filter can turn any nice looking icon into a flat, more generic, and single-colored version of itself.
* The innovative new Race Replacer can instantly change the color or other facial features of anyone in a photo, to make them look like they belong to a different race or ethnicity of people. This is based on years of research Microsoft had poured into this technology, for their own ads.
* Silverlight, as you may know, is being phased out, and replaced with a Microsoft-centric version of the Java runtime, they are calling Liquid Motion.
* Expression Blend can output code to either: C#, VB.NET, JavaScript, or Malbolge.NET.
* The new interface is optimized for use with the Kinect! This allows you to paint by waving your hands around, in the air!
* Users who don't have a Kinect can still use the product with a mouse and a keyboard: You right-click on the canvas to bring up the lower tools, and hover over the top to bring up the upper tools. If you swipe the mouse to the right, you bring up the left-side sharing menu. And, if you circle around the left side of the screen, you bring up the right-side cloud-sync options. Etc. Otherwise, all the options are completely off-screen, so they don't get in the way!
Sometimes, these gestures are confused for actually applying stokes on the canvas. But, you get used to that, eventually.
* Expression Media is back, as their equivalent of Adobe Bridge. But, it functions much more like a stand-alone application, rather than having any of that burdensome program integration features in it, to depend upon.
* There is promise that a future version will include the "dry paint" feature of their Fresh Paint app, but the two separate teams of developers have yet to communicate with each other on how to do that.
Now that we are entering the second quarter of 2013, I think it is about time Microsoft got their act together, and put out something to fit the direction of operating systems they have been running with, so perfectly well!
The new tools are so fantastic and fun to play with, this is probably the only reason why I haven't even bothered getting back to playing the new SimCity, for a while!
What new features are YOU looking forward to, in this legendary new suite of products?!
