MICROSOFT Expected To Launch FLASH Rival Monday

[Jerry Jones]

http://tinyurl.com/2tktp3

Microsoft's answer to Adobe Systems' Flash Player has an official name--Silverlight--and a coveted target audience: media and entertainment companies bringing video to the Web.

On Monday at the National Association of Broadcasters (NAB) Show in Las Vegas, Microsoft is expected to launch Silverlight, a Web browser plug-in for playing media files and displaying interactive Web applications.

Jerry Jones

http://www.jonesgroup.net

[Jerry Jones]

Adobe expected to launch new media player:

http://tinyurl.com/39m97q

Not content with having a dominant position in Web video, Adobe Systems on Monday is expected to launch Adobe Media Player for playing Flash videos offline.

At the National Association of Broadcasters Show in Las Vegas next week, Adobe is expected to detail the new player for downloaded media which will work with Windows or Mac desktops. Currently, Adobe provides no way for playing back Flash videos outside of the browser.

Jerry Jones

http://www.jonesgroup.net

[Jessterw]

The problem with any solution that MS offers is that they offer piss-poor or non-existant support for any platform other than a Windows-based one. Flash on the other hand is ubiquitous in spite of Macromedia's past indifference to certain platforms.

Competition is great, but MS has a bad habit of not learning from the current market leaders or the contenders who are doing things the "right" way.

[schmosef]

it's just wpf/e renamed. the tech has been in development for a while now. most of the dev community hasn't been pleased with the CTPs that have been available. It's hard to do much more than play a video with it. The object model is missing a lot of features and microsoft has been mum on whether they intend to include them.

here's a thread on the official microsoft forums that demonstrates just how out to lunch this project is: http://forums.microsoft.com/MSDN/Sho...17442&SiteID=1

In case the tech talk is over your head, the original post is just asking about how to use wpf/e for a real application. Barak Cohen's response was, to me, shocking. It was as if they never thought of practical uses for the tech. Daryl's response to Barak is a classic. He precisely identifies the issues that all us web developers are thinking and feeling.

in case you want to see it for yourself, you can google for some interesting wpf/e demos (or just check out the first page i linked above). any site that uses it will ask you to install the run-time.

[schmosef]

The problem with any solution that MS offers is that they offer piss-poor or non-existant support for any platform other than a Windows-based one. Flash on the other hand is ubiquitous in spite of Macromedia's past indifference to certain platforms.

Competition is great, but MS has a bad habit of not learning from the current market leaders or the contenders who are doing things the "right" way.

sorry JW, you're wrong on this.

the first wpf/e CTP shipped with run-times for ie, firefox (windows and mac), and safari. microsoft's official intent is for the run-times to be 100% feature compatible.

flash on the other hand is, even to this day, non consistent across all platforms. there are many platform specific tweaks required for professional flash implementations. indeed, of the flash devs i know, they consider the difference between amateur and pro flash devs to be whether they handle the platform differences gracefully so that all platforms have the best experience.

[schmosef]

Adobe expected to launch new media player:

http://tinyurl.com/39m97q

Jerry Jones
http://www.jonesgroup.net

the developer version of flash already comes with a player. i suspect they are just going to pretty up their existing tech.

[Jessterw]

I wasn't aware (or rather forgot about) wpf/e, so I was referring to pretty well everything else they've done. If they can pull something off that works well and they don't pull support like they've done every other time, then great.

In addition, I never said Flash was perfect, only that it was ubiquitous - please read carefully here - "in spite of Macromedia's past indifference to certain platforms."

[Jerry Jones]

I really despise most Web authoring programs I've used.

FrontPage: Despise it.
Dreamweaver: Detest it.
Flash: Hate it.
CuteSiteBuilder: Makes me sick.

I use SiteSpinner now, but it really does a number on me, too.

It is supposed to be WYSIWYG, however it isn't.

Like most software I buy for the PC platform, there is always a "gotcha."

Just when I'm ready to believe that a given Web page is going to look as I intended, I then seek out a Macintosh user and look at the page through the Safari Web browser and everything is often out of place and completely messed up.

So I'm beginning to dislike SiteSpinner, too.



Jerry Jones

http://www.jonesgroup.net

[schmosef]

well... pages rendering like crap is just as much safari's fault as anything else.

it sounds like (since you don't seem to want to get into the technical aspects of web design) you need a template based CMS system, not a web authoring program.

there are lots out there, at all different price points. DotNetNuke is a free web portal/CMS system. It doesn't come with any free skins (so it doesn't look great out of the box) but there are many free skins available.

a company that i buy a lot of components from, telerik, is about to release version 3.0 of their WYSIWYG CMS system, Sitefinity. And it truly is WYSIWYG. It's not free though.

wpf/e (now Silverlight) is not a web authoring program. it's a framework for manipulating XAML (Microsoft's format for 3D GUI objects) with javascript and AJAX. To work in Silverlight you'll probably need several tools: something for XAML design, something else for HTML design, something for javascript programming, something for ASP.Net programming (for AJAX). Right now, there's no one tool that does it all. The next version of Visual Studio (codenamed "Orcas") is supposed to finally bring all these things together.

[Jerry Jones]

No, I'm just growing tired of computers and their associated hype.

Jerry Jones

http://www.jonesgroup.net

it sounds like (since you don't seem to want to get into the technical aspects of web design) you need a template based CMS system, not a web authoring program.

[schmosef]

[Jessterw]

well... pages rendering like crap is just as much safari's fault as anything else...

Safari - and by extension almost any KHTML/Webkit browser - actually renders pages for better according to spec than most other browsers. The problem is that Safari isn't all that lenient with pages that have flubbed the specs here and there. Safari's real rendering issues fall into the JavaScript category where it seems to choke on or completely ignore certain instructions (hence many a Google app not working correctly under it).

The real problem of course is that the specs - and by that I mean Web Standards - are in a horrible state that has done little to make things easier for designers or developers. That looks to be changing, but it won't be until 2010 or later that we see any results. Browser rendering is the unknown. This is especially true when you have a browser (no, not IE) that fails to render content the same way across platforms.

I'd love to see one rendering engine being used across the board, with the vendor differentiation falling strictly on the UI side of things. Alas, that's too close to providing sanity.

[wkulecz]

Personally I think Flash is blight on the web and we'd all be better off without it and other proprietary doodads. I run Firefox with NoScript, ABP, and Flashblock, I don't seem to be missing anything useful.

On the rare occasions I've looked at things on youtube the quality has been pretty uniformly awful, amusing perhaps, but technically awful quality.

I really don't get internet "streaming" video, I've got HDTV so why would I want to watch low quality video in a tiny window on a computer monitor with jerky frame rates.

--wally.