Urban Potato

Which Designer do I use?

We just announced a bunch of design tools, two of which specifically target WPF: Sparkle Interactive Designer and the Cider extensions for Visual Studio. Why two? And which one should you use?

The reason for two designers is with WPF we’re really trying to rid the world of the need for graphic designers and developers to interact by sharing bitmaps. We do this at Microsoft all the time. I get emailed a bitmap of new UI from our design team and craft it all over again by hand. The design team needs to annotate the UI with pixel offsets, color RGB values and other data so I can create the UI.

That process is very awkward. If the design team instead used Sparkle Interactive Designer to design the UI, I could edit it directly in Cider. But graphic designers and software developers have very different expectations for a tool. Have you ever used PhotoShop? While I use and love PhotoShop, I would never want to use it as a designer for software development. I want to focus on event handling, data binding and good software factoring, not layers, bitmaps and effects.

While there is a lot of overlap between Sparkle and Cider, each designer is “tuned” to its target audience. If you’re a software developer accustomed to the Windows Forms or VB 6 form designers, Cider will feel right at home. If you’re a designer accustomed to Illustrator and PhotoShop, Sparkle should be very comfortable for you.

While we will continue to tune the feature set until we ship, here’s an example of the kinds of differences you can expect:

Sparkle

Cider

• The common usage pattern is to lay out controls first, then apply, create and edit styles of those controls.
• Integrating deeply with project user controls, data binding and code is a key focus.
• The tool palette is dominated by controls from Microsoft and 3^rd parties.

Which tool do you plan to use?