At the PDC today, more details on Acrylic have been released. It's now called Expression, and consists of three products:
- Graphic Designer - Derived from the Acrylic we saw in the CTP release, still targets Avalon
- Interactive Designer - Also called "Sparkle", for creating interactive content
- Web Designer - "Quartz", a standards-based rich designer for web sites
Sparkle looks very interesting. It looks like you can import:
- Graphics from Acrylic, including vector, bitmap, and XAML
- Video
- Audio
- 3D content from other modelling applications, or create simple models directly in Sparkle
- Text (of course)
Once you have that content in Sparkle, you can add animation, interactions, behaviours, keyframes, etc..It seems targetted to graphic designers, but fully capable of working the programming world--the object model seems to be addressable by C# or other .NET code.
It looks like Sparkle can deliver content as several types:
- Video presentations (including HD)
- A Windows application (exe)
- A Secure Web Browser Application (wba)
- XAML and C# code for integration into your Visual Studio 2005 project.
The inevitable comparisions to Flash are going to be made, and that's fine. But if Sparkle can truly bridge the gap between designers and programmers, it is going to go much further than Flash ever did.
More details on the Expression website.