Skip to main content

Microsoft Sparkle: Don't throw Flash away yet

Microsoft announced a new product called Expression Sparkle Interactive at PDC 2005 for creating Avalon user interfaces. Sparkle and the Windows Presentation Foundation together are seen as a Flash alternative and Adobe is already taking the Microsoft threat seriously.

Sparkle draws much of its inspiration from Macromedia Flash like Timelines, Drawing Tools and Image support. And 3D drawing and animation is one area where Microsoft sparkle has an upper-hand over Macromedia Flash. Sparkle also gives developers the full breadth of programming languages such as C# to add interactivity to their solutions.

But Sparkle is designed only to work with Windows Longhorn (read, Vista) which won't be available until late 2006. And it would take much greater time before people actually start buying Windows Vista.

That gives Adobe-Macromedia enough time to improve Flash. The ubiquitous lightweight Flash player is available for Windows, Mac, Linux, handheld devices and cellular phones. And Flash Player is free while Sparkle would require users to upgrade to a completely new OS and even new hardware.

Sparkle is a very promising technology but it will take years before we start seeing actual Sparkle applications. Till then, it's Flash all the way. If Adobe incroporates 3D features from Adobe After Effects into Macromedia Flash 9, Sparkle will find the going even tougher.

Read more in Publish.com story Sparkle Vs. Flash

Popular posts from this blog

How to Download Contacts from Facebook To Outlook Address Book

Facebook users are not too pleased with the "walled garden" approach of Facebook. The reason is simple - while you can easily import your Outlook address book and GMail contacts into Facebook, the reverse path is closed. There's no "official" way to export your Facebook friends email addresses or contact phone numbers out as a CSV file so that you can sync the contacts data with Outlook, GMail or your BlackBerry. Some third-party Facebook hacks like "Facebook Sync" (for Mac) and "Facebook Downloader" (for Windows) did allow you to download your Facebook friends' names, emails, mobile phone number and profile photo to the desktop but they were quickly removed for violation of Facebook Terms of Use. How to Download Contacts from Facebook There are still some options to take Friends data outside the walls of Facebook wall. Facebook offers the Takeout option allowing you to download all Facebook data locally to the disk (include

PhishTank Detects Phishing Websites by Digg Style Voting

OpenDNS, a free service that helps anyone surf the Internet faster with a simple DNS tweak , will announce PhishTank today. PhishTank is a free public database of phishing URLs where anyone can submit their phishes via email or through the website. The submissions are verified by the other community members who then vote for the suspected site. This is such a neat idea as sites can be categorized just based on user feedback without even having to manually verify each and every submission. PhishTank employs the "feedback loop" mechanism where users will be kept updated with the status' of the phish they submit either via email alerts or a personal RSS feed . Naturally, once the PhishTank databases grows, other sites can harness the data using open APIs which will remain free. OpenDNS would also use this data to improve their existing phishing detection algorithms which are already very impressive and efficient. PhishTank | PhishTank Blog [Thanks Allison] Related: Google

Digital Inspiration

Digital Inspiration is a popular tech blog by  Amit Agarwal . Our popular Google Scripts include  Gmail Mail Merge  (send personalized emails with Gmail ),  Document Studio (generate PDFs from Google Forms ) and   File Upload Forms ( receive files  in Google Drive). Also see  Reverse Image Mobile Search , Online Speech Recognition and Website Screenshots , the most useful websites on the Internet.