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

one thing microsoft can do...

[DeveloperAdvantage]

...is create good IDEs.

When I first read the article, my first response to a tool meant to improve user experience, from Microsoft, is that they should change the acronym from WPF to WTF, since, as a user, that is what always goes through my head when Word or IE crash.

But, with further reading, I actually think Microsoft may find success here. With Visual Studio they have a good track record and may succeed again.

Re:SVG?

[lasindi]

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.

Just today I experienced a considerable amount of frustration because of Flash. In my physics class at my university we have to turn in homework on the Internet, and the website we're using uses Flash for entering equations. Several of the problems required us to enter Greek symbols (like pi and omega). However, when I tried to enter these characters, half of the character would display and the cursor would remain in the same spot as before, so if you continued the equation, it would overwrite the Greek symbol. It's a weird bug and hard to describe (sorry if you don't understand what's going on), but the point is it prevented me from doing my homework. I ended up figuring out that when I tried doing it on Windows instead of Flash on Linux (the latest version still), it worked. So, clearly, the Linux version of Flash has some weird bug in it that Macromedia has failed to address. In the end, I was inconvenienced because I had to reboot into Windows to do my homework instead of on my normal operating system.

This isn't the first time I've encountered bugs with the Linux version of Flash; take a look at this (scroll down to glitches and then watch the cartoon for yourself on Linux). Obviously not getting to play a song on a cartoon website isn't going to scar me for life, but my point is that Macromedia (should I say Adobe?) isn't doing a very good of a job on the Linux version, probably because they feel that Linux doesn't have enough marketshare to significantly affect their profits.

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.

The reason that some people are concerned with open source is that it offers a way out of monopolies. The biggest problem isn't that the Flash player itself is proprietary (even though it would be nice if it weren't); it's that SWF is proprietary. This suppresses competition from would-be open source (or even other proprietary) Flash players that have to compete with Adobe/Macromedia. If SWF was open, an open source Flash player could be easily written that would eliminate such bugs.

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; there would be no need to replace the format, only potentially the player. But as long as SWF remains proprietary, it needs to be replaced by a format that everyone can use.