Microsoft Sparkle
I am currently attending the PDC 2005 in Los Angeles and the big news for me is obviously Microsoft Sparkle. One word summarizes my reaction: Respect. Not only did they make a demo, they even offer a hands on lab where you can try it out yourself. Talking to some of the engineers reveals that they have been doing some amazing work in the past 4 years (It seems it's a team of about 40 people which has been working on this). Sparkle looks to me like a mix of Macromedia Flash, Macromedia DreamWeaver, Adobe Illustrator and Macromedia Director.
Looking at the features I can see that they copied a bunch of ideas from competing products and technologies:
But there is much much more, I made a list of features for my personal reference and I am simply amazed how complete everything seems. What is even more impressive is that Microsoft did eat their own dog food and implemented the Sparkle UI using the Windows Presentation Foundation. Very much in the classic way: A compiler is not a real compiler until it can compile itself. :-)
Overall the innovation here is not so much the individual features, but the integration of them into one single package. With the addition of WPF/E I suspect this will be final nail on the coffin for SVG.
The first small scale beta program will start in 3 months from what I just heard. More updates and details will follow...
Looking at the features I can see that they copied a bunch of ideas from competing products and technologies:
- XAML. A straight rip off the SVG standard (Update: what I really mean here is that the code generated by Sparkle looks VERY similar to SVG. I am sure there are subtle differences though. Saying it's a rip off is a little inflammatory, I admit. ;-).
- Code view. Straight from design/code view feature in DreamWeaver, but instead of HTML they show the XAML code. It works amazingly well and the code generated looks very clean (unlike FrontPage or Word ;-).
- Timeline. The timeline is very AfterEffects like, although very much simplified. The timeline allows you to dig down on every property and manipulate it. They are no nested timelines like in Flash.
- Media integration. This looks very much like what Director offers. You can insert video and 3D with a few clicks and manipulate it easily.
- UI elements. This looks very much like Flash components which first appeared in Flash MX. All the controls are stylable in CSS fashion.
- Layout control classes. Looks very much like Java Swing.
But there is much much more, I made a list of features for my personal reference and I am simply amazed how complete everything seems. What is even more impressive is that Microsoft did eat their own dog food and implemented the Sparkle UI using the Windows Presentation Foundation. Very much in the classic way: A compiler is not a real compiler until it can compile itself. :-)
Overall the innovation here is not so much the individual features, but the integration of them into one single package. With the addition of WPF/E I suspect this will be final nail on the coffin for SVG.
The first small scale beta program will start in 3 months from what I just heard. More updates and details will follow...
posted by Tinic Uro at 11:47 AM
23 Comments:
Saying that XAML is a straight rip-off of SVG indicates that you have no understanding of what XAML is.
XAML is more than just vector drawing. It is an open, extensible object-serialization format - the instructions you see in there for the drawing ops happen to correspond directly to internal .NET classes.
One other note - the layout classes in XAML go FAR AND AWAY beyond what the Swing layout classes can do.
I'd be happy to discuss this further with you if you'd like.
I agree that XAML is much more. I should probably say that I am more referring to the rendering model since that is of interest for me here, look at the title of this blog. :-)
And yes the layout system is extensive and well thought out as it looks, I haven't had the time to dig into this though. What's interesting to me is how Sparkle allows to visually control this directly on stage.
Do you think that sparkle can give a very tough competition to macromedia products & take a big market share from Adobe/macromedia? ; - )
Oy. Anonymous -- must the kneejerk reaction be to always position a new thing against an existing thing? For the near future, if you want to do something for ubiquitous distribution, of course Flash will still be the likely choice. However, if you want to make kick-ass desktop client applications for the Windows platform, Sparkle would be the obvious choice.
The innovation here is that Microsoft is creating an opportunity for designers to become first class citizens in developer teams. It's not about one or the other -- the good news is that this creates additional opportunities for designers to expand their service offerings and lend their talents and skills to an area that could benefit greatly from their participation.
Absolutely - the reason why designers should be excited about this is because a whole new area of opportunity is about to open up for them: the client desktop. Using their existing skillset, designers can now create rich and compelling desktop UI and pitch their services to a much larger audience of potential clients.
This is not about taking share from Macromedia - it's about expanding the market for designers.
Tinic,
Actually the app that Sparkle has "borrowed" the most off of is Anark Studio (Anark.com). The entire feature set of Anark Studio is inside of Sparkle. I was told a former Anark person made it over to Microsoft and when I first saw the timeline and the layout of Sparkle I actually thought it was Anark Studio.
Anark was the first app to really popularize the combination of 3D, 2D, Text, audio AND Video all in the same space and in real time. Plus they have a web plugin to allow all of that to play in real time.
I love Anark, but Sparkle took everything from Anark and then added Director features and way beyond. It really is an exciting application. I can't wait to use it.
Michael
DigitalOverview.com
I do think that in the long run Sparkle will be a direct competition to Flash.
First when I heard about it I was giggling and figured that it will be as much of a competitor to Flash as Frontpage is to Dreamweaver, but having had a look at the presentation video I must say that I'm impressed.
It seems like a really exciting product, which is a first from MS IMO.
But I don't really buy in to this talk about the products being aimed for different uses.
Of course MS like to portray it like that, since it don't stand a chance to compete when it comes to capabilities for deploying applications on the web for a few more years to come.
So that is not a strong selling point yet.
Better focus on what Sparkle will be very good at when it's released, creating applications to use on the latest generations of windows desktops.
But an application is an application, and MS knows that.
The user don't really care if it can run of the web or need to be downloaded and installed, except that the latter method is a bit more awkvard.
And for a developer it's of course great to be able to choose how to deploy without having to change their environment.
I would most of all like to see the tight realtime integration between code and design that Sparkle has implemented in Flash as well, the rest of the features like 3D is nice but I would very rarely find use for them.
But a big-up to MS for seeming like they actually managed to get a good product together for once, and I'm looking forward to see what poeple will be able to do with Sparkle when it's out.
I agree one shouldn't compare an existing product to a newly innovated product based on a video or demo. Bottom line: Flash, please make the content searchable. Sparkle (MS Extension), please make it cross platform.
Sparkle looks pretty cool but I wonder how competative an application can be that runs on one platform on one OS?
Tim and Brandon:
Perhaps you need to do a little research on Windows Presentation Foundation/Everywhere.
I don't know why this makes designers 'first class citizens' on development teams. anyone that thinks designers WANT to do all their own production work doesnt know designers very well.
Sparkle is doing what all software like this does. Takes what once took tons of tech knowledge and opens it up to a wider audience. And that audience then buys more of your software, and makes more killer apps for your platform. This is a good thing because it ideally brings new ideas to the table. It will change the nature of development teams more than promoting or demoting anyone. It will enable new types of products to be made. The same thing has happened with print, web, etc.
Does anyone know if XAML stuff will run on the XBOX 360? Now that has some cool implications
yeah,sparkle seems to be good (actually better than i expected), hope mm integrates some of the good sides in the next flash ide/player.
There´s an interesting discussion on the topic in the german flashforum,too:
http://www.flashforum.de/forum/showthread.php?t=178273
(though in german ;) )
Hi Tinic,
Good post, thanks for spendings ome time with us at the PDC Sparkle lab!
I just wanted to mention that the timeline/animation system is different and does not prevent the effect of "timeline inside timeline" - I know it looks this way :)
. Animations do not "contain" any element... They simply "talk" to your visual tree (where the physical elements live) to poke at properties over time. Think of them as equivalent to what you would do in code.
. Any number of animations can be defined ... and any number of animations can live at the same time - they can either "compose" (what looks like "timeline inside timeline inside ...") or they can morph between one and the other (we call this "hand off") - as seen on the Channel 9 video on the 3D mesh - this last case gives you the "from any value to value X" effect we generally obtain thru code/script.
I hope this helps!
Take care
-mano
Joe Marini:
"Perhaps you need to do a little research on Windows Presentation Foundation/Everywhere."
From what I can see it's all FUD/Vaporware at this point. It's still very unclear why MS would want to make the experience as good on other OS and platforms as it will be on it's own house brand OS.
northcode, swfkit and several other apps have allowed the creation of crossplatform desktop apps for ages. Nothing new here. Microsoft is going into this market out of fear. They know that Flash is going to kill them if they dont catch up, the majority of "techs" know the same. Flash is the best front end delivery there is, those who dont like it are flat out biased and generally know exceedingly little about it.
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