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.
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.
At what price learning? At what cost wisdom? The price is a man's peace of mind, and the cost is his life.
How will this kill flash if I can not run it under other operating systems besides windows?
The only kind of flash killer I need is the kind that keps those damn annoying ads out of my face.
I, for one, welcome our new Flash killing overlords. After all, anything that promises to kill off flash must have been made by a most honorable and considerate person, who wishes nothing more than to spare us from the many, many pains of the hostile landscape of the web.
I am disrespectful to dirt! Can you see that I am serious?!!?
You see? You see? Your stupid minds! Stupid! Stupid!
Sparkle will never make it until it gets its own Newgrounds.com or Homestarrunner.com. A community of users, and large amount of created content is what really matters, otherwise games which use the Vitalize Plugin would be sweeping the internet.
Afterall, if they don't make IE dependent on ActiveX, they are going to need some new improved method for virus writers to gain access to your system.
http://channel9.msdn.com/3 878 43
And the videos about sparkle:
http://channel9.msdn.com/showpost.aspx?postid=115
http://channel9.msdn.com/Showpost.aspx?postid=157
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.
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.
You say things that offend me and I can deal with it. Can you?
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!"
...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.
FREE - Java, J2EE and Ajax Audiobooks for Software Developers - www.DeveloperAdvantage.com
I liked how this guy said it.
"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."
This "Quartz" thing might be close. We'll see.
Bill, Steve just called. He wants his silly name back.
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.
If this was an Open Source project it would be called SPACKLE or The CRIPPLE.
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.
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.
Sparkle is not supposed to be a Flash killer. It's designed to allow rich UI's to be created for Windows applications. The new Windows Presentation Layer, formally known as Avalon, needs a UI tool more geared to designers than developers (Visual Studio).
With Sparkle, a graphic designer can easily work on the UI elements while a developer concentrates on the code.
I bet that in the beginning, it will run on many platforms. So there is no excuse for not using it. Then, when they have killed Flash, there will come a new version that only runs on a Microsoft platform because of some feature. Of course the inner workings will be closed due to some DRM thing or whatever so no you can't make a 100% compatible open source version.
At least that is how the normally do it, so why shouldn't they do it with Mr. Sparkle?
Sparkle is developed in C#, and due to its compilation to .NET's CLR, it's unlikely that it will be a channel for virus writers to exploit. First off, Sparkle developers don't need to worry about buffer overruns, which have been the hole used in many previous exploits. Second, the CLR can block the use of unauthorized code, preventing the installation of spyware and other trojans. Admittedly, the CLR hasn't yet been as widely adopted as Internet Explorer, so there still may be bugs in the underlying technology. But generally Sparkle's developed using a much more secure architecture than previous Microsoft products and therefore it's unlikely to see the same issues as IIS, IE, and Outlook.
my blog
I mean, c'mon, there's Ghostbusters in .gif format. I didn't have to use bittorrent to find that shit and it took less than a second to download!
As a long time Flash developer I've been following the entire Sparkle/Avalon story and this is how it sums up according to me:
- Microsoft has awaken to "embrace" the web only until recently. Vista, however is a much older strategy to improve the desktop beyond what the web might deliver to keep the people locked in (on an OS level). As you know if Internet starts delivering multiplatform rich applications, the reasons to use Windows become less.
- Technogies like Flash threaten Microsoft's "monopol" on rich GUI-s, and Flash works on all platforms.
- Microsoft tries to convince the public that "Sparkle was never meant to compete with Flash, it's for apps and so on". While this is true, it's also false, because Flash is quickly heading into the applications arena, and Microsoft is quickly heading into the Internet rich GUI-s. Basically they meet in the middle and who survives isn't clear. But keep in mind both Adobe and (ex)Macromedia are totally aware that the Vista technologies are ALSO meant as Flash killer and don't fool yourself with what MS says.
- It's not true Avalon/XAML will work only on Windows Vista. For starters, it'll also work on Windows XP and 2003. Also Microsoft prepares cross-platform version of the technology, with less features, JavaScript support and so on, which has been demonstrated to work on a Mac. The initiative is called WPF/E, or: Windows Presentation Foundation / Everywhere.
- The Sparkle team has at least 4-5 ex. top (ex)Macromedia Flash employees, Flash gurus and alike. They all come in the team with their Flash habits and it shows in the interface of the program: it's simply MADE so Flash developers will dig it. And I dig it.
- Quartz is for web pages, don't confuse it with Sparkle, the Avalon XAML designer program.
- A weakness of Sparkle will be that it won't be suited for complex cartoons and animations like Flash is. Flash tried to move away from animations and cartoons as well in an attempt to look as a serious application platform, but later Macromedia regretted as they alienated their core audience, and the most creative artists out there. The latest version of Flash proves cartoons and animations ARE important after all, and a good share of the features are aided for artists.
Bah that should be about all important... I leave the conclusions to you.
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.