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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,
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.
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?
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.
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..
Amazing idea!!! No wonder it has been thoroughly implemented before. Just exactly in the terms you describe...