Again, a lot of news from the PDC. Microsoft unveiled its Expression Studio, which contains Acrylic, a vector and bitmap graphic editing and creation tool; Sparkle, a 2D and 3D animation tool; and Quartz, a design tool for page layouts and web sites. About Quartz: it does not require IE. In other news from the PDC: while at first look Microsoft Gadgets may appear a lot like Apple/Konfabulator Widgets, Microsoft has bigger plans for the technology.
I know Microsoft Quartz and Apple Quartz are different markets(page layout and screen composition) but I think that the name is going to cause a stink pretty shortly.
Oh yes. There’s a mineral somewhere out there looking for vengeance. No, not that mass of chromium-laced aluminum oxide; the other one.
The Demo/tour part of the site doesnt work in Firefox or Opera.
It’s Microsoft, what did you expect?
It actually doesn’t work very well in Internet Explorer either.
Like he said, “It’s Microsoft, what did you expect?”
Channel 9 has just published a video stream:
http://channel9.msdn.com/showpost.aspx?postid=115387
Please people we need MORE Microsoft related news!
The PDC (Professional Developers Conference) is currently going on and Microsoft is revealing quite a lot of their upcoming technologies. So until it ends, we can expect a flurry of Microsoft-centric news.
>Please people we need MORE Microsoft related news!
As opposed to more Linux news?
It actually doesn’t work very well in Internet Explorer either.
Works just fine for me in IE… You must be one of them linux users who poo poo everything microsoft.
Actually, not working for me right now either: XPSP2,IE6.
Just a black screen that says “Introduction to Microsoft Expression.”
The reason for it not working is because of Windows Media Player as that is what the demo runs on.
Hm, looks very interesting. Especially Acrylic. Btw, has anyone noticed how the guy said in the video about the Expression Web Developer “create sophisticated standard based web sites”? Or how about that line “Cross platform” near the end?
Weird I tell you
“standard based”
But who’s standards? If these pages don’t work in firefox then they’ll fail my standards requirememnts.
I sure hope they actually do it this time.
I watched a demo on Atlas with ASP.net in VS.net2005 recently, and was quite amazed.
It was actually producing standards compliant code. There was a dropdown that let you choose what standards you are working with. Hence, you choose XHTML 1.0 and it would validate your document based on those standsrds. It also of course had HTML 4.01 strict, transitional, etc.
http://channel9.msdn.com/Showpost.aspx?postid=111252 I believe this is the video. I highly recommend watching it all, it’s very promising and looks like these products are actually going to produce standards based code.
“Uh..uh…um..uh..um, uh.”
You’ve gotta be farking kidding. So far I see Dreamweaver 4. The ability to collapse tags is neat, but nothing new to XML editors.
Element-level formatting preferences: overkill. There’s a reason Textpad uses .syn.
“Layer support.” Welcome to 1999, with absolutely positioned page elements.
Accessibility support and validation. Assloads of FUD about difficulty of developing, and ultimately the same features DW had in 2002, only against fewer check standards.
Master pages in ASP: welcome to themes disguised as server-side includes.
Widgets and controls: I don’t see much proof their underlying code is cross-browser or cross-platform.
I guess if you absolutely had no choice except to develop ASP code and you were terrified of actually learning CSS, it might be neet0 k33n. As a practical tool for developing websites, it’s still years behind DW, and shoehorns you into a particular style of development which won’t be useful outside an IIS/ASP environment.
You missed the point. The point is that it looks like they’re trying to follow standards now. So the people who do write ASP won’t always put out shit that is only viewable in IE.
I don’t write ASP, nor do I use DW. I write HTML by hand, but I can still appreciate this.
Yes it is an interesting presentation – can’t wait to switch from asp.net 1.1. But where do you see Atlas? Atlas is a framework for building ajax apps right?
Yes, Atlas is the whole framework.
Or how about that line “Cross platform” near the end?
It means that is will work in both XP and Vista.
..thank you very much
Or go with Pixel on Linux – http://www.kanzelsberger.com
the demo looked good, i was impressed – and if they can deliver, they will have integrated paint, web design, program user interface design, and vector graphics in a few tools. and the user interface looks OK.
“Microsoft has bigger plans for the technology.”
Take over the world, one widget at a time of course.
these markets have long since been sewn up and adobe in particular has a mature developer community that isn’t going anywhere.
i don’t see the landscape shifting at this point. bill gates needs to realize the software-on-cdrom market is over.
Great, now that (x)html, css, javascript and flash are well supported on many systems, microsoft comes up with its own replacements and tools. If this catches on, we’ll be forced to use Vista/IE7 to visit half of the websites on the web.
i wonder why the dropped OS X support from acrylic, back when they first bought the program they had a beta that worked with it.
Despite many vehement protestations to the contrary (and I’m sure we’ll get many, many more from Microsoft supporters or even employees ;-)), the way Microsoft are heading is to get web developers to use their technologies in web development in the future and leave HTML and web standards behind. The vehement defence that Microsoft comes out with whenever this is mentioned is a big clue. A further clue about that came with Avalon for the Mac, and a plugin for Safari. From the way they are talking, they may even embrace other browsers like Firefox, extend those browsers possibly through plugins and extensions, and then extinguish later on. They’ve probably wisely realised that they can’t have people escaping from IE to other browsers, but they can try and catch them everywhere with half-hearted ports. Seeing Microsoft reach out more will be a another big clue.
It’s a big, long-term, thing for Microsoft. They haven’t managed to completely envelope web standards yet, despite the dominance of IE, and they are definitely not going to catch up with Google ever in direct competition. One thing they do control is the client technology that Google primarily use (IE is still very dominant) and they still control the desktop that everyone runs IE on. That’s the ticket for them. If they can get enough web developers using their development technologies and they can start to better control installation, and pre-installation, of client web applications for searching etc. then they can bypass anything that Google or another company or organisation uses because users already have something similar installed, or Windows Update will bring it down anyway.
If Google really are as good as Microsoft believe them to be they will realise this. Basically, for everyone except Microsoft to be able to survive on their own terms they have to get people off Windows tomorrow.
, the way Microsoft are heading is to get web developers to use their technologies in web development in the future and leave HTML and web standards behind.
HTML, CSS, and Javascript is a cobbled together piece of shit for RIA. Microsoft and anybody in their right mind wants to leave that crap behind as soon as possible. If W3C or whoever won’t get their shit together then it’s time to move on. XMLHttpRequest was invented by Microsoft much to the dismay of open source morons everywhere.
It’s a big, long-term, thing for Microsoft. They haven’t managed to completely envelope web standards yet, despite the dominance of IE, and they are definitely not going to catch up with Google ever in direct competition.
Google has no bits on the desktop, so is incapable of competing with Microsoft. Your next two sentences contradict that statement. Did you blackout or something, and then start typing?
Google’s only hope to ever be anything except a search engine is to team up with Mozilla and get some bits on the desktop.
XMLHttpRequest was invented by Microsoft much to the dismay of open source morons everywhere
Such innovation. Big round of applause.
CSS 3 and XHTML are not crippled, nor is the DOM. You may get wet with VS and .NET but most of it find no love affair with such technologies.
HTML, CSS, and Javascript is a cobbled together piece of shit for RIA. Microsoft and anybody in their right mind wants to leave that crap behind as soon as possible. If W3C or whoever won’t get their shit together then it’s time to move on. XMLHttpRequest was invented by Microsoft much to the dismay of open source morons everywhere.
XHTML and CSS are actually quite elegent, and javasacript is a fantastic language when you really get into it. XMLHttpRequest would be totally useless without javascript. How is this cobbled together? How much have you used any of these technologies? Ive been developing enterprise webapps for four years now, while thats not too terribly impressive, im proficient in everything you mentioned.
Maybe you were talking about the microsoft implementations, which web developers have been bearing the utter pain of working with for decadqs now. JScript is cobbled together, and breaks alot of the functionality of javascript. Microsofts support of CSS is rather pathetic, and the propriatary extensions they ve added are quite cobbled together. dont even get me started on vbscript, theres a reason noone uses it. ASP is a joke compared to both JSP and PHP. and the microsoft implementation of XMLHttpRequest is a total pain to work with, unless you write/find a good wrapper library for it.
Read the specs for Canvas and SVG, and you will see that the internet standards are already there for pretty much all the web stuff thats going to come with avalon. microsoft, as usual, chooses not to follow them, and instead is developing their own cludgy alternative.
Google has no bits on the desktop, so is incapable of competing with Microsoft. Your next two sentences contradict that statement. Did you blackout or something, and then start typing?
http://desktop.google.com/
http://toolbar.google.com/deskbar/index.html
http://toolbar.google.com/firefox/extensions/index.html
http://webaccelerator.google.com/
http://earth.google.com/
http://picasa.google.ca/
http://toolbar.google.com/?promo=mor-tb-en“ rel=”nofollow”>http://toolbar.google.com/?promo=mor-tb-enhttp://www.google.com/talk/
http://toolbar.google.com/gmail-helper/
no bits on the desktop? really? have you read any news by microsoft recently? they consider themselves in direct competition with google. maybe you know more then bill gates does. if you want, ill pull up half a dozen articles that prove that point.
ask any half decent web developer how he feels about microsofts domination of web technologies, and you tend to get an angry tirade along the lines of this one. microsoft is the worst thing to happen to web technology, and have been fairly consistant on that score for years now.
Yeah, only the lowly web developer would consider HTML, CSS and Javascript NOT CRIPPLED for rich clients. Javascript is a decent language, but (x)html absolutely sucks for real application development compared to XUL or XAML.
You’d have to be a real idiot to not understand that the current way of making rich clients for the browser is completely crippled compared to traditional rich client development.
when did i compare it to XUL or XAML? all i said was that those technologies are far from cobbled together. i wouldnt consider myself a lowly web developer, i do about as advanced DHTML as you can get, JSP on the front end, java middleware, and some sql/ pl/sql queries and stored procs on an oracle database. i work on an ERP/production management system that is used by several of the fortune 500 apparel companies. our app costs about 100$ per seat per month. im not an idiot, and i know what im talking about in this area.
javascript is a great language, if you have good xhtml. xhtml/css is a great, elegent markup language. it was never made for rich application front ends, but for document formatting and presentation, and the fact that it works as well as it does for webapps says something. look at gmail.
XUL/XAML is definately the next step, but the existing technologies, while they have their quirks, are not bad at all. the origional post implied that what is around now sucks, and that microsoft is the ray of hope for internet technologies, and that is most definately not the case. Ill ask the same question, what is your experience in webapp development? or are you speaking from reading microsoft supplied propaganda?
As a side-note I’ve heard very, very little about this gadget technology until very recently (until it has simply exploded and the new website put up) and the sidebar seemed to be consigned to history as they didn’t seem to know what to do with it. Now, all of a sudden, it’s back and there’s an explosion of writing Windows gadgets, and using DHTML and web technology to do develop it all with, along with powered by ASP.Net back-ends.
It’s all just reminiscent of the kinds of things that KDE’s Plasma project have already started (HotNewStuff, JavaScript Plasma applications etc.) and will be working on more of. I just find it a bit of a coincidence, that’s all.
Microsoft can’t invent anything it’s a proven fact. Apple is their cheapest R & D department and it’s free.
http://research.microsoft.com/
lets see what the results are. this is just recent stuff, and off the top of my head. im sure if we look at the history of ms innovation, we could come up with a much longer and more complete list
WinFX – Quartz Extreme
new Alt-Tab – Expose
Avalon Web Stuff – Pretty much everything is covered by SVG + Canvas
WinFS – Far less robust Reiser4
Longhorn Search + File relationship creation – Spotlight
New UI Guidelines – “Inspired” by the apple HIG
Gadgets – Dashboard
.NET – Java
MSN Search – Google
Tabbed Browsing – Opera
Anti-spyware – Ad-aware
Microsoft Max – Apple iPhoto
forget the names, but they have also have “invented” what is essential pdf and flash.
so far, the only “innovation” ive seen so far in longhorn announcements is the nifty DRM technology for HD-DVDs that will have so much encryption, you’ll need a card with an internal bus capable of 3gig transfer rate in both directions if you want smooth playback.
microsoft doesnt innovate, they implement others innovations (generally apple on the ui side, and unix on the technology side) and leverage their platform monopoly and insane amount of capital to become de facto standards. this is the way its alwas been. microsoft innovation tends to be rather pathetic, for example ms bob http://toastytech.com/guis/bob.html
their implementations tend to go from poor to decent. i think office and vs are their only two product lines that have ever impressed me
Not even getting into anything you said other than one thing….
How can you say that WinFS is far less robust than Resier 4?
Neither are out, and we all know that you haven’t even touched WinFS. I would doubt that you’ve even seen the demo of it on Channel9.
because of the archecture choices. far more work has gone into reiser4, and while it will still be a few more years before it hits WinFS level of functionality, it will be far easier to implement new functionality due to the plugin system. Reiser4 has been in development for about a decade now, and instead of dropping stuff, the choice has alwas been to do things the right way, even when it means rewrites.
and please, get into the other stuff i said. i would really like to hear about microsoft innovations.
I hate to break it to you, but WinFS has been in development, under different names, for well over a decade.
Microsoft hasn’t dropped anything from WinFS. If you actually take the time to watch the Channel9 demo, and the interview with the WinFS devs, you’d see they are really serious about getting it right. WinFS’s seemless integration with tradtional NTFS while still maintaning all the WinFS features is really a testament to the devs.
im really not bashing winfs here. reiser has been in active development for about as long, and has already proven itself to be both robust and performant. the code is extremely clean, and alot of time and care has gone into it (as i mentioned earlier, things are done the right way no matter how long it takes) I say it will be more robust then winfs for two reasons
1) reiser3 (the base of reiser4) has been in use for quite awhile, gone through its growing pains, and is quite stable and mature. winfs will be new, and time + real world use means quite a bit when it comes to bugs/defects.
2) plugins. since new functionality wont require as extensive knowledge of the codebase, we should see quite a bit, and at a fast pace when the fs is actually production ready. hans mentioned a compression plugin thats in the works that will half disc space while doubling performance, which he is trying hard to get out the door. Even though winfs will ship with more features, i doubt we will have to wait that long for reiser4 to surpass it. i also think that being able to add new functionality without an additional mkfs is extremely attractive, and cant wait to see what the desktop environments do with it.
now ill admit, all this is speculation, but i have done quite a bit of reading on both, and my money is on reiser. at the moment, it isnt even in the kernel yet, and winfs is still vaporware, but i would be quite suprised if reiser comes up behind winfs when we can actually do some benchmarking.
Couple of things…
WinFS is not a new filesystem. WinFS runs on top of NTFS, which has been around for, what, about 12 years(?).
Also, WinFS is not vaporware. I say again, go to channel9 and check out the devs showing off actual WinFS code.
Don’t want to get all pro-MS, but a few facts need to be corrected –
1) A crude version of the new Alt-tab was avaible as a poertoy from MS quite a bit before Expose came out.
Won’t get into the WinFS versus ReiserFS since they are both in development right now as far as I can see so not sure how you come to conclusion which was copied from which.
2) Spotlight is a somewhat beta version of an OS-integrated Desktop search. There are a ton better ones floating around in Windows. I don’t think Spotlight was even remotely first on this one.
3) Of course the most silly one being gadgets being a ripoff from Dashboard. Two things (a) (if you actually followed the link) the support for auxillary screens is rather novel and I have never heard that from Apple. (b) Dashboard is a ripoff of Konfabulator which is a ripoff of DesktopX. So not sure what your point with that is.
4) It is interesting after all that rant, you accept “office and vs impress you” but still don’t admit to innovation.
All in all, many of your examples of innovation by other companies appear to be copies. Needless to say, I believe barring rare exceptions, most softwares are evolutionary and not revolutionary but that brings us to point of open source but we better not go there.
1) A crude version of the new Alt-tab was avaible as a poertoy from MS quite a bit before Expose came out.
im not comparing alt-tab with thumbnails with expose. i thought that would be rather obvious. what im comparing with expose is the stacked windows thing.
2) Spotlight is a somewhat beta version of an OS-integrated Desktop search. There are a ton better ones floating around in Windows. I don’t think Spotlight was even remotely first on this one.
the ones floating around windows dont compare to spotlight. spotlight is fully integrated into the os. what they havnt done yet is leveraged the db with finder, but that will come in upcomming versions. if you had used tiger, you wouldnt be comparing it to stuff like google desktop.
3) Of course the most silly one being gadgets being a ripoff from Dashboard. Two things (a) (if you actually followed the link) the support for auxillary screens is rather novel and I have never heard that from Apple. (b) Dashboard is a ripoff of Konfabulator which is a ripoff of DesktopX. So not sure what your point with that is.
my point, as i said before, is that microsoft doesnt innovate. that is one area that apple didnt either, and there were plenty of things before konfab too. i believe the first time i noticed that kind of functionality was desktopX for windows. what i am saying is that pretty much anything thats interesting and non drm related in vista didnt come from redmond, which is rather odd as microsoft has more resources then anyone else.
4) It is interesting after all that rant, you accept “office and vs impress you” but still don’t admit to innovation.
so microsoft came up with the spreadsheet and the ide?
to be honest, you do see some innnovation in both those products. microsoft didnt come up with the idea for either of them, but they have come up with quick kickass features for them. but i was talking about vista, which is where this huge flood of news is directed.
All in all, many of your examples of innovation by other companies appear to be copies. Needless to say, I believe barring rare exceptions, most softwares are evolutionary and not revolutionary but that brings us to point of open source but we better not go there.
i was not providing examples of innovation, i was providing examples of existing products that have pretty much everything that is interesting in vista already. when a new mac os comes out, there are tons of features that are quite innovative. when a windows release comes out, they implement others innovation. apple is small potatoes compared to microsoft, and yet microsoft is offering virtually nothing new in their first os in five years. this doesnt make any sense to me, and it shouldnt make much sense to windows users either. what microsoft does with their os has very little real impact on me, but i was expecting a bit more from vista.
and there is plenty of opensource innovation, just not too terribly much on the ui side of things. yet. we’ll see when the desktop environments have finally caught up with the competition.
Spotlight: Minus the OS integration (which is not possible for most third-party application with closed source OS), everything is better implemented in something like YDS. Not really sure how much of difference the OS level integration has made for Spotlight, except cosmetics like you get a toolbar in Finder and can find files you created a few minutes apart (the latter being a feature that I can’t imagine when I will use). And I have used both and still do so extensively. Spotlight because the three Macs I take care of have nothing else to use. But it is nice to see that you even include features in future versions of Spotlight. That does make the comparison totally fair with something like the current version of YDS.
Dashboard: It’s nice to see you come down from your original example and justification, you should go back read your previous posts.
Office & VB: MS did not invent spreadsheets and ide but it definitely has taken it a lot further than any other company. And there definitely is a lot of innovation in both products. If you want to continue denying that that’s up to you.
I am not sure why you say Apple is small potatoes compared to MS, considering the hardware platforms and softwares MS carries with it, I think it is obvious that it will take more resources to make sure everything works unlike the single configuration supported by Apple. For instance, integrated search for Longhorn was presented at about the same time Apple said they will be doing the same. And the Sidebar was presented a lot before Apple said anything about Dashboard. But Apple happened to bring them out first.
Again, you mention tons of innovation with each Mac OS release and if you look beyond the advertisement blurb, most of these innovations are not really innovative. Plus are badly implemented. For instance, the version of Dashboard released originally with Tiger had a gaping hole which stayed open for more than two months after an exploit was publicly available.
Also, when a software comes after a big gap there obviously will be many features that it brings in which are already available in a some manner by smaller companies. These are not perfect products but they are “prior art”. But at the same time when it is re-implemented there will be improvements. So when Apple copied DesktopX and Konfabulator, in your previous post, you talk about smaller memory footprint. So how do you know those kind of improvements won’t happen with the Sidebar.
Now that Microsoft is on the desktop widget bandwagon (following Apple, both big *nix desktops, and numerous shareware programs) anyone care to guess when we’ll start seeing posts citing Karabma and gDesklets as examples of how non-innovative Open Source developers shamelessly rip off any new technology Microsoft develops? I bet it happens well before Vista ships…
Regardless if you’re in the M$, Apple, Linux or any other camp or if you’re a floater
, the truth is that what’s coming out of M$ PDC is beginning to get impressive. We are beginning to see the bulk of work that M$ has put together, and its a lot. Having said that, it should be obvious that part of the new applications we are seeing are the result of incorporating the products of recent acquisitions. Thus, not all this intellectual property came out directly from within M$, at least not originally. Regardless, it’s very impressive and I get the feeling that all of M$ competitors, big and small, regardless of the particular (sub-)industry are beginning to get afraid, very afraid. For me, up to a certain extent at least, it also shows that the software industry in general for the past several years, with a few exceptions, has been simply living a blue dream (to quote Joe Satriani) and has once again let M$ change the ballgame, just checkout the new M$ Office look! Everything else will start to look old pretty soon, unless we move our tails…
you have evidently never used osx. ms windows is currently a fairly old os, these changes will bring them closer to being modern.
Impessive, no. Typical MS BS
If all you say is correct, then the only thing MS has been doing is feverishly ripping off technology developed by others. So, what else is new?
For those who can watch the tour. Does Acrylic work in the same way Macromedia Fireworks does or is there some big difference?
I wonder why there isn’t such an app for Linux yet. I mean even BeOS had one
I think Inkscape would be a lovely foundation for such an app. Just extend it beyond SVG and we’ll have a wonderful app.
“i wonder why the dropped OS X support from acrylic, back when they first bought the program they had a beta that worked with it.”
i wonder too why apple dropped windows support for final cut pro and emagic logic after they bought them.
If standards are in the best interest for Microsoft then they’ll follow them, if not then they won’t. Microsoft isn’t going to follow standards just so that Linux can play catchup. Linux has to make it on its own without handouts from Microsoft.
Congratulations! You’ve just made one of the the dumbest statements of all-time.
Who the hell needs standards?!!!
Busines is al about building a better mouse trap, so yes microsoft will copy!
>lets see what the results are. this is just recent stuff, and off the top of my head. im sure if we look at the history of ms innovation, we could come up with a much longer and more complete list
WinFX – Quartz Extreme
new Alt-Tab – Expose
Avalon Web Stuff – Pretty much everything is covered by SVG + Canvas
WinFS – Far less robust Reiser4
Longhorn Search + File relationship creation – Spotlight
New UI Guidelines – “Inspired” by the apple HIG
Gadgets – Dashboard
.NET – Java
MSN Search – Google
Tabbed Browsing – Opera
Anti-spyware – Ad-aware
Microsoft Max – Apple iPhoto
that would be fine, if it were just something here and there. but with the money they have, and the amount of user that use windows, it should really be the leading platform in terms of innovation, but it really isnt. its one of the least intertesting platforms out there, and theres no real excuse for that. the reason is they wait for others to come up with good ideas, and then try and pass them off as their own. i guess windows users are just ignorant of the alternatives, or dont really demand much…
vista is being passed off as the coolest idea since sliced bread, while the vast majority of the technology and ideas have been around and in use by other platforms for quite awhile.
> WinFX – Quartz Extreme
What? You mean Avalon w/Aero Glass – Quartz Extreme?
> Avalon Web Stuff – Pretty much everything is covered by SVG + Canvas
Can SVG stuff be linked to code and can the svg objects be modified by code?
> Gadgets – Dashboard
Dashboard – Konfabulator
sorry, i may have gotten mixed up between avalon and winfx.
SVG will be javascriptable, so will Canvas. so yes.
And those examples werent all the origional concepts, they were popular implementations that are already in use that came to mind. Yes, dashboard came from konfabulator, and that is something i would point out to someone claiming apple came up with the idea. I am simply trying to illustrate that there isnt much thats interesting in avalon that really came from microsoft.
There isn’t anything in it that is revolutionary. It’s everything together, the power, the ease of use (XAML and Expression), that make it a great platform.
I recommend checking out channel9.msdn.com for some awesome demo videos. Instead of just reading about it, you get a look and feel for what it’s capable of.
thats exactly the point i was trying to make. just because its already been done doesnt make it bad, but its not exactly innovation. theres an astonishing lack of it in the microsoft camp, and theres no real reason for it. apple comes up with stuff all the time that is downright revolutionary and has never been done before, while microsoft has far more resources for things like research and development. i dont understand why microsoft is not the undisputed leader in this area, it doesnt make much sense.
Where did they get Expression? I doubt if MS actually developed it from scratch.
It used to be Fractal Design/Creaturehouse Expression and for a while after they had a free dowload no strings….. i see the mac versions still up on versiontracker http://www.versiontracker.com/dyn/moreinfo/macosx/13211 (wonder how long that will last!)
As much as I hate to admit it, this is the first time I’m actually impressed with the work MS has done. Though I haven’t actually tried Vista, I’m only judging it from videos and screenshots. I especially like the UI changes in Office 12. I think it’s actually quite innovative and surprising that they are taking things so far considering their conservative past.
I do wonder though how big the interest in Vista really is, especially in the corporate sector. What do they gain by switching? Is it worth the costs? I seriously don’t believe so.
People its a wma audio file cant play in most players except WMP and you will only see “Introduction to Microsoft Expression.”
That’s it.
-The show doesn’t start on browsers that respect standards. It just shows an oversized picture. And they tell you that you will be able to create better UX. Yeah, right. (Start to learn Flash now.)
-The feature tour doesn’t work well. Nice going MS, especially to promote a web dev app…
It’s just a show off for fan boys and people of the general computer press, people actually working on RIAs, etc. will pass.
I don’t know if Quartz is the final name for this web design tool and if Microsoft wants to use Quartz for the final product, but they can not do so.
Apple has trademarked Quartz, so Microsoft can not use Quartz, or maybe they even copy Apple to name their products.
http://www.apple.com/legal/trademark/appletmlist.html
I am not sure of this.
But is XAML cross-platform in microsoft way(98,2000,XP)?
If not, even if Vista gets good share in Desktop market, it will be by the time NEXT version of Windows is released and I dont see point in even a microsoft centric webdeveloper doing a webpage which targets the clients who will see his pages 3 years after he has developed.
It will be available on XP, which will at the time, have been available for over 5 years.
“Microsoft Expression Web Designer gives you all the powerful tools you’ll need to produce high-quality, standards-based Web sites the way you want them.”
Does anyone here believe that Microsoft gives a single shit about Standards??? Their friggin demos don’t seem to be working at all for me… damn, guess I should be using Windows and I.E….
– Please tell me what is this crude version of alt-tab. You dont know what you are talking about because Expose goes well beyond alt-tab, even in Vista i dont see anything as useful and functional as Expose. In Vista, you still have to look for the window that you want. Alt-tab in Vista only does what xp does today but with more eye-candy. And the 3D view is simply a joke, it is just eye candy, nothing close to Expose. You still have to look for the window.
If you would really knwow what Expose is, you would notice that Expose mimics how in the real life we would do to find 2 dimensional objects (looking for a document among many papers): we spread them out in a 2D plane, and therefore we get a instant glabal view of what is available and allows to find and recognize quickly what we want. Expose is also available per app, and allow to clean completly the deskyop. Expose is useful, what does Vista is simply eye candy. Now if you think that Microsoft has something like this before, well i guess there is always someone to tell us that Microsoft had first something, somewhere that did not work, and that was not implemented. Its just ridiculous.
– About spotlight, well go and use it first before to say stupid things. Absolutly no searching tools on windows xp can macth the integration Spotlight. Spotlight is really well implemented in osx, its fast, really fast, and i mean just go and use it, instead of saying bull…. Spotlight allows fast search, better data organization (smart folders help a lot for it), and can be found in many part of the os. Vista will also have good search, and Vista will also provide more feaures than Spotlight today, particularly when it comes to add metadata to file (keyword, etc). Spotlight allows it, but it still not spread in the all os interface. I guess we should get great things with Leopard about Spotlight.
However, even if Microsoft was planning search features in Vista, the way they implemented it in the user interface is very similar to Tiger.
– The great idea about dashboard is not that it introduces widgets. This kind of small app has existed for a while in different platforms. We could find widgets in the early version of MacOs. The good thing about Dashboard is fist that it uses Expose, which is really nice, because you can put as much as widgets as your screen is large. And if you dont use them it dont waste place in you monitor. The implmentation is simply great. Look at the Vista sidebar. Ask yourself, how many widgets can you put there? Not so much….. Look at the space that you lose with this sidebar, its simply ridiculous. Maybe microsoft think that everyone has a 20 inch monitor.
Dashboard also allowed to make widgets popular, much more that it use to be. A nice programming model helped a lot for that, and Microsoft just copy the approach of apple. Konfabulator or DesktopX take a lot of ressource to run, and it do not provide a nice programming model.
i admit i have triedd Alt-Tab in Vista….i will wait till it is feature complete and ready to use before i write it off…the cruder version i mentioned shows you thumnails of programs when you use Alt-Tab.
i use spotlight every day…i still think that it’s implementation is limited and very limited compared to the stuff (such as filtering, etc) that is available in Desktop Searches like yahoo….as far as speed is concerned…i don’t find it any faster than yahoo or google…(i think you are the one who has not trieed other programs)…
About Dashboards making widgets more popular and being better implemented…while this is the usual fall back argument Mac folks go for when they realise that Apple is just copying, even if this is really true (a) it agrees with my point of it being evolutionary and not revolutionary (b) the support of additional screens in Vista will simialrly more advanced than Dashboard. (c) Not sure about Konfabulator becuase I have used it very little but DesktopX definitely does not take much resources for me not sure where you are getting your data from (d) and going back to the premise of “making it more popular” : says who? The sidebar feature has been there in Vista a lot before dashboard was ever discussed…so not sure where you are getting your data for this.
oops, that was supposed to start with “i have NOT tried Alt-Tab in Vista”
Macrodobia will have to reduce their Flash MX 2004 prices in response.
Why is there this constant whinging noise coming from posters on this site [and Slashdot, not so ironically] about Microsoft ‘ripping off’ other products? Are you really that happy with having just one company provide you with everything? How many of you have said things like:
‘Oh Adobe’s already got Photoshop, why the hell do we need PaintShopPro, I hate those guys, always ripping Adobe’s features off’, or for those musically inclined, ‘Ableton’s product is so backwards, Reason already has most of it’s features and a trillion others; they shouldn’t bother copying some of Reason’s features, they should just stay with what they’ve got forever until they can invent something completely new’.
You’re all big moaning children, I can only assume you’ve not got much happening in life that you feel the need to consistently reiterate the same point over and over, every time a Microsoft news story is posted. We get it already, you don’t like Microsoft, fancy going to find another community to prattle on to?
By the by, if they call it innovative, and claim it’s revolutionary, that’s called ‘market-speech’; most if not all companies do it even if their product’s not.
N.B. No I don’t endorse the moaning about Apple or Linux etc. and solely defend Microsoft. It all makes me roll my eyes as much as this thread has.
did i say rip off? did i say “vista is teh sux0r”? if you actually read what i said over and over again, is that microsoft is not a leader in ideas, and it really has no excuse not to be, when apple can do it just fine and is a fraction of the size.
innovation means comming up with new concepts that help your users. innovation is not market talk, without innovation we would not be using computers to discuss this issue today. to claim that new ideas are unimportant is shortsighted at best, but it seems to be the rhetoric you tend to hear from a microsoft apologist.
and just so it doesnt seem like im just hurling stones here, i dont find the desktop linux movements terribly innovative either. but none of them have been doing this as long as microsoft, and noone has the resources of the company.
SimpleMachine wrote:
“The Demo/tour part of the site doesnt work in Firefox or Opera.
”
Anonymous wrote:
“It’s Microsoft, what did you expect?”
Anonymous wrote:
“It actually doesn’t work very well in Internet Explorer either.”
Like the man said:
It IS Microsoft, what did you expect?