Big Announcement Today at Noon

Per a few reports online, Microsoft has a big announcement happening at noon today in regards to Silverlight. Correction-a just-now received Tweet from Anthony Handley says it is in about 14 minutes at http://www.seethelight.com

By the way-follow me on Twitter: @weberjon

I have been fortunate to have seen version 3 in beta of Blend and am actually excited about this version-which, for me, is a bit unusual for a Microsoft product. Although I am still a bit of the feeling that Windows 7 = Mohave plus possible service packs, I am strongly of the feeling that Expression Studio 3 (esp. when paired with Visual Studio 10, which I saw beta’d about a month ago in the Chicago ‘burbs by two huge proponents of WPF) will be a turning point for many designers; Adobe should be a bit nervous (not earthquake-shakingly nervous yet, but definitely nervous).

Here is an appetizer from a few months ago which should wet your whistle from uber-SL designer Corrina Barber on some of what is in store:  http://blogs.msdn.com/corrinab/archive/2009/03/25/9508683.aspx

Like in the mid-to-late 1980’s, this is going to be a damn cool time in which to be a designer…

New Software Releases

Forthcoming, per ad emails I got today:

Abelton Live 7

QuarkXPress 8

Cool Betas-now available:

Adobe Dreamweaver

Adobe Fireworks

Adobe Acrobat 9

Weird non-releases:

Adobe pulls trial-versions of their software due to bug