Slashdot Mirror
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.
How will this kill flash if I can not run it under other operating systems besides windows?
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.
I've had enough abrasive sigs. Kittens are cute and fuzzy.
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.
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.
"You'll get nothing, and you'll like it!"
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.
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.