As I have used Expression Interactive Designer a lot in precedent projects, I was curious about new stuff in Expression Blend (the final name of Interactive Designer, aka Sparkle Designer).
So there are some very good stuff… and some not so good at all !
I will summarize my impressions with a good / bad list by theme.
Layout
Good
- The new toolbar (but not its placement, at the left of the screen)
- Grouping of the toolboxes by themes (Interaction, Project, Properties, Resources, Results)
Bad
- Lack of interface customizations (we cannot dock the toolboxes where we want)
- Timeline placement: It is in a vertical toolbox, and fit in the half of the toolbox width!!!
- No "auto-hide" functionality for the toolboxes (like Visual Studio toolboxes)
Features
Good
- Event triggers and property triggers support (the best new feature of this version)
- Style / template editor (much better)
- Asset library
- Syntax highlighting of Xaml code...
Bad
- ... but no IntelliSense!
- Lack of style editing / affectation options using controls contextual menus (whereas templates are present). Workaround: Menu bar -> Object -> Edit Style
- Integration with Visual Studio: No intellisense because the project is not loaded when you double-click on a .cs file
General design
Good
- Hmm Hmm...
- Icons of toolbar buttons and controls are not so bad...
Bad (here is the dark side of Expression Blend ^^)
- Layout problems (see the layout part of this post)
- The Dark theme (default theme of Blend) is awful: it is dark, not user friendly, unreadable, and it does not respect color preferences of the user (and it does not integrate well in the user environment, definitely)
- It is even worst for short sighted people (low contrast, text written in gray over dark gray, default police size...)
- Menus design make me think of old dos text editors (squared, gray... ugly)
- The worst is for disabled elements (disabled menu items, for example, are printed in dark gray over darker gray)
- Light theme is even worst (uglier, really awful)