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?"

Comments

Good thing

[CaptBubba]

This could be a good thing. Maybe there won't be any linux compatibility so I won't be attacked by "Sparkle" ads when I browse the internet.

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.

Open Flash source

[raddan]

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.

What isn't MS bundling into Longhorn?

[prgrmr]

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.

Re:What isn't MS bundling into Longhorn?

[onyxruby]

All things considered I think the killing off of the Registry is a far bigger story than a competitor of flash. This has been arguably overdue for many years, and long one of Microsofts OS weak points. Have you got a link for the registry story by chance?

Rich Media Anger

[l0ungeb0y]

It never fails, mention Flash here and you get a couple hundred posts bashing Flash as nothing more than an annoyance.

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 .gif and .jeg as well.

Not just a Flash kiiller ... PDF and HTML too

[roca]

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.

Re:Please, oh god, please

[NanoGator]

"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.

Re:Please, oh god, please

[dspeyer]

It's still around. Many Solaris workstations (and, therefore, their AFS servers) have iexplore on them, which claims to be version 5.

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....

Re:Don't brush this aside.

[M$ Mole]

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.

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 .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.