Flat Hatter Collaborative

More on Sparkle: Tinic & Other OS’s (Mac, etc.)

Posted by Bryan Zug - 2005/09/16

Tinic Uro, one of the engineers behind the Flash Player has posted a really important reaction to Sparkle. In it, he says this –

One word summarizes my reaction: Respect.

It’s an important post because 1) Tinic is smart enough to not underestimate Microsoft as an opponent and 2) his first reaction is that the Sparkle engineers “have been doing some amazing work in the past 4 years”.

It’s a reaction much like my own, noted in previous posts.

Another interesting turn comes in this “Microsoft offers development tools for Mac, Web” article from ZDNET which begins to detail how this new effort will not be windows only –

The company introduced Windows Presentation Foundation Everywhere, or WPF/E, software to build applications using Microsoft’s XAML page layout language in conjunction with JavaScript. Until this week, it was thought that Microsoft’s Windows Presentation Foundation, formerly code-named Avalon, could be used only to build graphics-rich applications on Windows. But because JavaScript runs on many operating systems, developers could, in theory, use WPF/E tooling to target several operating systems. Apple’s Mac OS will be one of the operating systems supported with WPF/E, as well as older versions of Windows and Microsoft Smartphone, according to Microsoft executives.

Not sure how much mis-information is in that quote, but even if it’s 50% true, it means that the either the dev tools or the distributable clients built with them will run on Macs and other systems.

That’s a big deal, because, well, it seems like Microsoft is finally getting the fact that monopoly asshole business behavior is bad not just for the world at large, but for the pocketbook as well.

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