The Designer Tools Landscape Andy Hood

AKQA PROVIDES DIGITAL BUSINESS SOLUTIONS We focus on providing our clients with a return on investment

New York, San Francisco, Washington, London and Singapore. FOUNDED IN 1995, WE EMPLOY 450 STAFF

AKQA CLIENT RELATIONSHIPS BMW Group(7 years) Microsoft (7 years) Sainsbury’s (7 years) Nike(7 years) Orange(7 years) Xbox (4 years) Yell.com(4 years) MSN (4 years) British Council (3 years) Otto Group (2 years) Domino’s Pizza (2 years) Sky (2 years) RAC (2 years) Unilever (2 years) Norwich Union (2 years) The Coca-Cola (1 year) Company

AKQA The 3 main areas: –Technology –Creative –Delivery

AKQA The 3 main areas: –Technology –Creative –Delivery Creative Development – sits between Creative & Technology

AKQA Creative Development –Rich front-end technology –Works closely with designers to implement graphic look & feel –Works closely with technology team to integrate front-end with server-side components

AKQA If you work in design, or in server-side technology, then the development of rich user experiences impacts you

The Old Designer Tools Landscape Everything is Flash! –Applications –Websites –Cd-roms –Screensavers –…and the rest

The New Designer Tools Landscape Flash Flex AJAX Laszlo WinFX

Flash Traditionally, an animation based environment Good for exploratory navigation, complex animations, transitions, innovative use of video Still the choice for “experience websites” Axe Clickmore, PG Tips World Cup game

Flex Created for RIA development Targets Flash Player (9) Provides various components that makes capabilities such as web services, remote objects, drag & drop, charting etc, simple to develop Layout defined in MXML Reduced development timescales for RIA’s

AJAX / ATLAS Asynchronous JavaScript And XML Is a group of web development technologies combined to allow developers to create interactive web apps Minimises page re-loading Google Maps

OpenLaszlo RIA focussed Targets Flash Player Coming soon – deploy to DHTML Uses LZX programming language, similar to XAML or MXML Pandora, Laszlo Mail

WinFX … is a set of API’s included as part of Windows Vista O/S, and can be downloaded for Windows XP …includes the Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) On the desktop, there is no ‘player’ for WinFX applications

WPF …utilises the power of Direct3D …is vector based …allows true 3D models to be integrated seamlessly into applications …uses XAML mark-up language to describe rich graphic elements

WinFX applications can run as standalone applications installed locally on a PC or as browser-based applications running thru Internet Explorer, (WPF/E)

Expression Graphic Designer Vector & bitmap graphics editor Live effects Export as XAML

Expression Interactive Designer The tool you use to build applications on the Windows Presentation Foundation True 3D animation, camera control, texture mapping Video (including HD), can render on any surface Full range of UI components

Expression Interactive Designer Code in C#, VB or XAML Open EID projects in Visual Studio Seamless workflow between creative, front-end & server-side technology teams

The Designer Tools Landscape Evaluate each project on it’s merits and requirements

The Designer Tools Landscape Evaluate each project on it’s merits and requirements Become familiar with each tool available

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