Microsoft unveils new design soft for Vista

Microsoft has unveiled Microsoft Expression, a family of professional tools for the Web and Windows Vista platform.

The announced products and their code names are "Acrylic Graphic Designer", a painting, illustration and effects tool for creating graphic designs; "Sparkle Interactive Designer", a user-interface design tool for modern application development using the Windows Presentation Foundation; and "Quartz Web Designer", a layout and design tool for creating websites. These tools enable designers to explore a wide range of creative options using vector and bitmaps graphics, 3-D content, rich text, media, animation and interactivity, and to integrate those designs seamlessly with developer code and functionality which is created using the Visual Studio family of professional development tools.

The "Acrylic Graphic Designer" boasts of dynamic visual effects and a flexible hybrid graphics environment where built-in flexibility enables designers to alternate between vector-based and pixel-based elements. Also, users can easily incorporate graphics into a variety of other software tools and industry formats, including Microsoft Office, Microsoft Visual Studio and XAML.

The "Sparkle Interactive Designer" has a rich visual design environment that enables the combination of multiple media elements such as vectors, pixel images, 3-D content, video, high-quality text and animation for rich, cinematic user interfaces. Content can be contextualized by applying custom styles and layout, to assist end-user interaction and comprehension, reports Techtree.com.