Simon Willison's Weblog: silverlight

Plupload

2010-02-10T12:53:11+00:00

Fantastic new open source project from the team behind TinyMCE. Plupload offers a cross-browser JavaScript File uploading API that handles multiple file uploads, client-side progress meters, type filtering and even client-side image resizing and drag-and-drop from the desktop. It achieves all of this by providing backends for Flash, Silverlight, Google Gears, HTML5 and Browserplus and picking the most capable available option.

Via Moxiecode Developer Blog

Tags: browserplus, flash, gears, html5, javascript, plupload, silverlight, tinymce, uploads

Quoting Sridhar Vembu

2009-06-07T11:32:21+00:00

Let's try to imagine what a Google Silverlight would have been. It would have been a fully open source product from Google, with a very liberal open source license (BSD or Apache). It would have all the technical specifications published openly. They would pledge to have the Silverlight VM interoperate with Javascript and HTML5. And a company like Zoho would have a ton of developers working on Google Silverlight based applications by now - as opposed to having exactly ZERO developers working on Microsoft Silverlight.

— Sridhar Vembu

Tags: google, microsoft, open-source, silverlight, sridharvembu, zoho

What the Heck is the Open Web?

2008-07-22T01:33:54+00:00

What the Heck is the Open Web?

Brad Neuberg is seeking a two sentence definition. Bonus points for answering the following: “If Adobe were to open source Flex/Flash, or Microsoft Silverlight, would that be the Open Web? If so, why? If not, why not?”

Tags: brad-neuberg, flash, flex, open-source, openweb, silverlight

Quoting Miguel de Icaza

2008-01-04T12:42:35+00:00

From my perspective, it is crucial for Linux to have good support for Silverlight because I do not want Linux on the desktop to become a second class citizen ever again. [...] The core of the debate is whether Microsoft will succeed in establishing Silverlight as a RIA platform or not. You believe that without Moonlight they would not have a chance of success, and I believe that they would have regardless of us.

— Miguel de Icaza

Tags: linux, microsoft, miguel-de-icaza, moonlight, open-source, ria, roberto-callahan, silverlight

The Dark Side Of The Moon

2008-01-04T12:41:32+00:00

The Dark Side Of The Moon

Robert O’Callahan believes that Moonlight is a strategic mistake, because it gives credibility to Microsoft’s entry to a new market which they will use to “keep the competition on a treadmill”; Moonlight can also never be entirely free due to the need for a proprietary codec (VC-1) available only as a binary blob.

Via Miguel de Icaza

Tags: binaryblob, codecs, microsoft, miguel-de-icaza, moonlight, open-source, roberto-callahan, silverlight, video, wc1

Questioning Steve Ballmer

2007-10-01T23:57:53+00:00

This morning I attended a half day briefing at Microsoft UK entitled "The Online Opportunity - What Makes a Successful Web 2.0 Start-Up?". Despite the buzzword laden title the event was well worth the trip up from Brighton, mainly due to the Q&A with Steve Ballmer (a pretty rare opportunity).

Of the other speakers my favourite was Brent Hoberman of lastminute.com and more recently mydeco.com. He presented without slides, choosing instead to simply blasting through dozens of lessons he learnt working on lastminute.com, both when it was a plucky startup and once it had morphed in to a large public company. Thankfully Jeremy took copious notes.

I was lucky enough to get the opportunity to throw a question at Steve. I considered asking how he planned to lure open source developers (used to controlling their entire stack) back to Microsoft tools, but another question had touched on patents so instead I asked the following (paraphrased):

This event is all about encouraging startups - but one of the biggest problems a startup faces is that it's almost impossible to invent anything without violating someone's patent. Big companies can use their patent portfolios to defend themselves, but small companies have no way to fight back. It's kind of like the Cold War.

Here are the points I can remember from Steve's answer:

The patent system (in the US) was designed for the industrial revolution and altered once to deal with the pharmaceutical industry. It hasn't yet been updated for software, but some kind of change is obviously needed. That said, we shouldn't throw the baby out with the bath water - patents are still needed to encourage innovation in both large and small companies.
At the moment, it's hard to say if small or big companies benefit most. Steve thinks it's actually the smaller companies - it's rare for a big company to crush a small company with a patent, but you often hear about small companies with a patent and nothing to lose going after the big guys.
Microsoft are lobbying for patent reform both in the US and the European Union.

About half way through Steve's talk the current favourite Microsoft demos got an airing: Popfly (a mashup editor written in Silverlight, reminiscent of Yahoo! Pipes), Seadragon and the awesome Photosynth. I hadn't realised Photosynth was actually available for regular people to play with, although my attempts at getting it working with Parallels on my Mac have sadly failed.

Tags: brent-hoberman, lastminute, microsoft, mydeco, patents, photosynth, popfly, seadragon, silverlight, startups, steve-ballmer, yahoo-pipes

Halo 3 Site Demonstrates Flaws in SilverLight

2007-09-27T14:38:14+00:00

Halo 3 Site Demonstrates Flaws in SilverLight

The Halo 3 “interactive manual” is like a throwback to Flash in the late 90s—“skip intro”, pointless transitions, text you can’t select or enlarge, links that aren’t links—all wrapped up in an ugly blob (only this time it’s XML instead of binary data).

Tags: flash, halo3, microsoft, silverlight, usability

H.264 support coming to the Flash player

2007-08-21T08:28:20+00:00

H.264 support coming to the Flash player

It looks like this is a response to the higher video quality offered by Silverlight. I wonder if YouTube knew about this when they started transcoding their videos to H.264 for the Apple TV and iPhone.

Tags: adobe, appletv, flash, h264, iphone, microsoft, silverlight, video, youtube

Implementing Silverlight in 21 Days

2007-06-21T11:10:47+00:00

Implementing Silverlight in 21 Days

Absolutely incredible feat of software engineering by Miguel de Icaza and the Moonlight team.

Tags: miguel-de-icaza, mono, moonlight, open-source, silverlight

Quoting Michael Foord

2007-06-16T00:25:52+00:00

[...] Silverlight has full access to the browser DOM and you can make calls from Javascript into silverlight code and from Silverlight into Javascript. This means that you can already write the presentation layer of a client side web app in Javascript and implement your business logic in IronPython.

— Michael Foord

Tags: fuzzyman, ironpython, javascript, michael-foord, silverlight