There are lots of cool videos of demos and discussions over at Mix09 today. If you haven’t been there you should definitely head on over.
There are lots of cool announcements for new features for the next version of various Microsoft products. Too many for me to even enumerate in a single blog post actually but what’s really exciting is that I finally get to tell everyone what I have been working on these last couple on the job at Microsoft.
I have been working with a small team of developers, here in Minneapolis, who are responsible for the Photoshop Import feature of expression studio. It’s been a very interesting an exciting project so far and it seems like something that developers and designers are both very happy about. Here is a screen shot from the Mix demo site.
We’re able to read the layer information from a Photoshop file and import them as separate controls into Blend. Once there a developer can make those generated layers into real interactive controls like anything else in Blend. There is also a re-import feature to ease to workflow from designer to developer. This exact incarnation of the importer is available in the build of Blend 3 Preview, so download that and give it a shot! Feel free to send me feedback if you do try it out.