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Longhorn's Flash Killer?
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?"
Whatever ad designer got the great idea to use flash should be beaten with a clue bat. Thank goodness for the flash click to play plugin for firebird.
Perhaps this would be a good time for Macromedia to get as many flash players on as many platforms as possible. They should open the source.
Saw a presentation yesterday by an MS techie wherein he explained that SQL-server, .Net, and IE are all being "integrated" into the OS (Oh, and the registry is going away. Former registry content will now be distributed across directories into a new file type). Now a Flash-a-like product as well.
Nice to know that MS is paying strict attention to the anti-trust settlement conditions.
XP -> eXPerience?
or
XP -> $\chi \rho$ -> Cairo?
taken! (by Davidleeroth) Thanks Bingo Foo!
It never fails, mention Flash here and you get a couple hundred posts bashing Flash as nothing more than an annoyance.
.gif and .jeg as well.
What gives?
Flash, believe it or not, provides a very good alternative to Java Applets for browser based GUI's. I've used it to create multi-user services and many a data-driven application.
IMHO, it provides much better graphics support than Java and allows me to tie it into non-Java based services very handily.
I got into web development because of Flash.
Having worked for companies such as Atari and then a smattering of CD-ROM game companies in the early/mid 90's Flash allowed me to produce my work and even develop games without having to worry about physical distribution channels and allowed for all the interactivity I required.
So for alll you who think flash is only used for annoying ads, well, why don't you switch to text based browsers instead? Because ads are still made as
XAML is Microsoft's new do-it-all markup language that includes vector graphics and animation a la SVG (they even call the graphics subset "WVG"). You can read all about it in the Longhorn alpha developer docs. I suspect Sparkle is just the authoring toolset for the graphics.
What's interesting is that XAML also includes markup for user interface elements (similar in intent to XUL), and general documents (similar to HTML). It also has a feature set called "fixed format" documents which seems clearly designed to supplant PDF.
It's hard to avoid the conclusion that Microsoft ultimately plans to bury the W3C and make Web formats their proprietary property. They may as well just call it Bluebird 2006.
"one assumes that sparkle will be embedded into the OS"
That would kick ass. It means that apps in Windows would have a vector based UI. This means that apps could be made resizable to any resolution up or down. If your 3D card does all the drawing work, bonus. Let the main CPU do important stuff.
"Derp de derp."
It's not the web-designers, it's demanding ignorant clients that think it somehow helps their site for people to see stupid animations before they can actually get to the actual content they are looking for. I should know, I get cornered into making Flash and I just about refuse every time, but they don't give up, even after explaination of why it's not good for their site.
The problem is that clients don't use the internet enough to imagine what it would be like if Google had a flash intro. The only popular sites with flash intros that are still popular are all-flash sites.
Karma Clown
The bizarre thing is that X forwarding allows it to run on my GNU/Linux desktop. It stands out like a sore thumb -- the hideousness hand-drawn icons clashing with gtk, qt and xul.
It doesn't use many libraries. I wonder if it would be possible to machine-translate it into x86-elf, and if it would then run on Linux. If the threading APIs match, I can't see why not....
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Once again, MS is trying to push aside real industry standards by creating their own proprietary ones.
There is *already* a W3C replacement for the proprietary Flash format: Javascript + DOM + SVG
The Mozilla and KHTML developers and others would be wise to put heavy emphasis on getting SVG support fully working ASAP.
Ugh, not all flash is stupid little animations!! Good lord. There are places where a Flash INTERFACE is far superior to an HTML/JavaScript/CSS interface.
.NET, J2EE, CF, and there are open source solutions for PHP), supports streaming media and data-push applications....it's a mature platform that has great potential.
Flash is not just skipintros, and if you disagree, you've obviously had it turned off for far too long. Macromedia's current push is into the same space that Sun tried to get into with Java applets...except flash has a smaller footprint, and runs 1000 times faster than Java did in the browser...and the market is much more primed for such apps.
Microsoft will not be able to kill Macromedia with this because Macromedia has been busying itself with aligning with companies like Sun and IBM to ingratiate itself with Java developers looking to deploy more robust interfaces for their applications over the web, but wanting something lighter than Java applets.
This is a case of Microsoft being WAY behind the curve. Longhorn is 2 years out minimum...Flash is in version 7 (MX 2004), has the ability to connect to various application server frameworks (via Flash Remoting to
Karma: Non-existant. Due mostly to the fact that you smell funny and nobody likes you.
Not always, normally it comes down to what sort of computer the COMPANY buys the artists to use.
But the thing is the COMPANY isn't some giant firm standardized on Windows. It is an Advertising and/or Design firm standardized on Macs. Any real design work is outsourced to designers and they use Macs. Sure most big companies have an in-house design shop to do their internal stuff, and some are perverse enough to condemn those poor suffering souls to use Wintel (probably make them wear ties too, or at best "business casual"), but you don't think that after treating them so cruelly they would trust them to do the company website do you? Believe me the flash animation splash page on your typical fortune 500 company's site was NOT done by a corporate drone in some cubicle wasteland. It was done by a guy with a nose ring working freelance out of his studio apartment - I assure you he was not using a PeeCee (and he was not wearing a tie).