The Fantastic Machine

Here are some fun links to some YouTube Music Animation videos:

Fantastic Machine

And another for a drum machine

Drum Machine

There is an urban legend that the Fantastic Machine depicted in the video was an actual machine built at the University of Iowa out of Farm Machine parts.

Of course this is not true. The instrument is computer animated and was created by Animusic.

On the Animusic site, they have clips from 7 computer animated instruments and offer the entire set on DVD.

Expression Web

I recently downloaded the trial version of Expression Web and took a first look.

I see Expression Web as a step up from Microsoft's FrontPage product. I never cared for Frontpage. Each time I attempted to create a web site using FrontPage, I got frustrated with the automated code updates it created and the lack of features and ended up importing the site into Visual Studio to complete and maintain. Expression Web is easier to use than Visual Studio and attempts to put many commonplace code edits into dialog based configuration settings rather than requiring you to update code. I see Expression Web as a possible time saver for building out simple sites with simple logic.

For me, I don't use Visual Studio on a daily basis and don't need most of the functionality it provides. I would welcome an easy-to-use version of Visual Studio and hope Expression Web will provide a new timesaving tool.

Microsoft Expression Web - Free Trial Download

Microsoft Expression Studio

I am looking forward to experimenting with the new web developer toolset called Expression Studio. The Expression Studio suite is a set of tools including a replacement for FrontPage in Expression Web.

Expression Web provides a WYSIWYG designer and HTML Editor in a tool that resembles and easy-to-use Visual Stuido type application with less funcitonality than the full version of Visual Studio.

Expression Studio suite also includes Expression Design which is a commercial professional illustration graphics design tool. It provides a raster and vector graphics editor.

Another tool in the suite is Expression Blend which provides a user interface design tool for creating rich graphical interfaces for web and desktop applications that blend the features of these two types of applications.

The final tool in the suite is Expression Media which is a commercial Digital Asset Management (DAM) cataloguing program.


The Expression Studio suite is a set of tools that consists of the following products.

Expression Web
A professional web site design tool with WYSIWYG website designer and HTML editor.

Expression Design
A professional illustration and graphic design tool with Raster and vector graphics editor for both Web and desktop application user interfaces.

Expression Blend
The professional design tool with visual user interface builder for Windows Presentation Foundation applications to create engaging, Web-connected, user experiences for Windows.

Expression Media
A professional digital asset and media manager asset management tool to visually catalog and organize all your digital assets for retrieval and presentation.