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With the release today of Silverlight 1.0, Microsoft has taken its first serious step into the world of rich Internet applications and also its first step toward competing with Adobe's ubiquitous Flash platform.
However, when one looks at Silverlight, all the attention and hype seems to fade away with the initial impression of, "So what, just another streaming media platform."
Still, I am impressed that Microsoft has delivered on the promise of a fully cross-platform and cross-browser run-time for its key rich media platform. In all of my tests the Silverlight plug-in worked well on Internet Explorer, Firefox and Safari on the Mac.
From a user experience point of view, that's about it when it comes to Silverlight. It basically does some of the same things that Flash does, from standard video presentations to online applications to interactive games and demos.
On the development side, the options aren't quite as broad and cross-platform as on the player side. All of the tools for creating Silverlight content are Windows-only and most are still in very early and immature beta or even alpha stages.
One that worked well in my tests is the Microsoft Expression Encoder. This is a simple and straightforward video encoding tool that made it possible to output my rich media content in the Silverlight format.
Another option I tested is the recently released Expression Blend 2 preview. I'd previously looked at the first version of this tool, which is designed for building Windows Presentation Foundation applications and has more of a interactive animation authoring feel rather than being a full-on application development environment.
Using the preview, users can start off projects as Silverlight projects and build applications for deployment in that environment. As a preview release, though, it was lacking in any kind of documentation, samples or help of any kind in building Silverlight applications.
Those interested in downloading Silverlight or finding out more about it can go to silverlight.net.
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Comments (5)
Jim
Why do you think this is good for open source, especially Linux? This is from a company who abandoned all it's partners, abused it's monopoly power and now ready to fight its' competitors with legal proceedings and FUD. This is simply bad, because it's from Microsoft. Once Adobe loses the market share, this will be Windows only. History has so many examples. There is no reason to trust them.
So please open your eyes before you start promoting this.
Paul
Posted by paul | September 5, 2007 6:20 PM
Paul, I didn't notice Jim even mentioning anything about Silverlight being good for open source or linux, so I wonder if that was a truly well-formed observation on your part, but...
Having visited the linked site, I am disappointed that only Mac and Windows versions are offered, so the claim that the runtime is "cross-platform" is only partly accurate.
I find it distressing that the overt lack of explicit Linux support was not even mentioned in this article.
Posted by Steve | September 5, 2007 11:50 PM
Good move but perhaps bit late -- MS has to realise that PC applications are moving online and windows will become mere PC boot program -- so time to put all its energy to Online applications.
Posted by 360 View | September 6, 2007 11:42 AM
Paul, I'm guessing you misunderstand my statement about it being cross platform as meaning its good for open source. Doesn't really effect open source in any way. It is good that its cross platform because hopefully when sites choose to use this technology (as many will whether we all like it or not) I can at least view that content on my Mac.
Its been covered in other stories that Microsoft is working with Novell to port Silverlight to Linux (a project called Moonlight) but I probably should have included that in this review as well. (I usually try to stick to what I can test)
Posted by Jim Rapoza | September 6, 2007 12:17 PM
Novell is going to offer the Linux plugin for Silverlight which it calls Moonlight. So, it will reach Linux through the Mono Framework.
I have a hard time listening to arguments that have lines such as "This is simply bad, because it's from Microsoft.". At this point, we've bridged from reasonable debate on the merits of this product into zealotry against Microsoft and a good and evil scenario. The polarization gets tiring.
Posted by John | September 18, 2007 8:20 PM