MS Expression Web Designer preview available .... or not

I've been playing with Expression Graphic Designer for about half an hour now. It's weird. It's supposed to be a hybrid pixel/vector tool. It's more comparable to Fireworks than Photoshop (there are only basic photo editing tools). It's hard to use because there's a lot of mystery meat and it doesn't look much like comparable programs that I'm used to. There are plaettes, but the terminology is different. There are a lot of vector tools in the tools palette but I didn't know what most of them did because of the unintuitive terminology.

I had a small task to do while I was playing with this - copy a diagram from Word to create a web ready graphic. I got stuck when I needed to crop it. I found the crop option (no crop tool like most programs) but it was greyed out. I also got stuck trying to find out how to save for web until I went through some of the stuff on the MS site and found out that they're calling this "Pixel Preview."

From looking at some of the stuff on their site, it might be possible to do some good graphics with this. However, with the default set up and available options I think the more likely option is that it will be used by newbies to create really ghastly looking crap with every possible effect applied to them. You can, for example, apply different effects to strokes and fills. Okay, so you can do this in Fireworks too but it's a little less obvious.

I think that if they want this program be used by people they need to improve the usability, first of all. It's also set up as more of a print tool (the opening dialog box asks you to choose from print paper sizes, with a pixel option at the bottom) than a web tool.

Here's what I got when I tried to go back to that link this morning.

http://admmail.uwaterloo.ca/~mjjack/ms_error.jpg

Classic

lol you love to put microsoft down a lot don't ya

bet the opera site's been down in past too

i won't be trying this software though, don't need it.

I'm just wondering what it's like really... I don't intend to actually use it for anything

That's not the site down, that's the software installation not working right still.

You never know, though, it could be good. I'm trying to keep an open mind

DaveyBoy wrote: bet the opera site's been down in past too

Sacriledge! Be careful, we might have to sacrifice you to appease the Software God.

I for one am very pleased Microsoft are wasting their time and vast amounts of money on trying to enter an - already saturated - market. The fact that their program is awful doesn't suprise me in the slightest. But then, being objective, it could be the best peice of software ever written and I'd still find some reason to hate it!

Does seem that Microsoft have managed to get their error messages right this time, they're making progress.

It's available now, can't use it though as don't have Windows XP. Never mind, think I'll go and stick weasels down my trousers instead.

http://www.microsoft.com/products/expression/en/web_designer/wd_free_trial.aspx for those of you who'd like to have a look. Let us know what you think - I won't be rude to you, honestly!

You seem to have to be running IE to install it. Otherwise it just downloads an aspx file.

I've been using this tool for about half an hour. Doing some simple text updates and checking out what's in here. And I must admit, that, um, I actually sort of like this (ducks and waits for Jeeves to hit me over the head with a mallet). It's a lot lighter and cleaner than Dreamweaver. I like the customizable top toolbar (instead of the rotating toolbars you have to use in DW). The code is standards compliant as far as I can tell. They have some built-in CSS layouts that are very good. There are also some preset CSS styles and Frames pages (huh?) but nothing with tables Dreamweaver's got a ton of layouts and snippets all done with tables.

There is a little bit of IE centric stuff. Like in the validation area (which they call "compatibility", you can check compatibility with different IE versions but not other browsers. I guess it's good to be able to check with the least standards compliant browsers. You know FF, O and Safari are going to be fine They also have IE set as the default "preview in browser" but you can also preview in your default browser. Preview also lets you choose from different screen sizes (which includes 640 x 480!) or preview in all multiple browsers at once.

There doesn't seem to be any way to do font tags in here. All the font drop downs create styles (same as DW in CSS mode). They do call them "style1", "style2" etc. - I think both should bring up a dialog asking you to name that style. Although there is something called "layout tables". Yikes, letting you draw nested tables. Yucky.

I like the way the design view works. If you select an element it will outline it and show you the tag name.

Ooh, nice, the colour drop-down lets you choose from standard colours or document colours. It seems to have pulled all my colours from my stylesheet! Nice, I like that. Last week I was trying to change the colour palette in DW and I couldn't find a way to do it.

Overall I'm quite liking this. I haven't found too many major annoyances, only a few minor ones that would take some getting used to.

ETA: MY CSS layout doesn't quite render properly but it doesn't in DW either.

Another thing I found that I like - complete control over code formatting. So you can decide how many line breaks go before and after each tag. I can't seem to find how to modify my keyboard shortcuts though

You can also customize the font families available in the font drop-down list. I was annoyed when I tried to draw a div and it put the CSS inline - well, you can customize that too (whether it writes the styles inline or as classes).

There's something called "Auto thumbnail" here that I'm going to have to check out.

More - it's got live spellcheck on (underline like in Word or whatever). Can't seem to customize the dictionary other than adding words but DW can't do that either.

It has a built-in drawing tool that writes VML and creates images ... not sure what I think about this but VML is a w3 standard. Nice way to create quick diagrams or put in arrows and such.

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