Tim Wang's eLearning Blog

Microsoft announced the "new weapon" in dot net based application creation - Sparkle. It is a Microsoft product for building Avalon user interfaces. It is aimed towards non-programmers using this tool to design media rich web or OS (Microsoft Windows series of course) based applications. Or looking at it from another angle, it can be used by "geeky" programmers to easily create applications with "cool" interfaces. Although this philosophy was first introduced by Macromedia products - Director and Flash, Sparkle still has many unique strength to compete (if they will compete) with the existing products. After watching the hourly long video on Sparkle, my first impression is it is still too early to compare Sparkle to Flash. However, what's worth to mention about Sparkle is it's easy data-binding and round trip XAML makes the final product more "searchable" by standard search engine. Flash contents not being indexable is the long known "fatal" problem and Sparkle may have a solution to this. However, in the short run (2-3) years, good luck to the Sparkle team to market this product. I simple can't see those hard core Flash developers will easily convert to this new application and not to mention, many of them are hard core Mac users too!