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code vs. designers

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Sorry about the delay on the post -- I returned from my customer training visit to RTP a week and a half ago and had promised that I would write a post about the excellent feedback I got from that session.  I'm pleased to report that the customers were by and large very happy with V1 of the product.  For those of you who were there, you'll be happy to hear that many of your suggested changes have been addressed in V2, including the current publicly available milestone.  If you are interested in doing Silverlight projects, you can use the free downloads. 

One comment I received frequently was customers who were a little bit put off by the fact that some of the keyboard shortcuts don't synchronize precisely with MS Office tools or Visual Studio.  This is quite true, and... it's the subject of a little bit of debate.  It is by design that we follow conventions more suitable to Adobe Illustrator and other design tools than our own VS tools.  The argument for this is that the new VS, Orcas, includes XAML editing capabilities, and there is technically nothing you can do in Blend that you can't do in Orcas.  It might be much easier in Blend.... but that's another story.  The majority of the customers at the training session in RTP were coders looking to do more design work, rather than designers looking to get more involved with the creation end of applications.  It stands to reason that those customers would prefer keyboard settings more similar to VS, even if they prefer to use Blend to do their designing and XAML editing.  We realize that a huge chunk of our audience is going to be people who already use VS that are excited about all the new functionality in Blend and the simplicity it brings to the design side of things -- now even completely artistically challenged folks like myself can make apps that look good.  We know you are a huge chunk of our audience, but the marketing strategy has been to go after an audience we don't have: the designers.  The entire Expression Suite has a goal of capturing a big share of the creative market, especially including designers who have no interest in coding, where MS currently has a rather small market share.  With that in mind, I think the decision to use design-oriented keyboard shortcuts is a good one.  I also think, however, that it is equally important to give the customers we already have the best possible experience and to make our software do exactly what they want and what they expect, and to that end I would love to see a simple settings switch that would change the keyboard shortcuts to align with VS.  I can't comment on whether or not that change is coming, but I can definitely mention that it is something I truly believe should be in there, and I'll be pushing to make that happen.  Granted, this is nowhere near my area (artboard and transformations), but the team communicates well, and I'm not the only person who has suggested such a feature.

We'll see what comes of all this, but I do hope that it does get included.  I'd like to thank everybody at the RTP session for all the great feedback and suggestions you gave me for our product, and I hope you'll be pleased with the new features as we roll them out.  The entire team hears about the feedback that we get from these sessions, and these suggestions absolutely do make real differences in how the product turns out.

Till next time,

I'm Michael McDuffee, and this is My Expression

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