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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?"
Meet Sparkle's new mascot.
ObSimpsonsRef
Trolling is a art,
...be "For lucky best web experience, use MS Sparkle"?
I was always told that NT stood for "New Technology." Which might explain why they removed the moniker from Windows 2000...
Lets see- Flash killer, by company that will never port it to Linux or OS X...
[stands up and cheers MS on]
Please help metamoderate.
...so, no.
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.
...with its product activation gibberish as described in this tale of woe.
The Army reading list
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.
Yeah...just like all those people who only started using Access in order to learn relational DB management...
have an astonishingly buggy piece of software tied intrinsically to their newly released incredibly buggy operating system that will have about 10% of the functionality that Macromedia Flash has now? One that only by the 3rd or 4th version (in another 3 years) might be adequate? Damn, I'm selling my Macromedia stock right now!
"Is this the beginning of the end for Macromedia?"
No, it's another nail in the anti-trust coffin for Microsoft.
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If it were to be the beginning of the end for flash/macromedia, they would HAVE to make sparkle compatible with previous versions of IE. Since most people STILL are using windows 98, they won't have the cutting edge IE, and there is less of a chance that they would upgrade to a new IE. thus, sparkle would have to work w/older versions of IE. ofcourse, in the end its up to the web developer, and since everyone caters to the masses (IE) it seems like it may be some time before this actually does 'kill' flash.
Please folks try convince Macromedia that their only salvation from the Microsoft borg is to fully open source their Flash specs.
Please make an open source , multi platform, components based player like Real is doing with Helix.
I think that way they can survive, otherwise Microsoft will swallow them like other unwanted competitors.
What do you think folks ?
Any prediction of the Flash-future ?
I'll bet that it will not require a plugin for IE, making web animation display on windows+IE avoid the plugin patent.
Not good at all for Flash.
Whenever I see "is this the beginning of the end" I know the submitter is full of it. First it was that Java DB, Prevaylor or something. Now it's this, next it'll be that. Face it people, it's not the beginning of the end. It's not even the end to the beginning. Chances are, Macromedia and MS will fight it out, MS will win (hopefully. It's a pain to tell computer incompetent people to go download the Flash plugin. They go "doh, what's a plugin"), or MS might buy out Macromedia (they do make that Dreamweaver site builder - nice piece of software) or MS's software might fall into a totally different niche than what Flash does. It's going to take at least another 5 -6 years for this saga to start unrolling, so keep your hats on, people.
Those graphic designers are hard to get to switch to something new. Many know flash and Action Script so well, I can't see them switching. I'm guessing M$ will somehow disable Flash support in their browser.
Sparkle? Couldn't they come up with a better name? The blatant rip-off of not only ideas, but names, is insane.
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Actually, in a way you may be correct. Lots of people in high school and even college first learn about databases using Access and that's how they get their interest in it. I'm not saying they learn everything there is to know about Flash, but that the learn some of the basics and become interested in developing their skills with a better software package.
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!
Especially as long as DreamWeaver is so vastly supirior to FrontPage.
Flash ain't (unfortunatly) goin' anywhere.
I am become Troll, destroyer of threads
CAn'T CompreHend SARcaSm?
Is this the beginning of the end for Macromedia?
God, I hope so. Flash is the absolute worst thing to hit the web since the blink tag. And no, stupid little animations don't make it better.
My browsing experience improved considerably the day I uninstalled (thanks for making it so non-easy, macromedia!) flash.
Now if only web designers around the world would realize that I go to their website for information, not to see their cute little flash animation intro. I know you're a frustrated movie/art student. Deal with it and let me get the info I need.
My only problem with this is that if Microsoft's integrated toolset takes off, then they'll make it completely impossible to remove.
But the tool goes beyond Flash in delivering a .NET application that has access to all the APIs in Longhorn,
Wow, that sounds like a security hole just waiting to be exploited. I'm sure Microsoft will make some attempt to cover their butts, but they haven't had the greatest track record so far. Look at ActiveX - some unwitting user clicks a "yes" button on a popup, and suddenly a program can do whatever it wants to the machine. I know Microsoft has time to make it secure, and maybe they'll surprise me and do that, but I'm not holding my breath.
I produce electronic music and write little games. Have a look.
So what if MS packs in another free application that is supposed to "kill the competition" with Longhorn. Look at other such programs: Frontpage Express, Wordpad, and the ever so popular video editing program Movie Maker. Sure they are great programs to play with, but no real professional is going to make a webpage in FP or write a document in wordpad, or edit movies in Movie Maker. "Sparkle" will only be another MS "innovation" flop.
As the only developer in my company who knows enough about our content management system I end up having to do the macromedia integration work. Last week I wrote a whole bunch of ActionScript 2 (ECMAscript between you and me) classes that allow all various types of flash applications to talk with our server by XML.
.Net Sparkle applets instead of Flash.
My impression of working with Flash is that it is a product desperate to dis-associate it'self from the version 1-4 days, when it was a product only suitable for designers. The MX2004 product whilst lacking in stability provides a more robust (semi-strongly typed) scripting language.
The addition of scriptable components for managing text, media and sound makes it an almost credible application prototyping environment.
In order to get my work done I had to find myself a spare computer in the office that has Windows on it because Macromedia refuse to support anything other than Windows and Mac (badly). The fact that most web developers are running LAMP (Linux, Apache, PHP, MySQL) seems to have evaded the Flash development team.
I suspect that this competition from microsoft is exactly what they need to encourage them to produce a Linux port of their flagship application. Previously Macromedia claimed that the Linux market was insignificant, however they will soon find that their windows market will shrink when the MS developers decide they prefer to script
A Linux port would be fresh grounds for Macromedia, and a welcome addition to the range of commercial software available for Linux. It would also be a good way for Macromedia to get some revenge on Microsoft who seem to be about to pull the carpet from beneath Macromedia's feet.
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
If you doubt this, ask yourself when the last time was you saw a useful animated GIF. Then bear in mind that, unlike animated GIFs, there's quite a bit of content out there in Flash/Shockwave form that people go out of their way to see. Why would the Mozilla, Opera, KHTML, etc, groups ignore the format?
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
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
"Flash ain't (unfortunatly) goin' anywhere."
Sigh. Flash is not as bad is its reputation - it can do a lot of very cool stuff. Certainly beats cookies for preserving state. It just gets misused, mostly by marketing departments.
That said, it *still* isn't searchable by robots or compliant with browser 'back' buttons. If Macromedia can't get that right over seven versions and ten years, what hope do MS have?
So.. talking about a product that could possibly be released with Longhorn IF it debuts in 2006, and talking about it like Macromedia have just been read their last rights.
3 years in the computing industry is an eternity. Thinking back to the year 2000, I was still using Windows 98, and had not long upgraded to a Slot-A Athlon 600MHz or something similar, and had just bought a brand spanking new Radeon 64MB DDR VIVO card.. most of that stuff is now obsolete, ESPECIALLY Windows 98!!
Nothing like jumping the gun a little eh? And as ever with any Microsoft product, I won't hold my breath.
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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.
Macromedia makes some decent tools, but....
... bleh!
Can someone here point us towards a site currently using Flash where the end result is dazzingly worthwhile? Flash programmers are finally getting to the point of occassionally delivering a stylish advertising graphic - but I usually set my system not to show me those, because it's extremely rare that the content I'm after uses Flash at all.
Could it be that
- the functional concept of Flash is a bad one, so it doesn't matter if MS introduces something else with as little real worth as Flash?
Or
- the concept is right, and the lack of results is because Flash doesn't implement it well enough, so there's actually room for someone else (even MS) to produce a truly useful tool in this space?
Or
- we'd all be in a Flash Web now, except we're held back by those Luddites in cyberspace who still miss the original default gray NCSA page background?
But really, a demonstration of Flash being useful - I still haven't seen it. It's concept is promising enough, but the results
"with their freedom lost all virtue lose" - Milton
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.
I noticed this page in the longhorn sdk api
It looked like a flash replacement and I guess I was right.
They will port it to OS X just like Office, Windows Media Player, Internet Explorer... and leave linux / freeBSD / other Open Source OS's aside as usual.
Then eventually they will cut support to Mac or make it substandard compared to the Windows version.
Business as usual.
And worse of it all - most people will probably swallow this as well. So sad people don't stand for anything anymore.
So, let me get this straight.
MS is going to be embedding technology into their browser and OS that ensure that every computer running their operating system have a built-in, "native" version of the software (and likely use it by default), whereas users and corporations will have to go out of their way to install the competing product (it's difficult to convince OEMs to do ANY extra work that they don't have to do when building these bigger, cheaper, faster McComputers).
Microsoft used this tactic to kill Netscape.
They're using it to attempt to crush Java and related middleware platforms (.NET), competing web technologies (IIS/ASP), Media (WMP), and, it sounds like, embedded vector animation ("Flash-killer").
Yes, I'd say the DoJ settlement is doing a bang-up job ensuring that Microsoft doesn't abuse their monopoly power and perform monopolistic anti-competitive practices...
I'm as annoyed by annoying Flash stuff as the next guy, but think for a minute what this means to the non-geek world -- yeah, you know, the people who we keep saying we want to see using Linux on the desktop.
There's lots of Flash, and Linux runs it flawlessly. What happens if Sparkle starts to displace Flash as the weapon-of-choice for webmasters who think they can't get it all done with ordinary HTML? There are sites out there that require Flash. Yes, it's annoying, and yes, we'd prefer to see it done right. But will that ever-popular dude, Joe Sixpack, care? All he'll know is that his favorite website requires Sparkle, and there's no Sparkle for Linux or Mac, so he'll stick with Windows.
Flash may be used in annoying ways but its availability on Linux is one of Linux's strengths as a desktop operating system.
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We know now how successful MSN was at putting AOL out of business, right? Not even after MS made clicking on abuot any button in new Windows install make you sign up for an MSN account.
AOL IS doomed, but not because of MSN.
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Wasn't Liquid Motion supposed to Kill Macromedia too. Nobody uses Microsofts Liquid Motion now because nobody needed it when they already had cross platform tools like flash.
Why? Did you trash your Macromedia Dreamweaver when you first read the press release on FrontPage? The problem is that Sparkle will have vastly different goals than Flash just like FrontPage had vastly different goals than Dreamweaver.
I cannot see in any way how all the new 'integration' is even close to fair to competitors! There now building everything inside the OS, so basically your being forced to use there stuff no matter what. Macromedia should sue the pants off MS as soon as it can aquire enough information of new Anti-Trust movements which are directed at the market place and their own companies software Flash.
No, this is
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..
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I will agree that a lot of crappy stuff has been done in Flash. There's also a lot of crappy books/webpages/slashdot posts that have been written, but I'm not about to propose getting rid of the alphabet so that it doesn't happen again.
There are some things for which the interactive, vector-based, flash delivered materials are best. Something like technial illustrations on a website would be a perfect example, ones that can be cross linked and are zoomable. (if you did it in static files, you'd need to render a bunch of different resolutions. if you did it as PDF, you don't get the same interactivity)
And whether you like it or not, a LOT of people learn better by smaller, bite sized bits of information, rather than by large text blocks that they need to plow through.
There is also this idea that presentation is totally useless. For many things it isn't the foremost important thing, but if you totally dislike having content delivered to you with somebody else's presentation applied, you'd better:
I don't care if it is flash or svg or whatever. The reason it popped up is because there are people who legitimately can use this technology. If you aren't one of them, fine. But don't assume that because you don't find it useful, then nobody should.
Incorporate SVG into the Mozilla trunk and add SMIL with support for mp3 and/or ogg vorbis. That'll be a real Flash killer.
Sadly, selling your Macromedia stock right now might not be bad idea.
I think the precedent for this is IE. Look at the zeitgeist to see how many browsers use google: http://www.google.com/press/zeitgeist.html
Were the first few versions of IE better than Navigator? I don't remember it that way.
Sure, Navigator got bloaty and buggy as time went on, but that was only part of the reason that IE dominates. I think a bigger contributor to Navigator's loss was that IE came free, and was 'bundled' with the OS. That's what's going to happen to sparkle. Everyone who pays the M$ tax will get it 'for free', it won't be 'uninstallable' and of course front page will use it and tons more web sites will work with only IE.
Will Macromedia open-source flash? Or, will they decide to try and support whatever obfuscated and hidden API m$ will come up with?
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.
I seem to remember a big hoo-ha about SVG being the open standard that would kill Macromedia. Since Flash has been extended to do much more than just animations and banner ads, that idea has gone by the wayside. This is no different. Once again M$ are at the cow's tail of the internet.
Moreover, the culture at M$ is just not conducive to making any headway in this market. I was at Macromedia's HQ in San Francisco the other night at a user group meeting, and the guy that was giving the presentation of Flash Professional 2004 summed it up beautifully. He said that the really cool things happen when artists and engineers collaborate properly. And that is what happens at Macromedia. "When was the last time anybody seriously used a Micro$oft image editing tool?" He asked. Everyone laughed, because M$ are crap at that sort of thing, although their technical stuff at the back end is supposedly okay (although I would dispute that.)
Go to Adobe and you'll find great tools for the artist, but when it comes to technical stuff for the web then they're a bit challenged.
Macromedia is a unique company that is full of renaissance people, people who are left brained and right brained. It has a good mix of engineers and artists, and that explains why their products are both slick and easy to use as well as being technical masterpieces.
Personally, whilst I have my doubts about the future uptake of certain products like Central, I think it's safe to say that with excellent products like Flash, DreamWeaver, Fireworks and Contribute, Macromedia are going to be around for quite some time to come.
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Hasn't a Japanese company got a trademark on this name?
Jonathanjk.com
How long before M$ breaks Macromedia Flash?
"I'm sorry, the plug-in you tried to install is not compatible with this operating system's beleif that all programs must be made by Microsoft. Please try Sparkle instead."
On a serios note, how is this not anti-competitive? I guess Macromedia can look for a nice payout once this has been implemented.
Let me ask you this: does that mean any new feature added in Windows is now an anti-trust violation? Doesn't that seem a little harsh?
Or perhaps you are just objecting to the fact that Macromedia already has similar capabilities. The problem is, just about any feature you add to an OS today has been done by someone before. Does that mean that the OS must be stagnant?
It's not as though Macromedia has the patent on vector-based graphics...
Remember that SVG is a W3C standard.
For that reason, it is imperative that Microsoft to make its own superceding one (embrace, etc.). A lot of other organizations suffer from the NIH malady, but it's extra painful when it is a company with this much influence.)
The community really needs free, powerful, robust SVG renderers and authoring tools using public standards to become popular, or else Microsoft will own yet another "standard".
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Ahh. This explains the BSODs. They use second grade developers for the kernel and such.
This is another one of my long winded theoretical pieces so grab some popcorn and beer and sttle down for a read;)
Firstly, the question must be asked of many things that MS is planning on including in Longhorn: Why are they doing this? Why are they adding in a Flash killing, Windows only Technology, and why are they adding an Office/Mail "security" feature that only works on Windows? The answer should be as obvious as the sky is blue: They want to kill off the competition. This should really, after all these years of bone crushing MS failures and successes in killing off alternatives, be blindingly obvious.
The next question is whether it will succede. That is anyone's guess. I tend to look at the last few times MS has attempted to intoduce MS only technologies in the browser, such as VBScript (instead of the ECMAScript compatible JScript), ActiveX (which only ended up with providing plug-in developers extra work into porting to Mac and Mozilla) and others. There is a very good chance that Sparkle will just fall flat on it's face as the millions of Flash developers will not suddenly switch over to something that will only work in one browser, especially after those same developers spent fucking years getting all their html stuff to work in all browsers.
On the other hand, Macromedia has a historical record of making catastrophically bad user interfaces for their products and has a knack of having good luck shots along with a host of bad decisions. They neglected Freehand for ages, for instance, only to have to rush like mad in a catch up game with Illustrator a couple of years down the road. Their latest product activation spree has irritated more than one developer.
There is a final line to this: With both Adobe and Macromedia kissing Microsoft's backside and concentrating most of their efforts on Windows at the expense of the Macintosh, they might have done something that they will highly regret in the future when Microsoft tries to kill both of them off. They might then realise that never ending price rises and neglecting their original markets was a costly mistake.
Is this the beginning of the end for Macromedia?
I'm sick of people freaking out whenever Microsoft announces something. These are only ANNOUNCEMENTS - who knows whether there's anything behind them, what they'll eventually release, how good it will be, etc.
Longhorn is years away, and yet every little piece of magic it will supposedly contain is breathlessly reported. How fortunate they are that all they have to do is say "We're going to do these magnificent things", and so many people jump right on it and assume it's true? As far as I can tell, whatever else happens in a couple of years Microsoft will still be the big boy on the block, will still release shitty, buggy software, will still be playing catch up to Apple on features, and will still be telling everyone how much better their lives will be when they buy yet another Microsoft upgrade.
So settle down people.
Facts are stubborn things.
Actually for a while NeXT had hardware-accelerated DPS for its cubes, via a graphics board called NeXT-dimension. At the time (1990) it was simply amazing. This board did accelerated Display Postscript at something like 1080x960 in 32-bit colour and even had video capture (PAL or NTSC). It sounds like not much right now, but there was nothing like it at that price range at the time.
I for one welcome our new Sparkle overlords.
Manipulate the moderator system! Mod someone as "overrated" today.
If M$ deploys this in longhorn and incorporates into to their web development tools then M$ will be another step closer to owning something they could not buy....the internet. They are already doing this for the most part. A lot of their web development tools are generating code and services that are Windows and IE only. Some content generated by these products are viewable on no other platform or browser other then what Microsoft puts out, for no other reason than they were created with MS products. What a way to control the net....want to view this page? Then buy Windows. Forget that the web was built on open standards, M$ will try to make it M$internet any way they can. Do you think that they will strive to make it run on other platforms like Macromedia has? Does Balmer have hair? This may sound like a conspiracy theory but have you tried to complain to the government about Microsofts compliance to the anti-trust lawsuit from the webpage MS has set up? If you are not running windows it can't be done.