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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?
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!
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 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.
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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.
You and everyone else are missing the point. While Sparkle can be used to make apps that run in IE, it is primarily for developing apps. It is not an plugin for IE. It is not intended to sweep the internet. It is for Windows. Sparkle is the designer for the main presentation layer for all of Vista. Microsoft has not to my knowledge ever even called it a "flash killer." It is not really competing with flash.
If you don't know where you are going, you will wind up somewhere else.
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.
I have discovered a truly remarkable proof of this theorem that this sig is too small to contain.
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.