Love the thoughts…happy to see you taking the time to dig into a new product.

Re: Terrible exports: I’m getting identical results for quality 8 and quality 12 in Design vs. Photoshop. Would you be interested in sending your files my way and I can have the team take a look? My email is dacook [at] Microsoft [dot] com.

Re: Seeing the image at actual pixel size: This needs to be fixed. A work around is that you can click on the zoom combo in the bottom left corner of the screen and set the zoom to ‘actual pixels’.

Re: 72 dpi vs 96 ppi: I find that just working in pixels and ignoring ppi is the best bet for creating bitmap artwork that is intended for the web. For a more indepth discussion of the mess that is resolution, there are a couple of fun essays:
- http://hsivonen.iki.fi/units/
- http://www.webdevelopersjournal.com/columns/ajs_ppi.html

Blend and WPF use a unique resolution independent ‘pixel’ unit that is defined at 96 ppi. To make conversion between the two apps easier, Design also uses 96 ppi as its default resolution.

Re: Locking: A couple useful tricks on locking objects
- As Qixing mentioned, you can expand a layer and click on the objects within. There is a lock toggle next to each object. No eye toggle for hiding though. 
- Lock toggles are ‘swipeable’ so you can swipe many simultaneously in one gesture
- You can lock all but the current layer by alt-clicking on a lock toggle.
- I’m a keyboard junky, so I use ctrl + 2 to lock my selected objects. Ctrl + shift + 2 unlocks all locked objects in the layer. It’s a great way to get something out of the way temporarily without worrying about digging in the layers palette.

One thing I can think of on effects not rendering…if your shape is outside of the document bounds, the effects won’t render. Effects only render inside your document.

Take care
Danc.

I wrote this post on the SkyTrain yesterday and I didn’t have my computer in front of me (thus the severe lack of screen shots and examples). The effects to customized shapes problem might have been misconstrued - I’m going to test it again today and find out what I did that caused the problem (there really is a problem you see, I just don’t remember exactly what I did to cause it). I’ll follow up on it shortly.

mor10

Great to hear you are playing with Expression Design. I can’t wait to see the samples and illustrations you’ve done using the tools.

Recognizing this is the version 1 of the project, we are here to gather feedback, so I really appreciate your comments. I’ve sent your comments to the product team for them to take a close look. Also feel free to post your problems on http://www.microsoft.com/communities/newsgroups/en-us/default.aspx?dg=microsoft.public.expression.graphicdesigner&lang=en&cr=US

Here are some quick responses from my experience:
1. applying effect to customized shapes: I tried to alter the path of a rectangle and then apply blur effect. It worked for me.
2. you can choose an individual object from the layer pallette by expending the layer and then clike on the object. However, you are right that users can only hide or show the entire layer.

Qixing