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Flash, Meet Sparkle
Robert writes "Microsoft finally released more information about their Sparkle product on a Channel 9 MSDN video. Sparkle is vector based XAML system for doing applications that may have traditionaly been done in flash. Ars Technica's Josh Meier has a few things to say about it, too."
When are the application makers going to start realizing that anything they develop on Microsoft's platform is eventually going to be copied and forced into the collective? Seriously, is there any piece of software running on Windows that Microsoft isn't in the process of making thier own version of?
The more you know, the less you understand.
If it goes to the point that Flash has, intrusive advertising, I'd be quite happy if Microsoft kept it proprietary. Then the rest of us could safely ignore it, and there would be a further benefit to using Firefox.
"Oh my God. This is terrible. This is the end of my Presidency. I'm fucked."; ~ Donald J. Trump
But will browsers such as Firefox even support this technology? I mean, there's no need to block it if the browser itself just plain doesn't support it.
Cyric Zndovzny at your service.
Do you install Firefox Plugins ? because they have just as bad a security model (ie. none) as ActiveX
A lot of people have tried to label Sparkle as a Flash killer but it is not. Sparkle is a new way to deal with winforms that allows custom UI design without coders running into the traditional limitations of development platforms. Think of it as a flash front-end to a full Win32 API and data-access. The fear I have is that Windows programs have always had a "consistant" look at feel. However, programs like Winamp back in the day changed the rules. These days more and more applications are starting to forego Microsoft UI guidelines for their own 3l33t designs which can be a pain to learn and a pain to script to. I hope it doesn't happen here but I would certainly, for example, expect a lot of Apple OSX-look knock off apps showing up once Sparkle gets out there.
Anyway, check out the picture gallery if you can't RTFA.
Oh please, SVG has taken the Open Source world ages to get rolling on, and it is still in very small support, now a competing standard from Microsoft comes along and the Open Source Community and Apple are supposed to just jump on the bandwagon? Please.
If anything, once SVG gets mainstreamed in Firefox, Safari and Opera (I'm pretty sure Konq already has it), it will completely undermine Windows developers from using XAML.
"Victory means exit strategy, and it's important for the President to explain to us what the exit strategy is." G.W.Bush
Sparkle is designed to appeal to the same idiots who think power-point presentations are the best tool for presenting an argument (they're also easily swayed by shiny bright objects, if you catch my drift).
"Look people, you too can program." Even though they can't. This will let them pretend. Of course, it also will provide Microsoft with another revenue streem, for MCSE - Microsoft Certified Sparkle Engineer.
So, how long before the first Sparkle virus, the first Sparkle trojan, and the first Sparkle worm? Lets just say it opens up new vistas.
Nah, running Linux is the best way to avoid Sparkle. With a bit of luck, MS will prevent you from disabling it while (of course) not releasing it for Linux, so switching to Linux will be the only way to avoid some spam/malware!
Opus: the Swiss army knife of audio codec
historical performance is a reasonable basis for prediction.
Snowden and Manning are heroes.
is still technically XML
Snowden and Manning are heroes.
... about designing a quality, usable GUI. That's most likely because, like programming, designing a good GUI takes a lot of skill, experience and effort. So this may actually be quite beneficial, as it lets everyone specialize. Programmers write the complex algorithms necessary to power these applications, while the GUI designers can manipulate and form the GUI without needing much effort on behalf of the programmers. Everyone is more efficient this way.
Cyric Zndovzny at your service.
Now, do you really want anyone to be able to read and write to your fs through an x(a)ml file? So, if it can do that, and since it is designed to "script" the native UI, what is to keep someone from cloning critical parts of the Vista interface, and fooling you into entering, say, your user name and password into their app? Or tricking you into installing other malware? Or getting you to agree to deleting your root partition when you think you're clicking on "save"?
Like I said, it opens up new Vistas, literally.
Watch the fscking video.
.NET for Avalon, Sparkle is a (even more than a) UI development tool for creating vector based interfaces. The beautiful thing is, everything you create is just a .NET object that can be manipulated by the developer.
You kids all want to bash on a new Microsoft product without having any idea what it is, what it can do, who it is for, etc.
Sparkle != Flash
Completely built on top of
What does this mean?
It means an artist can use an artist's toolset to create a beautiful fully functional front end, then pass it off to the developer to do the backend. No more mockups that can't be translated into a real application front end.
Seriously folks, let's hope the world's web developers steer clear of this. Flash is cross-platform and it's one of the key tools that make the non-Microsoft desktop useful. I know, I know, as a techie you probably hate all those "punch the monkey!" ads, but think of that Linux box you may have set up for your Mom or something. Would she be happy with it if she couldn't play all of those silly cartoons that your aunt emailed to her? These things seem trite to us, but normal users demand them.
XAML is a Windows-only technology, designed to make the Web one step more proprietary to Microsoft. Don't let them do it. Keep the web based on cross-platform tools. Steer cleer of XAML.
Tired of FB/Google censorship? Visit UNCENSORED!
Microsoft pays lip service to security. That's all. Their "big security push" that they so proudly declaimed, where they spent a "whole month" concentrating on making their people more aware of the problems of buffer overflows, etc., was pure marketing bullshit. You can't change decades of irresponsible behaviour with one month of rah-rah rally-the-troops crap.
If they REALLY wanted to concentrate on security in any meaningful way, they wouldn't continually fragment their own resources and create even more maintenance problems (7 versions of Vista? Fucking idiots - they can't even maintain what they've got now - this is a company that doesn't care about quality, or customer needs. Its ALL marketing, all the time).
If they really cared about security, then they'd stop producing standards-breaking stuff (Internet Exploder) that requires web app developers to work 10x as hard to achieve cross-browser functionality, at the expense of resources that these same developers could be devoting to verifying the rest of their code.
So, no, Microsoft will never really be interested in security. After all, security will remove both any perceived need to stay on the forced upgrade path, or to even use their software. It's not in their economic interest to write secure apps.
I remember when was a practical joke saying that reading a mail could hurt your computer, remember when there was no way to affect your computer just watching web pages, when all the efforts around java was to separate as much as possible what is from internet from what is the viewer's computer. And of course, Microsoft gived us Outlook, Internet Explorer, and ActiveX to change those obsolete ideas with really trivial examples.
I really hope Microsoft has learned from its past mistakes, else a lot of people will die laffing on the people that still keep trusting in them.
"Flash, Meet Sparkle" and then linking to an article explaining how it has nothing to do with Flash at all.
Seriously, the "rich" user experience that we see in most Flash websites really isn't something we need more of. Notice how rich the GMail user experience is, without a drop of Flash? Wonder why Google chose to go the route they did? The vast majority of Flash sites I see only detract from the user experience. The supposedly "rich" user experiences just mean that there's a cool animation as each new content area opens... with a tiny font that I can't resize, with a poorly-contrasting color scheme that I can't override, with annoying non-standard scrollbars, and with form fields that can't I use my browser's auto-complete features on. How is that a richer user experience? Adding eye-candy at the expense of breaking basic usability -- never mind the fact that you're hiding your pages from the search engines -- is not a worth trade-off. Oh, but wait -- I forgot there's music playing in the background, and bloops and echoing clicks when I mouse over the mystery-meat controls. Seriously, there's a place for Flash online -- it's a nice way to add inline audio/video or animations, and there are online Flash-based games that are awesome... but I'm yet to see a single Flash-only website where the user experience was actually better because of Flash.
With very little code we are going to be able to create gorgeous applications with a terrific user experience.
Depending on the programming environment you're using, this is possible now.
Using RealBasic, I've been able to whip up some useful programs in relatively little time.
I never migrated to VB.Net but VB6 was useful in the same regard.
LK
"Hi. This is my friend, Jack Shit, and you don't know him." - Lord Kano
Oh i'm not worried, MS will never release "Sparkle" for Linux, and probably never for FireFox either! Think it'll be years and years before i see a sparkle movie :-)
"They feel they've been raped."
So they
a) either have no f*cking idea what that's like
b) are prone to serious exaggeration
or
c)You're making it up and are one of those people that think 'George Lucas raped your childhood'.
Come on, calm down a tad... I use Windows and MS products as well as a lot of OS (Eclipse, Laszlo, PHP etc. etc. ) products every day and really.. I'm not fuming, I'm not frothing... I really am quite happily getting along with my work... and so are all my colleages... and those in the companies we do work in... and everyone else I know.
I agree with the licensing schemes, they are a load of absolute confusing and archaic crud... but the software (which is what we're talking about) is working fine for us all here thanks very much.
You know, Microsoft definitely deserves it's share of criticism, but when people are idiots about it then it just rubs me the wrong way:
They have to be kicked and dragged into continuing to provide security fixes for NT, claiming "sorry, its 5 years old - we don't support it any more".
I challenge you to find any OS manufacturer that doesn't end of life their products after 9 years (NT 4.0 was released in 1996). Would you still support a 1996 version of Linux? How about OS/2? Maybe MacOS? Stop being a retard. Of course they don't have to support NT.
Computer software isn't a "car", "fridge" or "toilet". Name any one of those things that doubles in power every 18 months. Oh yeah - you can't.
7 versions of Vista? Fucking idiots - they can't even maintain what they've got now
Probably the most retarded thing I've heard. They all share the same code base, dumbass. The only thing releasing 7 versions does is confuse the market, not reduce security issues, which tend to be confined to a relatively small number of apps, especially now the default login isn't Administrator and IE drops privs while running.
How many versions of Linux are there?
So, criticize away on MS, but don't make yourself a bigger idiot than their marketing team when you do it.
Fear: When you see B8 00 4C CD 21 and know what it means
The internet has grown and thrived thanks to open standards. Anyone (capable) person can write a mail reader or a web server and a lot of them have done just that. That's why I can write this words while sitting on a machine filled with free code implementing the standards. HTML, HTTP TCP/IP. All of them free and open.
/picz
Than FLASH came. A lot of sites started using it. FLASH is bad enough. Flash is a closed standard. There is a player for Windows, Mac OS and Linux x86. All other platforms are screwed. FLASH has degraded the open availability of the web for many people.
Now we have Sparkle. I'm sure it's brillant. But will we ever be able to write an open Sparkle player? Will MS release Sparkle player for Linux? I don't think so.
If people on the internet start to embrace closed standards and abandon the open one, the internet will not longer be free. All of us using Linux/BSD will soon be looking at empty boxes in our browsers saying "Missing plugin".
That's how corporations will steal the net from the people. By replacing openess with closed standards.
------- Look mum! I have posted another Slashdot comment! --------
There will never be the "year for Linux on the desktop", any more than there was a "year for Linux on the server".
Oolite: Elite-like game. For Mac, Linux and Windows
Software does not double in power every 18 months. Hardware is no longer doubling in power every 18 months either - clock speed hasn't been increasing, and the rate of integration is not increasing like it once was. Also, computers are remaining useful for longer - and Microsoft will have to deal with this. In 1995, a new PC was so vastly more useful than a PC made in 1990 in every respect. However, today, a 700MHz P3 made in 1999 is still a very useful computer for the typical things most users do (surf the web, write letters, email - that kind of thing).
Microsoft are going to have to get used to the fact that people will start routinely keeping computers as long as they do cars - for ten years or more. So are the hardware manufacturers, for that matter. Even though I personally like having the latest, fastest new hardware - normally upgrading every 2 years, this time around, I feel absolutely no need to upgrade and probably won't for at least the next couple of years.
Oolite: Elite-like game. For Mac, Linux and Windows
"Microsoft makes crap. Everyone knows it. Nobody likes it."
*cough*bullshit*cough*
Sorry for your reality check (you must really be unlucky to meet so many disappointed customers), but i don't believe a word of it. Give people a tool and they will always find something wrong with it. And ofcourse they will mention that, before mentioning the good parts of it.
Yes, i use Windows too. Yes, i dislike things about it. Hate it? Not really. I can do so much more on Windows than i can on any other OS. Oh yeah, i'm using Linux too, but not for the desktop. Not even for server in some cases. Active Directory is a really nice thing that is well supported, documentated and has been in real-life production for quite some time now and i can't think of anything that i would replace it with.
I also honestly think that your reality is kind of tainted by your opinion about MS too. I mean, this sentence:
"They hate the viruses, the downtime, the forced upgrades, the patch hell, the crappy products - everything"
Let me go over this, word by word:
viruses: fault of a sys/net-admin. It's no big deal installing a good antivirus, even network-wide.
downtime: redundancy. really. have multiple servers do the same thing. Our network here is 100% windows and has close to 99% uptime. More downtime? Ah, hire a (better) admin!
forced upgrades: does somebody from Microsoft stands behind you with a baseballbat, threatening to smack you silly if you don't upgrade? Anyways, we have upgrades all the time. The only persons who complain (if you can call it that) are the sysadmins, but that's just a select few compared to the normal users who should not notice these upgrades.
the patch hell: what patch hell? Please explain. I've just patched a terminal server using windowsupdate. One reboot later and the server is back in production. Hell? Not more than applying a patch for any other OS.
everything: right.
So, again, i think you're personal vendetta against MS is in the way here. Come with me and i'll take you on a tour through the building. I'm sure that alot of people will complain, but that in the end it won't be as bad as the customers want you to think. People who use computers complain. It's always been this way, and it will never change.
"The world and Microsoft are heading for a divorce."
Don't get me wrong, i would love to see the day that our systems run 100% MS-free. But the reality is, that (most) MS products are well supported, documentated and in use for longer than its other-OS-alternative, and therefor make it a better product. I wouldn't like to implement an opensource product in the network, and then find out when i have a problem with it, that i can't go anywhere for support.
Anyhow, how is this post at all interesting. It is just another person claiming that everybody hates Microsoft, when Microsoft somehow still pulls a vast majority of market share. Does anybody in the world believe, that as Mr. Hudson says "Not one person said they liked using Windows". Just so you can stop using that line, I would like to say that I like using Windows.
Really, don't blame the system admins for something that is flawed by design and intent.
Why do people keep saying this? Anyone with a Windows machine can download the schemas from Microsoft's site and verify that this isn't true.