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Microsoft Silverlight 4 vs. Adobe Flash 10.1
superapecommando writes "The richest RIA platforms today (and for the foreseeable future) come from clashing titans Adobe and Microsoft, whose Flash and Silverlight platforms both combine excellent tools for developers and designers, broad client support, strong support for server-side technologies, digital rights management capabilities, and the ability to satisfy use cases as varied as enterprise dashboards, live video streaming, and online games. And each has spawned new updates, to Flash 10.1/AIR 2 and Silverlight 4 respectively, which put them on a near-level playing field. Which one should you choose?"
Ummm ... how are either of the above better than WebGL + natively JIT compiled Javascript ?
Java's layout managers are pretty atrocious ... the gridbag layout managed to achieve a state of sadomasochistic perfection that hasn't been seen since the Middle Ages when plague victims would whip themselves for thinking God was mad at them. But the whole state of UI developing is nightmarish. Whenever I nested layers upon layers of layout managers, I felt like an ancient Incan, setting traps in a tomb for any poor suckers wishing to alter my application UI. Of course, that poor sucker was usually me.
In any case, some dude actually realized the insanity of the process and wrote his own layout manager called Mig Layout which puts an end to nesting and actually makes sense. Dare I say easy? I rewrote my last app in it and never turned back. Give it whirl although keep the retard with the bat around just in case.
Wake me up when Microsoft comes up with a tool that allows non-coder graphic designers or animators to create entire apps in Silverlight with the same ease that you can with Flash.
That's the assumption sideline-commenting non-designer coders who aren't in the web or multimedia industry make, like a lot of guys here in Slashdot who do mostly non-frontend stuff. Until then, don't expect Flash to vanish anytime soon.
Same case goes for HTML5. Without proper authoring tools for the non-programmer layman, don't expect any other tech to knock off Flash from its perch. Nothing comes close to the Flash Professional authoring tool's ability for creating vector animations and integrating motion, sound and interactivity with ease today.
Even then, Adobe CTO Kevin Lynch announced that Adobe would be the 1st one to build the same kind of tools for HTML5. In fact, they've already built HTML5 + CSS3 support for Dreamweaver.
As for video, there's a good reason Flash exploded on the net long before it had the capability to play videos, so don't expect alternative video players to end it either.
Heck, I heard even Blizzard used Flash for certain parts of Starcraft 2's UI. [citation needed]
visit my pal the xkcd explainer!
When I was developing a Silverlight 2.0 application almost two years ago, we had something similiar to this issue when (I believe) your plugin version did not match the version of Silverlight coded for. More specifically, when Silverlight 3 was available/installed it would complain to us to install Silverlight, when in reality we should have been downgrading to continue supporting our Silverlight 2.0 app.
Funny, I have only ever had a handful of issues with the netflix player, and those I'm pretty sure were attributed to other aspects of the machine (likely a temperature related failure).
Jumping over to Flash though, to watch the Daily Show, or anything through Boxie or Hulu, I get choppy play back, or the video drops out, or I have to try to skip ahead a second after the player hangs coming back from a commercial. Total pain in the ass. My favorite is when the Flash player crashes the tab in IE8, so IE tries to restore the tab, which fires up the Flash player, that crashes the tab... and the cycle continues until I bring up the task manager and kill IE. Pure win.
The MLB jump was totally expected. At that point they were using SL2, which was really SL1.1 with a name change so people wouldn't associate it with SL1, that used an entirely different system (SL1 was basically a XAML rendering plug in that depended on JS for everything). SL2 was the first iteration of SL to use the Silverlight Framework (a trimmed down version of the .Net framework).
It was too much, too early. And I would expect the exact same failure if the MLB attempted to make the same transition to Flash version 2 or to HTML5 today. They would have been much, much better off waiting for another year and getting SL3 out, THEN trying to crack into the bigger markets.
-Rick
"Most people in the U.S. wouldn't know they live in a tyrannical state if it walked up and grabbed their junk." - MyFirs