Expression Web 3.0 and why you should upgrade now to Expression Web 2.0
These are the three known links about Expression Web 3.0
One of the comments from somasegar’s blog asked if there was a plan going forward to unify them into a consistent UI framework/experience/codebase.
Steve Guttman replies (Steve manages the Expression Web product team)
“With respect to the interface of Expression Web and the Expression products–our objective is to unify the Expression applications under a single UI framework. As you can imagine, with a program having a lot of native, Win32 code, it’s a challenge to port that code base to a new UI paragidm. Expression Web 3 is our first, significant step in that direction. As folks have noted, SuperPreview (as it was written from scratch), uses the Blend UI framework. The Expression Web 3 UI uses significant parts of this framework to achieve it’s look and feel. All the new features (Insert Silverlight, Silverlight Video, Deep Zoom) are built with the Blend framework (you can tell by the dialogs). However, there are still quite a few remaining Win32 dialogs. These will be ported in future versions of the application until Expression Web is fully integrated into the framework.”
This means that a lot of things that worked before won’t work under the new unified UI framework, this can affect quite a few things when the coding of the program itself has to be changed. As Steve states at the end of his comment not everything will be ported into Expression Web 3.0 for this version. It also certainly means that none of the current Expression Web addons will work in EW 3.0 either.
So to my mind, if you like the CURRENT features of Expression Web 2.0 you should upgrade NOW. Since the SuperPreview will also be available as a standalone FREE version, you won’t be missing out on that particular new feature.
You can obtain a 30-day trial of Expression Web 2.0 to try it out.
When it comes to upgrading you can upgrade not only from Expression Web 1.0 or 2.0 but you may also be eligible to do so if you have a registered version of any of the following products:-
- Adobe Creative Suite – any version
- Adobe/Macromedia Flash or Director – any version
- Adobe/Macromedia Dreamweaver – any version
- Adobe GoLive – any version
- Microsoft Office – any version
- Microsoft FrontPage® – any version
- Quark QuarkXPress – any version
According to somasegar’s blog Expression Web 3.0 will be out this Summer, which means about the next eight weeks or so, so don’t wait too long.
I reserve the right and do so.
