Microsoft demonstrated the first developer beta of Silverlight 4 at the Professional Developer’s Conference this week, nothing very exciting if it’s not that they actually demoed it running on an iPhone.
For those who don’t know about Silverlight, Wikipedia is your friend:
Microsoft Silverlight is a web application framework that provides functionalities similar to those in Adobe Flash, integrating multimedia, graphics, animations and interactivity into a single runtime environment.
What’s great about it is that thanks to Silverlight, web developers will soon be able to make their content available to iPhone owners without hassles. It’s actually pretty amazing since we’ve been awaiting this from Adobe for a while now and it seemed like Apple was just not ready to let them do it. So how did it happen ? The guys over at betanews found out:
We asked Microsoft User Experience Platform Manager Brian Goldfarb last week at PDC 2009, and the answer was a huge surprise…followed by some caveats. But it contained these four amazing words: “We worked with Apple.”
The promise of Silverlight is that it’s a cross-device, cross-browser, cross-platform solution, and it works the same on Macs as it does on Windows
What do you think about it ?
I feel trouble in the force
[via BetaNews]
Really hope to see Silverlight come to light: to be able to have a better web and apps experience…Facebook app can’t even load videos!!
Wow I tototally agree that there is trouble in the force.
Wow. Apple hates Adobe so much they’d rather put a MS product on their flagship product? That’s pretty weird. And stupid too, I mean seriously, how many people actually use Silverlight for *anything* besides on MS sites (and Netflix, who of course are financially entangled with them already).
Well MLB.TV used Silverlight….in 2008. Did not return for 2009 so obviously not a quality product at this time yet. Perhaps it will be, but Apple should just bite the bullet and go with flash. Doubt its going away anytime soon.
Well, people have gotten really sick of Adobe and Flash. Microsoft getting Silverlight working on the iPhone might be some HUGE incentive for Adobe to stop saying “Waah, Apple is so mean to us, that’s why there’s no Flash..” and fix the problem. Right now they’re just whining about it like brats.
Well, good decision. The Silverlight plug-in for OS X actually outperforms the Flash plug-in by a huge margin. We have a HD video on demand service here using Silverlight – HD movies play without any stutter and the CPU load is roughly 1/4th of what Flash causes playing back a small pixilated YouTube video. Adobe has failed 100% to develop a decent plug-in for any other platform than Windows (sucks under OS X, sucks under Linux and sucks on absolutely every phone) – MS is, for once, doing a lot better.
I support Apple on their decision not to include Flash in iPhone’s Safari. The benefit is that pages load faster, have no flashing animations and requires less memory thus less chance of freezing.
Adobe should really work on its Flash, it has some serious bugs on PC that have been there for ages… one being taking keyboard focus when there are no input fields, like youtube’s video player. If you click pause, the keys up and down won’t work until you click out of the flash widget.
There is also the flash updater annoyance, which shows up sometimes during Windows startup. In my opinion, flash has no right to run as an app, only as a plugin inside a browser, and so it should only show updater when hitting a page with newer version of flash.
Adobe has also been spamming with its new AIR component, which comes with Acrobat Reader, and most people don’t even need it.
On the other hand, Apple also spams with its QuickTime bundled along with iTunes. And Microsoft is no exception. They secretly installed a plugin in Firefox with its Windows Update.
If this means Netflix watch instantly is coming soon then I’m all for it. Now we just need to get Hulu to use silverlight and then there would be no need to for flash.
Why nobody reads whole news and just continue to copypaste this crap?
“So we’ve worked with Apple to create a server-side based solution with IIS Media Services,” Goldfarb continued, “and what we’re doing is taking content that’s encoded for smooth streaming and enabling the content owner to say, ‘I want to enable the iPhone.’ The server will dynamically make the content work — same content, same point of origin — on the iPhone. We do this with the HTML 5 tag, in many ways.”
It’s SERVER-SIDE, and iPhone only gets html page with tag and h.264 stream. Any webserver can do it, you don’t need silverlight for this. And Apple has nothing to do with this – it’s just HTML 5 support.
Parser removed “video” tag
Just goes to show that Apple management thinking is so Inbred that when pride is on the line: Apple would rather stay home on Friday night and sleep with his own fat and retarded sister than to pay for dinner on the first date with a hot rich chick.
Apple so far has been pretty smart with all their desicions. So if they decide that silverlight is better for the iphone than flash, then let it be and we’ll see the results. If Adobe really wanted to get Flash on the iphone my guess is that it would already be available for the Jailbroken comunity one way or another… if the only reason was an issue with Apple…
silverlight works way better than flash.
also: NETFLIX!
Get real dude! Microsoft rules.