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Microsoft's Sparkle a Flash Killer?

Posted by ScuttleMonkey on Tue Jan 24, 2006 08:57 PM
from the preying-on-mixed-opinions-about-flash dept.
Microsoft
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.
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  • SVG? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by MikeFM (12491) on Tuesday January 24 2006, @08:59PM (#14553399) Homepage Journal
    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? (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Lerc (71477) on Tuesday January 24 2006, @09:35PM (#14553621)
      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 [mediasalesltd.com]

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

        • Re:SVG? (Score:5, Informative)

          by merlin_jim (302773) <James...McCracken@@@stratapult...com> on Tuesday January 24 2006, @10:55PM (#14553997)
          I've seen quartz run. I've even had lunch with some of the product team. The same event I saw a demo of WPF (I forget what Microsoft is calling it now - most everything I saw at the conference was identified by codename - but WPF stands for Windows Presentation Foundation... I think it might be "Avalon" now)

          I think you have some misguided concepts about how Quartz works. Quartz is just a web designer - with support for rich UI features. It has compatibility target levels - if you want to run on NN 4.0 it supports that with a reduced feature set. If you're interested, my favorite feature of Quartz I saw was actually the XML/XSLT WYSIWYG support (a close runner up is the AJAX RAD)... and that feature is compatible with no-CSS HTML 4.0! I know becuase there's an app I helped write (in 2002 without WYSIWYG) using the exact technology.

          If you are targeting the WPF that still doesn't mean that your users will need Windows Vista to run it. Hell, the first demo of WPF I saw was on a Windows XP box. You don't really think the guys developing WPF have been doing it on Vista? Vista isn't even alpha yet... so WPF has been running on XP for some time already. The release of WPF will be back ported to at least XP, and I've heard ME and 2000 server are distinct possibilities. 98 won't be supported, but then 98 has been EOLed for a while. Besides... if you can't be bothered to upgrade your operating system once in eight years, then you obviously aren't interested in taking advantage of the latest technology anyways, right?

  • So how will this kill flash (Score:5, Insightful)

    by rminsk (831757) on Tuesday January 24 2006, @08:59PM (#14553400)
    How will this kill flash if I can not run it under other operating systems besides windows?

  • ZOMG FIRST (Score:5, Funny)

    by Dragon of the Pants (913545) on Tuesday January 24 2006, @09:00PM (#14553405) Homepage
    The only kind of flash killer I need is the kind that keps those damn annoying ads out of my face.

    • Re:ZOMG FIRST (Score:5, Funny)

      by fiannaFailMan (702447) on Tuesday January 24 2006, @09:49PM (#14553707) Journal
      I entirely agree. While they're at it, I hope they kill that gif image format too. It's only ever used for annoying animations and tacky envelopes folding up to represent a link to an email address. Never did anything useful in its life, only was abused. All the fault of the technology.

  • I, for one (Score:5, Funny)

    by Chemisor (97276) on Tuesday January 24 2006, @09:01PM (#14553411) Journal
    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.

    • Re:I, for one (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday January 24 2006, @09:19PM (#14553523)
      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/ [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.

      • Re:I, for one (Score:5, Insightful)

        by nwbvt (768631) on Tuesday January 24 2006, @10:58PM (#14554009)
        "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).

  • MS Sparkle! (Score:5, Funny)

    by Junior J. Junior III (192702) on Tuesday January 24 2006, @09:03PM (#14553426) Homepage
    I am disrespectful to dirt! Can you see that I am serious?!!?

  • New Virus Channel? (Score:5, Funny)

    by NatteringNabob (829042) on Tuesday January 24 2006, @09:09PM (#14553463)
    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.

  • No one remembers (Score:5, Insightful)

    by GigsVT (208848) on Tuesday January 24 2006, @09:16PM (#14553501) Journal
    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? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by randomErr (172078) <tekrat@NoSPaM.2d.com> on Tuesday January 24 2006, @09:16PM (#14553502) Journal
    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.

  • Try Flashblock (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Ranger (1783) on Tuesday January 24 2006, @09:24PM (#14553557) Homepage
    I already have a flash killer. It's called Flashblock. [mozdev.org] 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.

  • one thing microsoft can do... (Score:5, Interesting)

    by DeveloperAdvantage (923539) on Tuesday January 24 2006, @09:25PM (#14553567) Homepage
    ...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.

  • Last Time We Discussed This... (Score:5, Informative)

    by somethinghollow (530478) on Tuesday January 24 2006, @09:31PM (#14553598) Homepage Journal
    I liked how this guy said it [slashdot.org].

    "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.

  • This is not what Sparkle is about (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday January 24 2006, @09:32PM (#14553606)
    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 need VISTA to run it! (Score:5, Insightful)

    by javaxman (705658) on Tuesday January 24 2006, @09:39PM (#14553651) Journal
    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.

  • Sparkle is not Flash (Score:5, Informative)

    by Ececheira (86172) on Tuesday January 24 2006, @09:54PM (#14553721)
    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.

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