Can Expression Studio challenge Adobe?

Expression Media (available individually)

Expression Media (derived from the iView Media product acquired by Microsoft in July 2006 and available for the Mac as well) is the Expression suite's organisational tool for still images, video and audio. In some ways the program is like a bigger, more professional cousin to Windows Vista's Photo Gallery application because it works with high-end media types like RAW-format camera files.

Adobe's competing product is probably Lightroom or Bridge. A more direct competitor would be Extensis Portfolio, which supports RAW formats and video and offers a great many other professional-level features (such as a server component for the asset catalogue). Right now Media isn't much of a challenger, but it is a cautious first step and a decent starter choice for people who have no application like this yet.

The first thing users will want to do with Expression Media is fill it up with media. This is easy enough: Select File --> Import Items, point it at a directory, and let it slurp everything up. A catalogue is compiled from file path names and metadata and can be saved anywhere. Once Media figures out what's to be imported, it processes the files asynchronously. Any folder added to a catalogue can be monitored for future changes.

Users will also want to categorise and add metadata to imported media - a task that ought to be familiar to anyone who's already played with Photo Gallery. Metadata added to a file that is supported by industry-standard extensions for that file type - such as EXIF - is written back to the file in addition to being stored in the catalogue. File types that cannot support some types of metadata directly (such as PNGs) will just have their metadata written into the catalogue.

Expression Media's interface for adding metadata is far more detailed than Photo Gallery's, but we miss a few things from Photo Gallery that would be handy here. For instance, when adding keywords to existing pictures by typing, Media doesn't use smart completion to prompt the user from the existing store of keywords; it only prompts from whatever has been typed in during that session. (On the plus side, you can assign keywords by dragging and dropping pictures onto a given keyword.)

Some of Expression Media's other features are more conventional and familiar - making contact sheets, for instance, or building thumbnail galleries from lists of images, or converting images en masse. We liked a lot of little touches, too, like the fact that multilayer Photoshop images can be browsed as thumbnails but can also be browsed layer by layer when viewed directly in Media.

The more advanced features of Expression media go a long way toward making it genuinely useful: for instance, all functions are exposed through APIs, which users can see in action through a number of included sample scripts written in Visual Basic.

Expression Blend (available individually)

Blend is a design tool for creating XAML application interfaces, mainly for programs that run on .Net 3.0 and the Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF). It's been superficially compared to Microsoft's take on Adobe Flash, but we're not sure that's a precise comparison.

Microsoft's stated goal with Blend is to allow users to create application front ends that are slick and powerful in a way that Microsoft's programming tools really haven't allowed until now, and in that respect Blend is probably the most genuinely adventurous of the Expression products.

Blend isn't likely to be much use to people not writing programs that use Microsoft's Silverlight/.Net/XAML/WPF axis of technologies. For thoses interested in building such things, though, it's certainly worth a look.

Blend users are greeted with a workspace that does seem to owe a couple of debts to Flash: Among the panels that are available are event timelines, for creating behaviours that can be hitched to actions such as clicking an object. Users can easily switch between Blend's graphical design view and editing the underlying XAML code.

Integrating existing .Net code into a Blend project isn't terribly tough, and Blend supports either C# or Visual Basic on a per-project basis. Blend also comes with a slew of vector design tools that hearken directly back to Design and it loads not only XAML objects but, interestingly enough, Wavefront 3D objects and textures as well.

Projects created in Blend can run standalone or be further expanded on in a programming environment such as Microsoft Visual Studio 2005 - especially useful if users are writing a lot of back-end code that needs to be debugged in detail, separately.

There's plenty of sample application projects bundled with the program: a primitive animation studio, a 3D object demo, a "virtual photobook" (complete with turnable pages), a video shelf (like the photobook, but with video), and a playable grand piano.

Again, it's hard to avoid comparisons with Flash: Blend created applications can run in Web browsers as part of a site (for instance, as an interface for a site that is too complex for mere AJAX) or as standalone desktop applications. Still, we don't expect the full potential of Blend apps and the Silverlight platform to really become clear until people actually start building things with it.

The bottom line

It's hard not to see Expression Studio as less a true "suite" than a collection of products that have been co-branded after the fact - partly because Microsoft's other suite, Office, is so tightly knit in comparison. It's tough to see how the products in Expression Studio fit into a single integrated workflow or how they can all be used together, aside from creating XAML applications for websites. Design's vector-drawing tools seem to be mainly for the sake of creating graphics for use in Blend, for example, which could create applications embedded in a site using Web.

But there are still many pieces missing, such as an image editing program such as Photoshop. The individual pieces that do exist aren't bad. The program we were most impressed by was Expression Web, if only because it represents such a positive step forward from FrontPage.

One feature of the entire bundle that could prove attractive to a lot of Windows users is its price: Getting all these tools for $1040 is pretty hard to beat. If history is any guide, though, Microsoft will have a finger in the wind for how the suite can be made more of a suite, and make the next version of Expression Studio a truly remarkable piece of work.