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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.
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Lets see- Flash killer, by company that will never port it to Linux or OS X...
[stands up and cheers MS on]
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...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.
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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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
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
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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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.
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.
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.
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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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.
Windows: XP
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