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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."
.. will this expose Windows users to? Will it be as problematic as ActiveX has been, for instance?
Cyric Zndovzny at your service.
Agreed. I'm Ok with flash when it's used for animation, but the advertising side "benefits" like shoskeles should cause some people's karma to reach out and strangle them.
Using a marginally beneficial technology for evil should mark you for death.
"Oh my God. This is terrible. This is the end of my Presidency. I'm fucked."; ~ Donald J. Trump
Does this mean that we are going to see a huge rise in crappy Sparkle menus and animations on every web site?
Or maybe some sweet pop-over Sparkle ads? Microsoft just created their next enemy. Will the IE popup blocker block Sparkle ads? Or will that be a selling point?
The best thing that can possibly come of this is new games. That's the one thing I still enjoy about Flash on occasion.
Are there any plans to include support for this technology into Mozilla, Konqueror, Opera, Safari, etc.?
Cyric Zndovzny at your service.
Yet, here it is, with a name that sounds exactly like it's directly competing with Flash. Along those lines, why Sparkle? Flash sounds cool, but Sparkle sounds...girly.
Otherwise, the concept actually sounds really cool, like the visual component of Visual Studio on steroids. Replacing the windowing interface with purely vector graphics sounds promising, though it also sounds a little too abuseable. Still, this might herald the beginning of an actually innovative M$, seeing that they now have Google and FOSS knocking on its doors.
I wonder if it'll make use of the GPU to do the rendering.
"If a nation expects to be ignorant and free in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be."
If "Sparkle" isn't significantly more attractive as a creative tool than Flash, there really will not be any advantage for web developers and advertisers alike to use it. It just means another plug-in that people may or may not have, and advertisers and web developers can't aford this risk, given that IIS is not the dominant web server, and not everyone has IE. It's not going to be an easy road for MS.
"Who are in control, they are not in control of anything - they don't even control themselves!" - Glen Beck
There seems to be a clamor for Flash-like functionality but without Macromedia's proprietary player and tools.
SVG is one alternative that a lot of people seem to like. Scalable Vector Graphics. Supposedly, Firefox/Mozilla will support it soon. Sounds like a great thing.
Then why doesn't Microsoft's Sparkle sound like a great thing too? The language is written in XML (this statement doesn't compute, but works), so it's not like you couldn't program your little game in something like vi or Notepad. Is it because it is Microsoft that everyone is down on it?
Jesus saved me from my past. He can save you as well.
Let's see...Vista's too powerful for our computers, so we'll flip to linux. Vista has Sparkle, so we'll flip to linux. Let's see...what's next...Vista steals our soul so we can't flip to linux?
If it's based on XML, it had better specify a compression standard. Declarative prgramming a graphical object can make for some absolutely huge files.
On OS X, there was this program floating around on Versiontracker that would convert any picture into an html document by converting each pixel into a table-cell that was styled 1px by 1px and colored. This prevened easy downloading of the image, but caused what might have been a 100k image to take up 4 megs in an html file.
Of course, XAML is vector-based, but knowing the kinds of schemas MS likes to promulgate, the possiblity of bandwidth-chewing "rich web content" is quite real.
Don't blame me, I voted for Baltar.
So, Sparkle is a Windows Vista virus/trojan toolkit for non-programmers. The PHBs should love it, as it will make outsourcing all those P3N15/V14GR4 ads to India *so* much more profitable.
For those interested in seeing a demo of this impressive family of products click here. The link on the article seemed to be /.ed.
In any case, I don't think this is a "flash killer."
There will always be designers who prefer what they grew up on or somehow prefer what Macromedia has to offer. That doesn't mean, however, that this future product of M$ isn't pretty useful and a bit impressive.
Nevertheless, they had to go and do something similar to what they've done with Vista and hopefully won't do with Office: There are three different components to the entire software package: Expression - Graphics Designer, Interactive Designer, and Web Designer. They could have crammed it all into one package but Microsoft is quite wise (and quite annoying) with marketing strategies.
Falun Dafa is good!
The best way to get a decent gui design is to force the coders to talk to the end users. Have the coders develop their skills at shutting their pie-holes and listening to the people who are the most pissed off with what they're using currently.
Replacing that process with "gui designers" is a pure waste of time. A "gui designer" is no more likely to have better listening or people skills than anyone else.
The idea that the best use of your coders is locking them up in a room to write code is dumb. If you take them on the road half the time to talk with customers, they'll only be writing code the other half of the time, but it will be with the insight that comes from talking with the end user, so they'll be more productive overall.
Time to end the stereotype that all coders/programmers lack soft skills.
I've been working on flash apps for work. God the networking library sucks ass. Creating a connection returns true or false. True if it succeeds, false if it doesn't. There's absolutely no way to figure out why it didn't work!
Insane. I set policies first with my XMLSocket server, and then with an HTTP server. Doesn't seem to be it and it's driving me nuts. Every other networking library will tell you exactly why it failed. Not Actionscript!.
Fuck macromedia. And fuck Microsoft for killing client-side java!!!
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
I've spent the last 2 days on the road talking with people at 53 companies. Dragged along an engineer as part of his training. I'll be out there again tomorrow, and I'm sure that it'll be the same.
Not one person said they liked using Windows. Not one! They hate Windows. They hate Microsofts Client Access Licensing schemes. They hate the viruses, the downtime, the forced upgrades, the patch hell, the crappy products - everything. And they also hate it when they go home. They want OUT!
This is not a slashdot "talking-out-of-my-ass" opinion - this is the reality in the corporate world today. Pissed off doesn't begin to describe it. They feel they've been raped.
Like I said, I've expended the shoe leather, gotten the face time, and this is the reality. Microsoft makes crap. Everyone knows it. Nobody likes it.
There's no need for a "coming together." The world and Microsoft are heading for a divorce.
Seems microsoft is trying to tie web services to windows.
ie. Google threatens microsoft because many google applications run in a web browser that could be running on any platform.
Now if microsoft can get everyone using what is basically Windows GUI in all there web apps then those web apps will be tied to windows.
Yay for microsofts World Domination Department. good job guys, thanks for making life difficult.
...and that is all I have to say about that.
http://jessta.id.au
I'm a grad student studying interactive design, and I'm fairly intrigued about a software package seemingly being marketed toward "interactive designers."
Currently, interactive designers are few and far between. It's difficult to find a -good- graphic designer who understands human behavior and software development.
I know a ton of good developers who can produce ok interfaces (ok as in "ehh", not ok as in "good"); I know a slew of good designers who don't know a string from an array; and I know several HCI gurus who don't understand graphic design / visual communication from a hole in the ground.
So, here are my questions... is Sparkle evidence of Microsoft's foresight? Does Microsoft realize "interactive design" is an emerging discipline? Are they going to cater to new designers who are capable of communicating with developers and contributing toward in initial development. Or, is Sparkle just another attempt at offering staggered babelfish communication between designers and developers who really don't understand each other's jobs?
If it's the latter, I don't know how successful this product is going to be.
This sounds fairly rad, but I'm somewhat pessimistic. After seeing the UIs for Windows Vista(TM) and Word 12, I doubt Microsoft really understands interactive design. How can they understand interactive design if they're not hiring real interactive designers, or at the very least, not incorporating them properly into the development process? My complaints about OS X's Finder pale in comparison to my complaints about those gift wrapped turds.
Man... what I would give for one day in Redmond with executive management.
Personally, I think the next big wave in software development is going to come from interactivity
"Things are more moderner than before- bigger, and yet smaller- it's computers-- San Dimas High School football RULES!"
What's interesting about your experience is that I've experienced exactly the opposite myself. I suspect this is because I've mostly been around small to medium sized businesses, and you're talking about large corporations. Still...
I currently work for a manufacturer of restaurant equipment. Not counting the folks that actually build the machines, I'd guess we have roughly a hundred employees in the form of executives, engineers, etc. Total Microsoft shop. I am literally the only person with a non-Windows machine-a dual processor G5 Mac. Reportedly, when the head of IT heard that a Mac was going to be brought in, he slammed his fist on his desk and proclaimed that nobody was going to be hired just to maintain one Mac. The folks in the IT dept. then informed me that if anything happened to my machine, they would not help me.
Prior to this, I had worked in a small mom-and-pop advertising company. Roughly between four and eight employees depending on who had left at what time. One computer guy, and all machines were Windows. This guy had been a Mac person, but for some reason converted. It was practically pavlovian. If you mentioned either "Apple" or "Mac" at any time, he'd immediately say "Man, I hate the Mac!". Once he proclaimed that Windows was easier to use and just generally let it be known that the Mac was inferior to any Redmond product. He had no experience with *nix-based systems. We had people come and go for that one, but that's a different story.
While there's hardly and hard research any analysis going on here, my point is that Microsoft seems to have achieved a perfect two-pronged attack. On the one hand, they've won over the small-to-medium businesses who pay out little per business, but are more numerous, and they've locked in the larger corporations who are fewer in number, but pay much more. The corporations hate the lock-in, but are constrained by a number of factors, not the least of which is previously trained admins coming up from the smaller business ranks.
As I stated, no hard research and analysis, but if it were true, it'd be pretty damn impressive. From a business standpoint at least.
--Erik
Okay, enough of the mis-directed Flash-bashing. Is this just a nerd thing...the cool geeks on /. seem to hate Flash, so I hate it too!
a in-application for the sake of OOP.
I mean really, do you blame photoshop every time you see a bad image? Video cameras for bad commercials? Shit, lets blame guns for war and give politicians a break!
Flash is a powerful, relatively easy tool to use for developing everything from annoying ads to cool, slick, easy-to-use web applications and games. That, unfortunately, means that many clueless usability-impaired newbies can use Flash to create equally useless splash screens and seizure-inducing Ads. Maybe they should make Flash more like MIA or Lightwave, eh? Then only the smart, nerdy types could use it.
Oh, and from what I've read Sparkle doesn't 'describe' the objects in XML as far as the Forms/UI goes, it uses XML to position, size, and adjust an object's attributes. XML files like that are like 5-10K for most forms. It isn't just a big document of vector descriptions...(take a look at Macromedia Flex if you want to see what they are trying to do)...so settle down on the 'my god the files will be huge' melodrama. It'll suck just fine being a Microsoft product without all the misaligned conjecture and assumptions.
Oh, and since this is probably going to get modded into oblivion by some pissed off Flash-hater, I'll just add that OpenLazlo sucks...just what we need, learn yet another task-specific language to develop a code-embedded-in-design-godforsaken-mess-to-maint
There, done bitching, go on about your business.
I don't actually know anyone who is "happy with the products." I know people who think that "all computers suck." I know people who look at it like going to the dentist. I don't think there actually are microsoft fanboys who are users. I know mac fanboys who are users. Then again, I don't know of *any* linux or bsd users who are just users...
Well I hope you enjoyed your rant.
Fact is, MS make good (e.g. SQL Server, Exchange), middling (e.g. Windows) and bad (e.g. IE) products.
Some of their products are truly excellent (Excel, Visual Studio) and nothing really comes close to them.
As a developer (Win and *nix) I do actually like using Windows and find it productive. Which must make me a total odd ball I guess.
Not possible based on the security model?
Give me a break. I remember when it was not possible to catch virus by viewing a webpage. Microsoft changed that. I remember when it was not possible to catch a virus through email. Microsoft changed that too.
The current security model would be great, if it worked. But I still get these idiotic "read only" files. I change the permissions, I can do that, they're my files. I re-open the directory and the files are read only again. I repeat the process as administrator, guess what, they're still read only! The Microsoft security model is broken. And the company as certainly had time to fix it. No you expect me to believe that this will change with the next DRM enabled system? My answer is hell no.
I see Vista as a haven for scumware writers. They're going to figure out a way of putting scumware on you system, and using the DRM to revoke your permissions to remove it.
If someone is passing you on the right, you are an asshole for driving in the wrong lane.
This has always been Microsoft's strategy, not some reaction to Google. They had to kill Netscape because they feared "browser based OS", i.e. all applications running inside a browser thus minimalizaing the importance of the OS. They've introduced numerous anti-standards (HTC for example) in HTML, so that most websites would only work in IE. ActiveX claimed to be about "a richer internet experience" but hide the curious side effect of making this richer experience only available to Windows users. XAML is really just a redux of ActiveX, but maybe will less potential spyware opportunities.