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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."
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.
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.
historical performance is a reasonable basis for prediction.
Snowden and Manning are heroes.
is still technically XML
Snowden and Manning are heroes.
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.
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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.
"Flash, Meet Sparkle" and then linking to an article explaining how it has nothing to do with Flash at all.
"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
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