Microsoft's Sparkle a Flash Killer?

Charmless1 writes to tell us eWeek is reporting that Microsoft has release new previews of their upcoming developer tools. Some have even dubbed these new tools as "Flash killers". From the article: "Microsoft's Expression Suite consists of the Expression Graphic Designer, Expression Interactive Designer and the Expression Web Designer. Microsoft has yet to release a CTP for the Web Designer, also known by its codename Quartz." Slashdot also covered some of the pre-release sentiments back in September.

Comments

SVG?

[MikeFM]

What does it do that I can't do with SVG, canvas, and other existing standards? I can see Flash as needing replaced but I can't see a benefit to replacing it with an even less open standard.

Re:SVG?

[tvon]

It doesn't necessarily "do" anything differently, but unless someone whips up a suite of applications to support authoring dynamic and interactive content with SVG and canvas, it doesn't really matter what they do (not in the "widespread adoptance" sense anyways).

Re:SVG?

[Lerc]

I think the answer to that question, is Everything. And that's why it'll suck (1). I don't want a solution for everything. I want something small and nice that does a particular job well. If I want a different job done then I want something else small and nice that does that well.

I'm actually working on a web plugin for animated content. It's not aiming to be better than SVG or Canvas, the goal is to provide a number of solutions to things that those things don't do. That's not to say SVG is flawed, It is just saying that if you are wanting to do some non-scaled, non-vector graphics, perhapse something else can perfom the task in a more efficient manner.

That's the long way of saying; I don't want to do eveything with one of these http://www.mediasalesltd.com/images/lg/10-15/multi tool-pic-1-p21.jpg

(1)I don't have any special knowledge to confirm that it'll suck, I just have faith in microsoft

Re:SVG?

[Anonymous Coward]

> What does it do that I can't do with SVG, canvas, and other existing standards?

Run on 95% of personal computers?

Re:SVG?

[Overly Critical Guy]

Hey, it's cool. This will never take off like Microsoft hopes. But if it did, Adobe owns Flash now, and they just might, you know, have to delay Photoshop CS3 for unforeseen "technical reasons." Let the companies squeeze each other by the balls; I don't care.

Re:SVG?

[briancnorton]

Why? What's wrong with flash? It does what it does quite well, it's flexible and extensible. It's mature and has almost 100% market penetration. Why does it need replacing.

If your answer involves "open source" then you can stop right there. Nobody (except about half the slashdot audience) gives a rat's ass about source code as long as the software works properly.

Re:SVG?

[merlin_jim]

It doesn't do anything you can't already do.

It does do it better and with better design time support.

It can target XHTML/CSS3/ECMASCRIPT browsers (I've heard it's cross browser ECMASCRIPT. I'm expecting some features, at least, to only be available in IE however)... a key of Microsoft web design technology since .NET has been that it "degrade gracefully"... at PDC 2000, when they first announced .NET CLR and ASP.NET, practically every speaker used that phrase when they'd explain how web controls work.

Microsoft understands that ActiveX was a shitty technology because of its platform dependence. The marketplace of rich UI controls they were expecting never really materialized. Now, ActiveX was the best possible at the time... JavaScript was hardly a gleam in Sun's eye, and it was a logical extension of the Netscape plugin module, which was itself a non-standard part of HTML at the time, but the point is that it's technological limitations severely hindered it.

Microsoft gets this. They've been working hard not to make the same mistakes again. Yes, some features of Quartz depend on the Windows Presentation Foundation (I believe they're calling it Avalon???) to be present - and if you've seen a WPF demo you'll understand why... javascript will never be able to present the type of rich UI I saw.

It may not be as open as SVG or canvas... but that doesn't really matter for people writing extranet sites, which is a large portion of active web development - in my seven years as a web technology consultant I have only been asked to work on a consumer-facing website 3 or 4 times, out of a total of approximately 50 I've worked on.

What matters to me is my clients for a majority have a fixed install base. Getting a component that I can redistribute or get my clients to install via automatic update is a huge boon in this situation - and provides an incredibly rich design time experience that allows me to deliver responsive software widely.

I don't care if that's SVG, canvas, WPF, or some bits picked off a deep-space radar dish in the New Mexico desert - as long as I can use it, that's good enough for me. The lifetime of corporate applications varies between 3 and 15 years. I have yet to see a single solution I've developed go 5 years without a retrofit - as businesses grow, their needs change and technology evolves to better fill them. Once you've ROIed you can usually build something better, cheaper, that'll help your business grow faster... and many of my clients choose to take advantage of that option shortly after that point in time.

I'm not worried that my applications will outlive Microsoft's support of WPF, nor am I worried that Microsoft will suddenly choose to limit my use of it. It's in their best interest for WPF to be as widely disseminated as possible. I don't need WPF to be open - that's why I buy software, so someone else can worry about the bugs while I go get my job done. Closed or open, I have no intention of ever cracking open the source files.

My only concern is building my apps better and cheaper than anyone has ever built apps before. Quartz will help me do that, and I can't wait to get my hands on it. Windows was fundamentally succesful in the operating system market back when they had something that could be called competition because their programming language, Visual Basic, was far cheaper to write rich, useable applications in than any other product on the market. More, better apps naturally led to a larger client base.

ASP.NET was supposed to deliver the same kind of experience to the web. It made things MUCH better. But the bottom line is that the web is far more complicated and limited than the Windows API - and the same kind of designer just isn't suited for it. With Quartz, I anticipate being able to bring the same kinds of efficiency and economic power to my clients that VB brought to Windows clients in the early to mid 90s.

Sorry for the ramble heh I kept thinking up new points and persepectives I thought the fellow slashdotters might enjoy reading. I'm not trying to flame anyone with the above - personally I wish that SVG had taken off, I was looking forward to developing with it...

Re:SVG?

[typical]

For that matter, what does *Flash* do that people need?

I've seen:

* Indie animations, most of which are pretty bad.

* Custom interfaces for webpages. These are, in my experience, much slower and more annoying to navigate than regular ol' HTML interfaces, are fixed at a size too small for my father to easily read, often (irritatingly) play sounds, usually have awful color schemes -- there's a *reason* that I have my foreground and background colors set to black and white, have sluggish reimplementations of scrollbars that don't look like scrollbars, and don't really IMHO do much for anyone other than the designer, who gets to play with a fun toy for a while.

* Ads. Animated, computer-bogging-down ads. Ads with sounds. Horrible, awful things which make computers without Flashblock miserable to use. Probably the primary use of Flash today.

* Small web games. While I have played these occasionally, the best of them don't come close to the best full-blown native games.

* Splash screens, which many companies inexplicably stuff in front of their website's main page. I would assume that this is to drive the less-than-dedicated away.

I mean, seriously, how does Flash make life better for the browser *user*? Okay, granted, perhaps in some very indirect way (advertisers will maybe pay more for Flash ads, that money goes to fund the production of websites that users want), but in general, Flash doesn't seem to be a net positive for my web browsing at all.

Re:SVG?

[sp0rk173]

Homestarrunner. This makes the user laugh. Laughing is good for the user.

Re:SVG?

[Flibz]

Plus the recent Adobe/Macromedia merger will probably result in either: -

-SVG being phased out and replaced by flash
-SVG support being integrated into flash and the flash tools

Since the new Macrobe isn't going to want to support two technologies that are so simliar.

Re:SVG?

[Julian Morrison]

The reason I personally hate Flash is that it violates the principle of "the browser belongs to the user". You have to take what you're given, all or nothing. This isn't tangential to open source! Firefox has extensions that give you control of HTML, javascript, animations, etc because both the data spec and the rendering process are open. You may not need the source, but others do and you benefit by their work.

Re:SVG?

[TheNetAvenger]

What does it do that I can't do with SVG, canvas, and other existing standards? I can see Flash as needing replaced but I can't see a benefit to replacing it with an even less open standard.

Well it can do a lot, but that is NOT the point...

This HAS nothing to do with SVG or killing Flash. These are the art side of the development tools for MS WPF technologies.

It is used to create 'interfaces' for applications in Windows and eventually online for Windows Users.

This is basically the art side of the MS new technologies that are not really in competition with anything but the Win32 GUI API drawing set. This is the replacement for Microsoft's internal rendering engine of Windows.

What this does do that SVG and Flash don't is inherently handle many more types of graphical display concepts, blending, transisitions, 3D workspace, Viewpoints, and even collision detection for 3D UI objects, as well as provide these object and work with controls for applications.

It is like Flash and SVG and Postscript on Crack with full 3D capabilities to CREATE A UI, either application or eventually Web 'pushed' application.

If Flash or SVG or any other of the current technologies could do any of these features, MS wouldn't have had to create this new system.

It does basics from drawing fonts to screen and printer, to making a 3D Cube spin in front of a building with clouds going by, and the 3D Cube has User Controls and Interface items on it.

This is basically moving Application UIs for Windows to the next generation, what people have complained about with Windows, that there was no inherent 3D inteface unless you wrote in DirectX. (Although not many other OSes have inherent 3D model rendering engines as a part of their standard API interface, not even OSX.)

So instead of having to drop to OpenGL or DirectX to do some really cool animations or 3D application interfaces, you can use this tool and the other new tools from Microsoft, and they work in the WPF, which calls DirectX for you. This is like making 3D simple application design and animations 'easy' for the casual programmer.

The causal programmer will also get something they can't get with SVG or Flash technology for their Windows application as they will get the speed of DirectX, where Flash and SVG don't give you that, even if you create a 'fake' 3D interface in them.

I wish people would take a look at these technologies and see where MS has done some really good work, that is beyond what others are doing. If not, all other OSes will be falling behind once again.

And the cool thing is, if the Linux and OSX world didn't want to have to 'create' their own version of this technology, MS is giving the keys away to it for free.

So you could create a WPF for OSX or Linux, drop it through to an accelerated OpenGL interface, and be able to use these technologies on ANY OS platform.

Just because MS designed the technologies and even if they are not 100% perfect, they are above 99% of what is out there for simple application design, the specifications for them are open - wide open even, and you could be writing a great KDE or OSX application using this interface technology with no intention of ever running it on Windows or having anything to do with Microsoft.

Re:SVG?

[theTerribleRobbo]

> Now, ActiveX was the best possible at the time... JavaScript was > hardly a gleam in Sun's eye, and it was a logical extension of the > Netscape plugin module, ...

You, sir, have no idea what you're talking about.

Re:SVG?

[Tetsugaku-San]

Well I suppose the only problem with your statement is that it's not true . . . . Flash will read CSS style sheets no problem and apply it to the site, it also has accesability options so that people with access problems can use it, the development can be a bit of a pain but you *can* get nice simple easily used web apps out of it without buggering about with ajax.

Re:SVG?

[tzot]

I'd like to see browsers support a cleaner language than Javascript (such as some variant of Python)

I love Python (for its clarity and simplicity) and use it extensively at my job and for personal reasons, but the whitespace-significant syntax is not very handy for embedding in web pages.

So how will this kill flash

[rminsk]

How will this kill flash if I can not run it under other operating systems besides windows?

$var Killers...

[guaigean]

Micro$oft and their PR crew have been labeling every new product a _Insert_Opposing_Company_Here_ for years. Are we ever going to see these products or is it more "Wait and ours will be better" talk?

Re:$var Killers...

[ClamIAm]

This is one of Microsoft's great refinements to the art of FUD. They welcome with trumpets and palm leaves some technology that they're developing that's similar to an already-existing one, leaving out the fact that it's probably not any better and is several years off.

They try and get people to wait for the MS version and hold off or stop buying the competition's product. There have been cases where they've actually done this and then never brought their solution to market, raising the question of whether or not they were even developing a product in said area anyway.

Or, they do bring a product to market, and they fuck around with their OS to force the competition to release patches to even get their stuff to run. Add to this new, incompatible "standards" that make it near-impossible for competitors to create things like export filters so the products can work together.

Why can't we all just get along?

[ArkiMage]

Why is it that any time anyone develops a product and is successful with it Microsoft vows to "kill" them (or it)? Sad... Their "killer" will of course be MS-only. PS. If it's multi-platform, watch out.. That will really get you in MS's sights.

Yeah, sure . . .

[lixee]

In other news, pam is dead, 640Kb is enough for everybody, Gates is respected 'cause he gives money away, Ballmer never had any anger management issues, .NET is ubiquitous and Google's days are counted!

Closed Source Killers...

[Anonymous Coward]

"Are we ever going to see these products or is it more "Wait and ours will be better" talk?"

2001..2..3..4..5..6, will be the year of desktop Linux. Just you watch.

Re:Closed Source Killers...

[guaigean]

I get the point, and really don't know which is worse. A product that exists but has failed to reach the masses due to over geeking, or a product that doesn't exist but keeps the PHB's enthralled with its concept art. Either way, both are a cause for Microsoft's further dominance.

Re:Closed Source Killers...

[Trejkaz]

Nah, that was last year. You missed it. :-)

No one remembers

[GigsVT]

Back when the big thing in IT was Postscript, MS and Apple worked together to try to make a Postscript killer to break Adobe's control. It was called TrueImage. It failed badly.

The only thing we still use from TrueImage today is TrueType fonts, which were the type of fonts that TrueImage used rather than Adobe's Type I fonts.

Some of these recent moves by MS to replace common presentation formats with their own remind me a lot of the TrueImage story.

Since Adobe owns Macromedia now, it's the same old clash, MS vs Adobe. Adobe has proven themselves to be very good at format wars. Because of TrueImage and other market pressures (like HP's PCL), Adobe opened up the Postscript and eventually PDF specifications and made implementation of them completely royalty free. This was a big long-term win for them.

So now MS is going against Adobe on two fronts, their new MS XPS format to try to kill PDF, and this Sparkle up against Flash. Adobe would do well to learn from the past and continue to use open specifications to keep MS in their place.

How much is it going to cost?

[randomErr]

Getting past all the Micr$oft and Crapomedia comments that have been posted so far, I have to ask: How much will the design tools cost?

If its freeware, Sparkle WILL kill Flash. If its cheapware($99 or less) it will hurt Flash in the short term, and could kill Flash in 5 years(because of the cost). If it cost ny more then that, and Micrsoft's product will just become a niche market like Real Media's SMIL format.

Re:How much is it going to cost?

[supabeast!]

"If its freeware, Sparkle WILL kill Flash. If its cheapware($99 or less) it will hurt Flash..."

The price of Flash, or Flash competitors, is all but irrelevant. Now that Macromedia is owned by Adobe, Flash and Dreamweaver, will be added into the Adobe Creative suite bundle. Since most designers end up buying the CS bundle for Photoshop, Illustrator, and Indesign anyway, they'll be getting Flash for free. The inclusion of Dreamweaver and Flash into the CS suite is going to make Adobe the king of the hill for graphic designers in print and web work, and trying to beat them on cost isn't going to work - only someone who can make a product so good it compels users to get out of the Adobeland is going to have a chance.

And given Microsoft's recent history with design apps, they don't have a shot in hell.

Re:I, for one

[Anonymous Coward]

I can understand that you hate ads taking space and processing-time, but have you ever developed an APPLICATION using Flash? For me it's the language (ActionScript 2.0) and the player. Thats basically what flash is. With the Flash 8 player you can do some really cool things with actionscript. Check it out before you just "hate everything flash". Also, I would like to point you to http://www.osflash.org/ for all your opensource Flash-needs. Flash / SWF / ActionScript isn't just a way to create ads. You can create whole applications with it... when there is an appropriate use for it of course. Making stupid banners and ads with Flash is just a very small part of Flash, though many use Flash to do it. Do you hate gifs, jpegs and pngs too? They dont have as many other uses, besides banners and ads, as Flash do.

The component-architecture by Macromedia admittedly sucks badly, but open source projects are worked on as I write this, to change all that. You can now use Eclipse as a development environment for Flash, though I prefer either TextMate or XCode for my development needs. Especially Xcode, since I do alot of Cocoa/Objective-C development as well.

You should check out ActionStep, which is a framework modeled after NextStep/Cocoa, for Flash. It's opensource, nearly at 1.0, and looking quite good. There is the open source compiler mtasc, which supports all the latest things of the Flash 8 Player, is faster than Macromedias own, does better type checking and works from the commandline on most OSes. Being a commandline compiler, means it can easily be integrated with your favorite editor / IDE. Do read up on these things before you call it a nuisance and ad-thingie. Thank you very much.

Try Flashblock

[Ranger]

I already have a flash killer. It's called Flashblock. Of course it only works in Firefox. If the truth must be told, advertising killed flash for me. Flashblock simple buries it. Though it's more like burying something alive. It's still there. You just don't have to look at it anymore.

This is not what Sparkle is about

[Anonymous Coward]

The Slashdot summary appears to completely misunderstand the point of Sparkle. It is not really a direct competitor to Flash. It's a tool for designing application interfaces. It's much more akin to Glade or QT Designer but for Avalon/XAML instead of GTK+ or QT.

The big difference though, is that it's targeted towards designers rather than programmers and it lets you take advantage of all the animation/multimedia/typography/etc. features in Avalon. This means that UI specialists can actually design the UI in programs, rather than designing it and handing a spec off to a programmer to implement.

Frankly, I think it's a really good idea. As a programmer, I hate writing GUI code and certainly won't miss it. As a user I look forward to quality and usability improvements from this.

Does it come with a Mac version?

[moria]

If not, then the killer will never kill, considering a major portion of the flash contents are author or co-authored by the artist developers, a large number of whom are using Macs. Well, let's see whether it is wheel reventing stuff or a real innovation. At least, this is the time that M$ is not copying Apple, or Sun, or Borland. Hope it is not a new mimicing game.

Re:Will it catch on?

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, it'll have a couple of million developers in a year or two. Eventually, the Java community may "go native" with Windows UI support and add XAML UIs too.

I expect over 90% of Windows development will have XAML UIs in maybe 3 years. And it will cost a hell of a lot less than Flash.

You need VISTA to run it!

[javaxman]

From TFA :

But for Sparkle to even get in the ring with Flash, Microsoft has to first convince us that we need to move from Windows XP to Windows Vista. This migration will take time, possibly as much as five years. In the meantime, Macromedia has just released Flash 8 and can anticipate over 250 million unique downloads between now and when Windows Vista begins to sell.

Umm... yea. Flash is about as dead as BSD, I think.

I mean, really, I'm no fan of Flash, but somehow I don't see some Vista-only Microsoft technology replacing it. Call me when Sparkle is a shipping, multi-platform, free-download product.

Then tell me where the millions of Flash games and applications on the web today are going.

The real question.

[cinderful]

Do completely misguided hyperbolic newspost titles generate fervent responses?

Yes, they do.

Re:Flash killer, my shiny metal ass

[heinousjay]

I'm simply mentioning this as a fact: Microsoft Windows is, by far, the dominant desktop operating system, which means they can kill flash without doing a thing for any other platform.

Flash works on my solaris/sparc setup, will this?

[gentimjs]

I'm one of the freaks who runs solaris on sparc as my desktop box (home and work) and I've been pleased that my minority platform has a flash player. Actually, I havent found many minority platforms that DONT have a flash player (os2?).

Somehow, I'm skeptical that MS will give me a client to view thier new "rich" "active" content that is going to run on any non-x86 non-vista system. They can lock down the development platform (as adobe/macromedia has) but if they dont give me a player, then to $UNDERWORLD with them.

Re:I, for one

[nwbvt]

"You can create whole applications with it... when there is an appropriate use for it of course. "

You know what else can create "whole applications"? Java, C++, C#, C, Perl, Python, Javascript, Fortran, Cobol, Ada, Visual Basic, Smalltalk, Assembly, need I go on? The fact that you can create "whole applications" with it isn't really something to be proud of.

Show me one instance where Flash truly is the best choice out there. Show me one instance where the negatives attributes of Flash (ie accessibility problems, requirements for third party proprietary software, an inability to interact with the operating system, etc.) are outweighed by the positive attribute (it makes it easy for third graders to make pretty webpages).

Re:I, for one

[ScottyH]

accessibility problems
Accessibility isn't a requirement for a lot of software.

requirements for third party proprietary software
There aren't any requirements to work with 3rd party proprietary software, as many OSS development tools exist...unless you're talking about the Flash Player itself.

an inability to interact with the operating system
What do you mean? Why should it be able to interact with the OS. It's a web technology.

OK, it's cross-platform...

[argent]

OK, you don't nee Vista to run it. It's cross platform: it'll run on more than one version of Windows. Har bloody har.

Shocking news

[diegocgteleline.es]

We can always debate whether or not proprietary or open source development models produce better quality code, but proprietary formats are never good. All they do is hurt competition, which helps no one but the authors. Now that Adobe owns Macromedia, hopefully the Flash people will take a hint from PDF: open formats work. If SWF is opened, great

Shocking news: The SWF format IS open: Here you have a link. The license is quite similar to PDF. I think it's somewhat more restrictive to create tools which create SWFs or something but what the hell, stops saying that SWF is closed.

Just because the open source community hasn't managed to write a decent implementation of the PDF format doesn't mean. Actually, people has tried to write implementations (way before that GNU thingy by the way): Google for libswf. There's even a gstreamer plugin which uses libswf to draw flash animations (and it works for simple flash files, I've used it). Dude, in my machine nautilus shows me thumbnails of some flash files. Also, macromedia has written a linux flash player plugin for mozilla-based browsers, I wish all companies would do that.