I think the talk went well despite yesterday's incredible wind actually knocking out power to the venue (they were worried the projector might strain their backup generator and it sure did and the power died as I wrapped up :). The crowd's tech knowledge spanned everything from very casual web use to bloggers and SEO-fanatics, so I started off with a quick review of the basics (e.g.: Web 1.0's one way street vs. Web 2.0's participatory conversation), and then jumped into blogging, social media, search, ecom, and collaboration. We covered a lot in an hour and some people were starting to get a bit of the Information Overload glaze in their eyes, so I wrapped up with an encouragement to take advantage of the wealth of free software and opportunity and get out there and experiment. I'm on the train on the way back to Toronto now, but will post the slides to SlideShare from a more reliable net connection for anyone interested.

So, almost needless to say, we're getting really excited about the emerging drafts of the HTML5 and CSS3 specs. This may seem somewhat abstract to some of you, particularly if you don't do what we do, but it means your websites are 'about' to gain some great new functionality which will solve a number of the problems we bump into on a regular basis. Some things we're really looking forward to:

• CSS3 Fonts: The technology to embed fonts in a web page was first specified a long time ago (so long ago that there's a webmonkey tutorial!), but support from the browser makers never materialized and it died in the water (for a complete history, I refer you to our esteemed colleague, Joe Clark: Simon Daniels: ˜Web font embedding rides again!€™). This is a very complicated issue given that the web exists in virtually every language on the planet (does your favourite font include a full set of Kanji characters?), and that fonts have licenses (just like other software) and many of those licenses prohibit things like embedding them in web pages. CSS3 brings it back to life with the @font-face at-rule, which means that we will finally be able to use something other than Verdana, Trebuchet, Georgia, and Arial.
• CSS3 Multiple Columns: Clients who are used to working with print layouts are often surprised to discover that there's no way to automatically layout HTML content in multiple columns. Sure, we can count out the total number of elements in a list, divide by two, then output the first half, end the column manually, and finally output the second half, but that's about as tedious as it sounds. The Multi-Column Module in CSS3 makes it about as simple as specifying:

  column-count: 2

  and Bob's your multi-column uncle.
  
• HTML5 Client Side Storage: Of less import from a visual perspective, Client Side Storage gives web applications the ability to store data locally in the browser, which effectively makes the app accessible offline (e.g.: if you had a website which allowed people to store recipes and share them, client side storage would make those recipes available even when Tom's laptop wasn't connected to the Internet and he was in his kitchen making Duck à L'Orange). This is fundamentally similar to Google Gears, but would mean that your site's visitors wouldn't need to install anything in their browser to make use of the technology. Congrats to Dave Hyatt and the WebKit team, who have announced preliminary support in the latest nightly builds.
  

Keep in mind that we're a good five years away from actually being able to make use of these fun new features, since they'll have to get built into the next release of the major browsers, and then those will take some time to eventually replace the current versions in popular enough numbers to make the new stuff widely available. As always, we'll do our best to keep covering the new specifications for your ongoing edification, as well as to start producing some fun samples for you to play with once some browsers with HTML5 and CSS3 support become a little more stable and easy to download.

• Don't launch your webapp in December, unless you're doing it to make January's sales look particularly good.
• Language choice doesn't matter: pick the one you like and get on with building it already.
• 1% is a pretty consistently advertised figure for the conversion from free to pay accounts. Only inflate this number if you're about to do a dog and pony show for a VC, otherwise you will only have yourself to blame when you manage to achieve 1%.
• The one number that's missing here which would help to provide a sense of scale is the actual user base of each app. It's almost like pulling a Michael Moore: the murder rate in the US is way higher than in Canada (they have 10x the population, but sssssh! Don't tell anyone or the numbers are less impressive!)
  
• Remember that, along with a bigger user base comes a higher support cost. Look at RegOnline's support calls/day compared to even FeedBurner's.
  

I was drawn to this session because we're big advocates of the semantic web, particularly focused on making sure that we implement client sites in semantically-correct HTML with embedded data like microformats. I've also had a long-standing interest in Natural Language Processing, both out of general curiousity and as a user interface mechanism. It's one of those technologies, like virtual reality and voice recognition, which has been just around the corner for the last twenty bends in the road, so I was really curious to hear what the panelists had to say and about how close they are to releasing products based on it.

It was a great session with an excellent conversation between the panelists, who were all very knowledgeable about the topic. Panels often degenerate into promos for the represented companies but the hard (and soft) sells were kept to a miminum. A quick summary of the most salient points (raw notes follow below):

    
• The much-maligned labels 'Web1.0', 'Web2.0', and 'Web3.0' could really just refer to decades (1990-1999, 2000-2009, 2010-2019 respectively) in which the priorities of the web community shifted from inventing the backend of the web to improving the user eperience and frontend, to returning to the backend and building in intelligence in the form of semantic meaning (Nova). Think of it as the shift from plumbing to meaning, over a thirty year period (Barney).
    
• The web to date has been focused on producing content for human consumption rather than on content for machine consumption and processing (Barney). The web needs to move from being a file system to a knowledge system in order for humans to be able to more efficiently extract meaning from it (Nova).
    
• The semantic web is going to require humans to add all of the semantic information, which is where search engines like Mahalo are going (search results augmented with human-created information). Radar Networks is taking this approach by building community networks which help people add and augment the semantic understanding of the web (Nova). Sometimes people aren't very good at adding that information because of the complexity of the context required (e.g.: the difficulty is in things like email messages which just say "Yeah! Let's do it!", which could mean "Let's go for lunch!" or "Let's commit securities fraud!" but which can't be understood without the context of the related emails in the thread). Humans are only right about categorization about 60% of the time but Cataphora's software has been independently evaluated as being 99.6% accurate (Elizabeth).
    
• There's an element to the semantic web which is heavily based on the concept that the work one human does can have benefit for another human, and that giving your time in one place will save you time in another (e.g.: tagging, Wikipedia, etc.). This is the begining of the semantic web and future search software (like Powerset) will need to understand the meaning that we are now creating (Barney).
    
• One of the really interesting things in this space is finding the impossible problems and figuring out how to solve them. The question of "who said a specific thing" is really hard but could be a killer app for people like journalists (Barney).
    
• The basic technology at play here is nothing new and has been around for decades.     
• Trust is a big factor affecting the success of all of these systems. It's really hard to assess how much you trust a certain source and to have that trust affect the weighting of the graph for specific knowledge, especially when people will publish information which intentionally distorts the truth (Nova). It becomes even more difficult when you consider that some people will be highly trustful about certain topics and wrong (sometimes intentionally) about others, so there's no such thing as a single trust metric per source (Elizabeth).
    
• There's a difference between trust and authoritativeness, around which there is a bunch of research into hubs and authorities. This is the area that Google's PageRank is based on and is known as Bibliometrics. A measure of authoritativeness is not always the same as a measure of trust - you might trust your friend's opinion more than an authority because of your proximity to him or her (Nova). Sometimes authoritativeness is the opposite of what you might expect in that the document seen by more people might be less authoritative than the one seen only by a few (Elizabeth).
    
• General Magic had a vision for a semantic web before the web even existed, using a collection of autonomous agents to go out into the ether and do work for you, reporting back when they were done. Tim Berners-Lee's vision of the semantic web (Semantic Web Roadmap) was basically a restatement of the same vision. The more intelligence you add to the web (in the form of metadata), the less intelligent the agents need to be. Right now, we're more at a level where the agents aren't autonomous and are more like processes which run outside of your server, like the GoogleBot. We're probably 10 - 15 years away from truly autonomous agents (Nova). That said, we don't need them to be autonomous to be useful. We should expect the tools we use on a daily basis to get smarter about who we are and what relationships we have, as well as to understand richer inputs like natural language, in the next few years (Barney).
    
• AT&T deployed a natural language voice recognition IVR some years ago which understood only five words but which saved them hundreds of millions of dollars by directing service calls automatically instead of relying on human operators (who all lost their jobs). There was a belief in the 60s that the economy always creates more jobs than it destroys, so where will the new jobs be created (John)? Some of the call centers that moved to India are moving back because it turned out to be too difficult to train Indians to look, sound, and feel like Americans (Elizabeth). Humans do a much better job of adding semantic meaning to data, so the more data we acquire, the more knowledge coders we need (Nova).  Also, keep in mind that machines don't always replace humans but rather change the interaction. ATMs replaced some tellers but also allowed us to take out money at 3am, which didn't take away any jobs (Barney).
    
• The semantic web opens up whole cans of privacy issues that haven't been dealt yet with, not least of which is determining which conclusions you can share when some of them have been derived by traversing data sets which are private (Nova).
    
• There are a bunch of efforts underway to make it easier to share the underlying data behind the semantic web, both in the form of things like RDF which make it easier to combine disparate data sources by mashing text instead of re-calculating relationships (Nova) and in developing UDBRIs in addition to our existing URIs to identifiy and open up datasources (Barney).
    
• Sometimes the real meaning of things is found in what's not there. Cataphora bases part of their analysis on looking at things like people switching languages outside of a pattern in an attempt to hide from traditional search engines or English speaking searchers (e.g.: if you always write to your grandmother in German, it will ignore emails to her in that language but it will flag an email to a colleague in which you switch languages against the trend).

Full session notes, in a strange plain text/HTML format, are available at: Supernova2007-MakingComputersSmart.

But that was not to be! Thanks to the incredible generosity of the conference organizers, I've been invited to attend the upcoming Supernova next week in San Francisco. I'm particularly excited about this one because it combines two of my passions - technology and business - in a forum packed with industry leaders and mover/shakers (similar to cocktail shakers in that their presence at these events is often combined with a fair amount of alcohol and that merely standing near them can sometimes make you tipsy with excitement). A particular thanks to Deb Schultz for the gracious invitation, and for some advice on an upcoming Radiant Core project which I can't talk about just yet.

The schedule looks particularly tasty: they're running an OpenSpaces event on Tuesday at Wharton West, and those who know me know that I'm drawn to those events like a moth to a self-organized, community-driven, meritocracy-based flame. Be still my beating heart and pray that AA gets me to SF in time to catch part of it!

Wednesday is Challenge Day, a series of workshop like events "designed to provoke opinions from leading technology and business thought-leaders on key Supernova topics". I'm particularly looking forward to Making Computers Smart: A Dumb Idea? (Moderator: John Markoff, Barney Pell, Elizabeth Charnock, Nova Spivack), Introducing the Relationship Economy (Jerry Michalski, David Weinberger, Doc Searls), Research and Relationships (Discussion Lead Max Kalehoff, Aaron Coldiron, Steven Haskel, Jonathan Carson), and Where's the Innovation? (Lightning Talks).

Thursday and Friday move into more traditional session days, with everybody moving through a series of talks and presentations together. Topics range from Dark Matter: Are We Missing the Real Internet Economy? to The Social Web: Choices and Voices to Disorder: Feature or Bug?. It all looks pretty interesting, and I plan to blog as much of it as I can, bandwidth allowing (in both the time and network senses).

Registration is still open and I highly recommend it if you're involved in the web. It's not a particularly cheap conference (the Challenge Day is a great deal at $695, the full three days will run you $2,595), but the caliber of the participants is high and the sessions are quite small so you're virtually guaranteed to make some good contacts. If you're going and want to meet, drop a comment on this post or find me on Twitter.

How to Change the World

Sunday, April 15th, Moscone Center, Room 2002
David and I will be doing a 5-minute, 20 slide, Ignite extravaganza on the use of *Camps for positive change. Look for a profile of TransitCamp as a case study on the power of Open outside of the tech community. We're scheduled to talk in the first block, which kicks off at 7pm. Be there or be []!

The *Camp phenomena has been successfully applied to a variety of technology events. This is the story about moving beyond technology, into public policy. And the impact open, creative communities can have on changing the experience of being a citizen, the face of a city and it's transit system.

Update: our talk went really well, although something got a bit messed up with the slides and images placed in the deck got replaced with images from that machine. We got a lot of laughs from the crowd and many congratulations after, and placed 4th out of 8 speakers, with 9% of the vote. Thanks to everyone who voted for us!

Web2Open

Tuesday April 17th and Wednesday April 28th, Moscone Center
It's an absolute pleasure to join our good friends Chris and Tara to attend Web2Open!

The Web 2.Open was conceived with FooCamp/BarCamp in mind. This open event blends some pre-scheduled content with an open grid where the attendees fill in the sessions they either want to discuss or present themselves. It is the perfect space to provide the community at large with a place to connect with other attendees, learn more about elements of Web 2.0, and share one’s knowledge and experiences.

We're not sure yet if we'll lead a session, but we definitely plan to be there and to help out wherever we're needed.

How to Make 27 Million People Hate You: Lessons from Firefox 2

Wednesday, April 18th, 4:30pm, Moscone Center Room 2018
We'll be up on stage again, this time talking about our experiences designing the official theme for Firefox 2 and about the changing role of designers.

Radiant Core enjoyed the terrifyingly good fortune of working closely with the Mozilla team to design the official theme for Firefox 2. Designing for a group of users larger than the population of Canada is hard! Learn about the challenges of cross-culture/language/platform application development, and why passionate users are both a blessing and a curse. Plus, we'll share the big secret about great design!

Find us on Twitter

If you're coming to the Expo, find us for a drink or dinner! You can follow our adventures on Twitter, where we'll be sure to post the where's and why for's. See you there!

What a week it's been! Had I known that it was going to take me about 25 pages and 7,000 words to describe our trip, I never would have volunteered for this gig :) I hope you've enjoyed reading through this as much as I've enjoyed putting it together and that this information is of value to some of you out there. Today is the final post in this series and provides a blissfully short summary, so if you're only going to read one of the five posts, make it this one (although you'll miss the Ali G clip).

The New Microsoft (Again)

In Tuesday's post, I talked about how Microsoft is turning a new leaf and repositioning themselves as a design-focused organization. I touched on how there's a lot of new blood breathing life into the beast and how they are making massive investments into UX for high-risk products like Office 2007 and the Ribbon.  I covered the development of the NYT Reader application and how it carefully balances layout and readability issues with brand and content. These are both examples of the positive impact that design can have when factored into your process and a very elementary and basic level and I applauded Microsoft for their efforts. You can find out a little more about their new focus in the Microsoft Design Center website.

Design Matters (Maybe?)

In Wednesday's post, I provide the corollary in which I talked about how we saw an equal number of examples where design (and UX specifically) had not been taken into account. We looked at the Virtual Earth Windows Vista Gadget which violates the User Experience Guidelines for Gadgets, and at Expression Blend which seems to be aimed at the very broad demographic of 'designers' without much consideration as to who that might be specifically. And I managed to sneak in an Ali G clip about ice cream gloves that's still making me laugh a full 24 hours later.

Expression

In Thursday's post, I gave a review of the new Expression Studio suite, which includes the Web, Design, Blend, and Media products. I liked Web but wished for a Mac OS X version, thought Design was an Illustrator knock-off with the sole advantage of being able to handle XAML, felt that Blend would be a useful tool for us if we built Windows applications, and wished that Media provided the ability to easily work from shared catalogues.

Wrapping Up

It's been almost a month since our trip which has given me a fair bit of time to think about what we'd seen and heard. The last five days have really helped me to form some conclusions and I think, in the end, the experience was exactly what I expected it to be. It was an honour to be invited to participate and I hope that I have other opportunities to do the same with Microsoft and with other firms (though I might hold off on the epic blog post series after!). It's not often that you have an opportunity to peek inside the kimono of a big software company and to get a sense of what they're thinking and working on. Like it or not, almost all of us use their software every day of our lives and they have shaped our industry like no other force. I have a lot of respect for the Microsofties and this trip reinforced that they burn their torches with the same passion and strength of belief as our colleagues in the Open Source world.

Martin joked that I should end the series with a surprise announcement that Radiant Core was going to ditch our Macs and switch over to Windows and I really thought about it (the joke announcement, not the reverse-switch), but in the end I was worried that I'd have a revolt on my hands. The truth is that even after two days of learning about their products and plans, I still don't really get it. One of our fellow attendees, Gene Smith, commented that I was under-reporting the general scepticism in the room and I think he was right. Those of us in the industry, especially my fellow UX folk, have grown used to expecting little from Microsoft and being underwhelmed. The video which Microsoft produced as a study of their own bloated box design, entitled Microsoft re-designs the Microsoft iPod 2005 Package, was brilliant not only because it was funny but because it was true. Apple is smaller than Microsoft by several orders of magnitude and has a fraction of their cash reserves and market share, and yet they consistently lead their industry because Apple builds products which people love. We are victims of marketing as much as anything else, but Apple is cool and hip and now and Microsoft is increasingly becoming boring, square, and then. The Mac vs. PC ad campaign is winning people over, not because Macs are necessarily better at photos and video, but because people want to buy into the belief that they are. This is an important point: other than the XBOX 360, people don't tend to have an overwhelmingly positive emotional response to Microsoft's products and they don't inspire the unbridled want lust in the way that only the iPhone can. At the end of the day, we run our business on Mac OS X and Apple hardware because it is easier to use, because it just works when we need it to, and because we have far fewer issues and tech support calls than we ever did running Windows. I started this series off by saying that I was no longer the Jobs worshipping, Apple flag waving fan boy that I used to be and that's definitely true. This conclusion isn't an attempt to sell you on making a switch or on how clever we are for our platform decision, though it would have been in days of yore. Bear with me for a moment while I bring us around to the final thoughts.

We believe in Open in all of its forms. We use an operating system which is built on top of an Open Source kernel (Mac OS X runs on top of the Darwin kernel which Apple released in 2000 under the Apple Public Source License). We run an Open Source web browser which we helped to develop (Mozilla Firefox is released under the Mozilla Public License). We currently build our software on a stack which rests on the most popular web server in the world (Apache is released under the Apache License Version 2.0), includes an Open Source Java Application Server (Tomcat is also part of the Apache project) and an Open Source database (MySQL is released under the GNU General Public License). We write our software in a (mostly) Open Source language (Java was recently released under the GNU GPL Version 2) and develop in an Open Source development environment (Eclipse started life as an IBM project and is released under the Eclipse Public License). We are very active members of the BarCamp community in Toronto and around the world and we dedicate a fair portion of our time to promoting the adoption of Open outside of our industry by organizing events like TransitCamp. We believe so strongly in this movement that we are exploring the possibility of releasing Foundation, our Website Management Platform, under an Open Source License before the end of 2007.

Microsoft is typically held up as the counter-example to the Open Source world in that their business practises in the past have been very closed, proprietary, and predatory. The decision to make Expression Web speak standard XHTML is a very good one and the right thing to do, but it's tempered by the decision to build the Expression Suite on XAML, a proprietary file format published for use by the public. They occupy a strange position in the technology universe, balanced on both sides of a dichotomy in which their Research labs are building some of the most innovative software in the world and yet their product divisions build products which engender little interest from consumers (Zune) or fall short of expectations (Vista). There are rumbles out there that say Microsoft has lost their mojo and are becoming less and less relevant in a world which is focused on the web and which is starting to show a stronger and stronger interest in the value of capital-D Design (led by companies like Apple, Oxo, and Target just to name a few). I think there's some truth to those suspicions and you don't need a richter scale to measure them: just compare the worldwide festivities of the Windows 95 or XP launches to the downright mellow and uninspiring "The Wow is Now" campaign for Vista. Other than the work coming out of the Research labs and XBOX teams, Microsoft is not an innovative company. I had this conversation with a few of my fellow attendees over drinks and the best examples they could come up with to defend innovation at MS were in the data warehousing field. I didn't argue - and I'm sure they're important to Data Warehousers - but that's not much of a defence. Focusing on design is a good move (even if it is playing catch up) but it needs to be a move which starts at the very top of the organization and which inspires everyone to take part. What we were shown during our visit was a great beginning and time will tell where it leads, but given that they are a technology company driven forward by the development of technology, I suspect that it will fall short if the hardcore developers within the company don't buy into it. Bill Gates is worshipped within the organization as the Alpha Geek and his Internet Tidal Wave memo successfully mobilized Microsoft to make an enormous course change in 1995 - where's the Design Tsunami equivalent?

That's it for Day 5 and the Microsoft Trip Report series! Subscribe to our RSS feed to make sure that you don't miss out on future insights from the Radiant Core.

Today we take a look at Expression Studio,  billed as:

Better Designer Tools for Better End-User Experiences

The suite includes tools for visual and web designers (Design and Web respectively), a media cataloguing tool (Media), and a cross-discipline Windows application development environment (Blend - mentioned in yesterday's post). If you haven't heard of it yet, it's only because most of them are still in Beta. Expect the hype machine to kick into action when the full suite is ready for purchase - until then, you can buy Expression Media, buy or try Expression Web, play with the RC1 (Release Candidate 1) release of Expression Blend, or play with the Beta1 release of Expression Design.

Express Yourself

Expression Suite is really interesting in some regards and business as usual in others. The tools share some common DNA with Visual Studio in that they're all part of the .NET 3.0 framework (forgive the occasionally incorrect terminology as we're not a Microsoft development shop - it may be more correct to say that they are built on the .NET 3.0 framework). With the exception of Media, they all communicate using a new XML-based markup language invented by Microsoft, called eXtensible Application Markup Language (XAML) (prounced zammel). The team behind Expression comes from a varied background of well-known players, including Silicon Beach (among many other things, makers of the awesome Dark Castle series of games), Avid, Adobe, Aldus, and Macromedia.

Our Expression day started off with a great intro by Angela Baxley, Product Manager (Expression), who stepped in for Erich Zocher, General Manager Tools (Expression), who couldn't make the morning. Despite her warnings about being new to the material, Angela did a great job presenting an overview of the platform based on one of the better PowerPoint decks we saw. As mentioned back on Day 2, her presentation saw a return of the equation Platform + Tools + Craft = UX, although in this case she was talking about the Platform + Tools piece while Darren was addressing the craft bit. Between Web and Blend (think ASP.NET and .NET Framework respectively) where the actual development work happens, the new platform provides the tools to build everything that a modern dev shop needs to produce.

The Value of Open Standards: XHTML vs. XAML

Most readers of our blog don't need a lecture on why web standards are important (for more information, see Web Standards on Wikipedia), nor do you need to be told that Microsoft has not exactly been known to embrace Open Standards in the past. Given that, you would presumably find yourselves equally as curious as I was to find out what was really meant by:

Expression Web is a professional design tool to create modern, standards-based sites which deliver superior quality on the Web.

Which really makes XAML all that much odder. David and I got in a debate with Arturo about whether XAML was actually an 'open standard', during which he confirmed that it was created at Microsoft and is controlled by them. By my books, that makes XAML a published file format rather than a standard and certainly not an open one by any means. This isn't a particularly new effort, as this handy Comparison of user interface markup languages tells us, and some of the projects go back ten years. We're familiar with a different XML-based approach called XUL (eXtensible User interface Language - pronounced zool as in the ancient Sumerian deity called Zuul, who you know from Ghostbusters). The cynic in me says that having Web do proper XHTML/CSS is an admission of defeat in the sense that Microsoft has been trying for years to  embrace and extend the HTML/CSS standards and maybe they've finally given up. Or maybe they got tired of people bashing the horrible HTML that came out of FrontPage and decided to fix it. Either way, standards support is almost always a good thing so yay! But then why not open up XAML or choose to contribute and work on one of the existing efforts? This is an important issue because anyone who choses to use Expression to build their applcations will be held hostage by the XAML file format and may have to make substantial changes to future versions of their software depending on what Micrsoft chooses to do with the format. Truly Open Standards are controlled by independent third parties who have (or at least appear to have) no particular bias towards any one firm and can therefore (theoretically) make decisions which drive the whole industry forward (e.g.: the W3 'owns' a number of standards including HTML and CSS). Maybe some of the Microsoft folks want to weigh in on this in the comments.

Expression Web

Web replaces FrontPage and is an effort to bring Microsoft's web design technology up to current levels by building a new application and environment rather than trying to fix the old stuff. It's designed to do HTML and XHTML, CSS formatting and code management, and XML/XLSTs, as well as to integrate closely with ASP.NET libraries for things like AJAX (via the AJAX Extensions). The demo was given by Wayne Smith, Senior Product Manager (Expression), who started with a really quick rundown of why standards are important:

1. Speed
2. Search Engine Indexing
3. Efficiency
4. Future Proofing the Web
5. It's professional!

We've spent more time cursing at InternetExplorer's lack of support for standards than most people will ever even spend in front of a browser, so this is a very welcome change in tune from the maker of the most popular browser in the world (though, I suppose, it remains to be seen how much the one hand talks to the other). I agree with all of Wayne's points here - we've been building standard compliant sites since we started the company because they just make more sense. In addition to the standards support, Web has a bunch of other great features:

• CSS Box Model: In 'design mode', the interface goes to great lengths to expose the box model (see BrainJar's CSS Positioning, or a neat-o 3D rendering by Jon Hicks). Wayne showed us how Web uses shaded borders to make the padding and margins more obvious, which you can kinda see at about 17:50 of this training video. Grab the 'crop marks' on the edge of any element to change the margin, or hold down shift and drag to change the padding.
• Style Application Mode: Web's Page Editor options allow you to toggle between having styles applied in either Auto Mode or Manual Mode, with Manual giving choices between inline, as classes in the head of this page, or as classes in an included document. You can also configure the Manual setting on different types of elements to behave differently (e.g.: apply h1...h6 styles inline but divs get styled in the included CSS).
• Multiple Doctype Support: Web supports proper doctype declarations for XHTML1.0 Transitional and Strict, which will affect the doctype output at the top of the page as well as the options in the IntelliSense code completion menus. Web also supports a Secondary Schema, consisting of various versions of InternetExplorer, which will be used to check code compatibility when rendering Quirks Mode pages.
• Style Manager: If you've ever used Word's Styles properly, then you're familiar with the way the Style Manager works. WYSIWYG previews of styles make it easy to pick the right text formatting and apply with a simple click.

Overall, I was really impressed with the product. If they ever released a version for Mac OS there's a good chance we might start using it internally (although it looked good, it didn't look good enough to run Parallels and Vista just to use it). If you're a Windows-based web shop, especially one that does ASP.NET work, you should take a look.

Expression Design

Arturo Toledo took over to show us Expression Design, a vector-based graphic design tool. I actually have no notes from his demo other than "Adobe Illustrator", which will tell you pretty much all you need to know. Challenging Adobe in this space is like trying to take them on in the Photoshop arena, which is ill-advised unless you're even bigger than they are and have mountains of cash. Which Microsoft happens to be and have. They may, in fact, be the only company out there who could reasonably stand a chance of taking any substantial market share away from the 800-pound gorrila. Right now I think you'll have a tough time ahead of you if you need to get your designers to try and switch over, unless the tools, keyboard shortcuts, and menu items mimick Illustrator pretty closely and your designers don't have to give up years of training and muscle memory. The biggest (only?) reason you would do this is to take advantage of the fact that Design can output XAML files to pull straight into Blend. That said, Mike Swanson (a Technical Evangelist with Microsoft) has released an Adobe Illustrator to XAML Export plugin with reasonably good support for the Illustrator feature set and better support coming soon (some of the unsupported features aren't available in Design or XAML), so yeah. Draw your own conclusions (get it? draw? ha!).

Expression Blend

In the same way that you can think of Web replacing FrontPage, Blend basically replaces VisualBasic. The primary intent for the Blend is to build Windows applications on the Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF). Arturo showed us a few demos of the kinds of things which Blend is intended for (the now defunct Microsoft Max project and the Avalon Patient Monitor specifically), which made for really cool looking interfaces with debatable practical value (like the now famous Jeff Han video). I'm always slightly suspicious of totally avant garde interfaces for medical applications which include snazzy animations and effects - when life-threatening decisions need to be made, I sure hope my doctor has to wade through flipping menus and rotating panels! - but it works very well as a proof of concept to show off how flexible Blend's toolset is. I was also slightly put off by Arturo's repeated statements that Blend finally lets you escape the tyranny of the boring gray button (and the Microsoft UX Guidelines) and map full motion video to your spinning control surfaces, which brought to mind thousands of horrendous Flashtastrophes (and one of my favourite Penny Arcade cartoons ever). At any rate, if we built Windows apps (or if WPF/E does become a potential competitor to Flash and gets widespread adoption as a browser plugin), it looks like a great environment for building interfaces. I think we, as a group, were a little confused about who it's being aimed at (see yesterday's post if you haven't already), but once we had sorted out their definition of 'designer', it all made sense. I was particularly impressed when Arturo pulled in an application that only its developer could love, built in Visual Studio, and then reskinned it without affecting the functionality (I grabbed two photos of the finished login and welcome screens). Going on personal experience, I have a suspicion that a lot of shops will end up using Blend by having their Dev team build off a spec and then having their UX/Visual team polish things, so it's great to see that the app works that way too.

Expression Media

Media is actually iView Media Pro, formerly made by iView Multimedia out of London, and acquired by Microsoft on June 27th, 2006, and is the only product in the Expression Suite which is available for Mac OS X. Media is a Digital Asset Management (DAM) Tool (which is fun to say - Dam Tool!), which basically sucks in all of your media in a whole littany of formats and then provides tagging and sorting capabilities. There's an important distinction in the DAM world between browsers (which just read the info available in the media files themselves - like EXIF data in JPEGs) and catalogues (which store their own meta data about the files and can therefore provide much easier and more efficient sorting). If you've used anything like Apple's iPhoto or Aperture, Adobe's Lightroom, or even Google's Picasa, you're familiar with the basics. Media goes further in that you can build up all kinds of ways of looking at photos, including adding custom fields (e.g.: a pro photographer might add price to track how much to charge for her images), and build collections for quick access (e.g.: all potentially good backgrounds in one area). It looked like an excellent media catalogue and something that we might make use of to store assets from different clients for easy retrieval by all of our Professional Services team members. There was some discussion about how much support was included for sharing the library files (could they be checked into a version control system? read of a network mount?) which I think was left open, so if any of the Microsoft folk know the answer, please feel free to leave a comment.

Final Expressions

I really had to work at putting myself in the mindset of a potential purchaser/user of the software since our Mac bias basically rules us out. Someone did ask Erich Zocher if there were plans to do Mac versions and there clearly aren't, which I think is a real shame. We spend a lot of time in the trenches of this industry and we're seeing more and more glowing Apples while we're down there - particularly amongst the digerati whose influence reaches far and wide

That's it for Day 4 - tune in tomorrow for the big wrap up!

zeit·geist | Pronunciation:  'tsIt-"gIst, 'zIt  |  Function: noun | Etymology: German, from Zeit (time) + Geist (spirit) | Date: 1884 | Meaning: the general intellectual, moral, and cultural climate of an era

• We could go with a heat map a la Ben Hammersley and I really like what he's done there, though I would maybe keep the font sizing effect for post frequency and use the position and colouring in the grid to indicate post recency.
• We could do a separate tag soup, labelled differently, where sizing indicates most frequently discussed topics from the last week. I'm less a fan of this approach because it requires a second widget with the same appearance but different meaning (up with consistency!).
• We could leave our existing tag soup the way it is but use a second dimension of colour to indicate when posts happened. Using a cool to warm gradient of colours, we could show how "hot" tags are in terms of when they were last posted, with a legend below showing the colours on a timeline. I'm leaning towards this idea most strongly, though I'm not a fan of using colour by itself to indicate something in a UI given the prevelance of colour blindness. We're okay here because it's not essential information and the visitors with colour blindness conditions will see the key incorrectly as well so they might still be able to understand the data.