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Longhorn's Flash Killer?

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the one-tech-i'd-love-to-see-die dept.

SunSaw writes "Erin Joyce reports on internetnews.com that "Top developers at Microsoft are working on a new graphics and animation toolset for Longhorn (the next generation of Windows) that could spell trouble for Macromedia's popular Flash MX and Director MX animation tools". Flash's yet-to-be-released competition from M$ is code named "Sparkle" but it wasn't demonstrated during Microsoft's Professional Developers Conference in Los Angeles last week. Is this the beginning of the end for Macromedia?"

6 of 784 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Microsoft Liquid Motion by Locutus · · Score: 3, Informative

    They purchased Dimension X, the owner of Liquid Motion in order to kill the product and help kill off Netscape. You see, Liquid Motion was a Java based application that Netscape was using for it's authoring tool. Microsoft found out that Sun Microsystems was looking to purchase Dimension X and got into a bidding war with Microsoft winning.

    This was also the period where Microsoft purchased Coopers and Peters too. They had a Java based product too and it too was killed.

    So goes the way Microsoft competes and "innovates". Don't take my word, history is a better instructor.

    LoB

    --
    "Anyone who stands out in the middle of a road looks like roadkill to me." --Linus
  2. Want to know where MS got this tech? by WillAdams · · Score: 3, Informative

    Point your browser to http://www.creaturehouse.com and read the fine print.

    I _really_ hope this doesn't mean that Expression will die a second death...

    William

    --
    Sphinx of black quartz, judge my vow.
  3. Re:please oh please oh please oh please by AT · · Score: 4, Informative

    I wholeheartedly agree. I recommend this solution for mozilla users though: http://www.squarefree.com/userstyles/xbl.html

    It shows a place holder in each flash frame until you click on it to play the flash. This gives you the best of both worlds: flash is blocked by default, but where you actually want to see it, it is only a mouse click away.

  4. Re:Please, oh god, please by Drathos · · Score: 5, Informative
    ...a certain company called Microsoft bought some rights or something to Mosaic and it became Internet Explorer.
    Um.. MS licensed the tech from Spyglass for IE for a percentage of the sales, then proceeded to give away IE.

    Guess what?

    That means they paid nothing to Spyglass for Mosaic.

    True, there was a version of IE for Solaris, but it was extremely slow and buggy. IIRC, it never got past version 4.0, either.
    --
    End of line..
  5. Re:Finally! by FIRESTORM_v1 · · Score: 3, Informative

    You are correct. According to Microsoft, twhen they released NT, they called it NT because it had "new technology" 32 bit processing perhaps? What is funny about the nt moniker is that 'nt' is a trademark of Northern telecom (now Nortel Networks). and Microsoft has been paying them a lot of money to use that branding for NT.. Probably why Windows 2000 wasn't called Windows NT 5..

    Haver fun!

    --
    Partnership for an idiot free America!
  6. Re:Open Flash source by stephanruby · · Score: 3, Informative
    The flash player IS open source.
    http://www.macromedia.com/software/flashplayer/lic ensing/sourcecode/form.html

    It's not open to me. I just filled in the form and my request to look at the source was denied.

    In any case, some people say that the Flash player is open source because the swf format is open, but that's just like Bill Gates saying that the Internet Explorer is open source because the html format is open.