I was watching the Microsoft Sparkle video that has been heavily hyped across the blogosphere with my friends August and Michelle with whom I work. (the video is over an hr long, here's a concise synopsis of Sparkle)

August made a good point: the video showed us what the tool looks like, but didn't really go into what it means. This post contemplates some of that.

What it made me think of is that there may be increasing opportunities for "traditional applications" to have rich media interfaces, and thus create branding opportunities. Maybe a rich media tool that has a full animation/3D and a full application framework behind it will be the next step in the command line -> GUI -> ??? evolution. In fact, we're already seeing that sort of thing with Dashboard Widgets on OS X and Konfabulator (the product from which Apple aped the idea for Widgets, now owned by Yahoo). Maybe this will take it to the next level. Maybe it'll just be another tool to use.

Much of what is demonstrated in the video certainly falls into the "flash already does all that" category. It reminds me of the "Director already does that" days when Flash got bought by MM and hit the scene. I guess the "next new thing" might not be better than the existing thing, but it might be what you end up with.