Highlights
SketchFlow — Revolutionize the speed you can prototype your vision for an application
SketchFlow, a feature in Expression Studio Ultimate, enables you to rapidly present ideas, user interface flows, screen layouts and application functionality to your clients with an effective prototype. Convey your ideas through informal drawings and ‘sketchy’ styled components that help your client focus on the functionality of the prototype rather than the detail, while the SketchFlow player gives your client the opportunity to test the prototype and give feedback, which can be viewed directly in-context on the design surface in Blend. SketchFlow prototypes are real WPF or Silverlight projects so once the design is finalized you have a simple choice. How much of the prototype do you want to reuse? Do you want to simply throw the prototype away, or use individual elements from the prototype such as a resource library or Behavior, or carry the complete prototype forward into production? The choice is yours.
Adobe Photoshop and Adobe Illustrator import — Utilize your traditional design assets
Expression Blend includes powerful importers for both Adobe Photoshop and Adobe Illustrator enabling smooth integration with the workflow visual designers are using today. During import you have the freedom to view and import Photoshop files layer by layer. Layers can be easily regrouped and elements retain their original formats; layers, layer positions, editable text and vectors.
Behaviors — Enable interactivity without writing code
Behaviors are powerful building blocks of interactivity that bring a project to life by adding control of interactivity, animation and transitions to your applications. Developers can encapsulate complex interactions and ideas into reusable production ready Behaviors, which can then be refined visually through the property inspector without writing code. GoToStateAction, ChangePropertyAction, MultiTouch, conditional actions, adding physics and MouseDrag are perfect examples of Behaviors that can easily be shared amongst your design and development teams to ensure consistency, reduce duplication of effort and allow teams to maximize their innovation.
Expression Blend 4 for Windows Phone provides the same streamlined development workflow for Windows Phone 7 that was previously only available for Silverlight and .NET applications. The ability to take your ideas all the way from concept to completion helps accelerate the delivery of innovative applications on Windows Phone. It has never been easier to create the user interface of your application; simply drag UI elements to the design surface where they can be quickly customized and styled, import assets from tools such as Adobe Photoshop and turn them into data driven UI elements before finalizing your UI with transitions and animation that bring your application to life users navigate from screen to screen.
Develop for Windows Phone 7 by installing the Windows Phone Developer Tools which includes Expression Blend 4 for Windows Phone, Visual Studio Express for Windows Phone and the Windows Phone Emulator. (Please note: Depending on your configuration the install will either add Windows Phone capabilities to your previously installed version of Expression Blend 4, or if no previous Expression Blend 4 install exists, Expression Blend 4 for Windows Phone will be installed in its entirety).
