.:microsoft can be okay sometimes:.
let me just point out the obvious. a lot of the more ‘hardcore’ computer users out in the world simply do not like microsoft. there is a bevy of reasons for that, but i won’t get into that right at the moment…
i think silverlight might change the view of some people who are very much against microsoft products.
let’s start off with, ‘WTF is silverlight, mate?’
.:WTF is sliverlight, mate?’:.
this all started as an arm of the whole initiative of microsoft live. i feel like (in my own humble opinion) that MS dropped the ball about 2-3 years ago when the concept of web 2.0 was beginning to come into play. they were not innovating. they were resting on their laurel’s and not working fast enough. they really let google…and in some cases, yahoo!…take the lead in the commercialization and accessibility of consumer-friendly web applications. some will argue that MS has just been taking it’s time to create a product that is really superior, that truly ties in easily with the web and on your desktop. so first they rolled out live…which is essentially MS’s new cool (and very pretty) search engine. there are a bunch of services that branch off of it, but at it’s core, that’s what it is. and then you see this new release of the hotmail webmail platform (which i have to admit that it’s pretty slick)…
and now we see silverlight…
about a month ago, MS released this nifty new piece of software that is going to be a competitor to flash. but, instead of just ripping flash off directly, they really made an effort to make something a little bit different.
one of the coolest things about silverlight is the fact that microsoft has integrated in functionality to host and stream large, high definition media files over MS networks. that’s pretty huge, as it’s really expensive to do this either quickly OR realiably for up-and-coming developers. and it’s free for the first year (”the first hit is free, kid…….”). after that, distribution is set to be free up to 1 million minutes a month. undetermined fees will be set after that.
delivery is one thing…but what about the actual code? MS created this language called XAML (extensible application markup langauge, and that’s basically how content is ultimately created and displayed. why is that different from flash? flash delivers content in a package that is very pretty…but it’s just not that incredibly easy to optimize for search engines. there are several extra workarounds that one has to perform in order to get a flash site to be SEO’d. silverlight solves that problem with the XAML language, as it can be crawled by search engine spiders.
silverlight is also small…around 4 megs…, it’s fast, can display video content in high-def by working with native resolutions and will (supposedly) integrate seamlessly with windows mobile devices.
i’m not saying it’s the second coming or anything…and MS will definitely have a very hard time moving the general design/development community away from adobe (read ‘flash’) products. but i’m glad they are taking the initiative to do this, as a lot of people have been frustrated with flash for the past couple of years. the market is ripe, friends…RIPE…
one of the cool things that you’ll eventually be able to use that was created using silverlight is called popfly. MS just released this into private beta, so it is, unfortunately, invite only at the moent. however, from what i’ve read about it, it’s pretty darn cool.
popfly is another ‘mash-up’ creater. i talked about something awhile back called yahoo! pipes; this is very similar to that. essentially, a mash-up creator is a tool that allows your average user to go out to the web, find useful applications and then integrate them into one central tool without knowing a bunch of programming. so, for example, i could create a tool that only provided me movie reviews from a specific genre of film from five or six different sources and put it into one place for me to view. i could have that tool send it to me via e-mail or SMS. i could have it send to other people that i chose as well.
this is an area that is going to be really, really huge, as it empowers average joe user to be able to create pretty cool little web applications without actually having to know much about coding.
anyway, so popfly is apparently extremely easy to use. it allows you to create a number of things, from applications to widgets to web pages and then share them via a social networking component.
keep your eye on it here.
