Silverlight has very few to no features that do not exist in Flash or that cannot be created in Flash. Still, Silverlight fanboys insist on holding a peeing contest with Flash users.

Another painful example of this can be found at Tweakers.net which is a Dutch tech-site. The article reports on Dutch public television using Flash for online TV. A previous article on a Dutch Public Television using Silverlight already resulted in a Flash-Bash in which some people threw around "But Silverlight can do ... " statements, only to be countered by Flash-savvy people.

There are good and valid reasons for choosing Silverlight over Flash. For organisations that are deeply rooted in Microsoft development, with money invested in Visual Studio and .NET development, Silverlight is a logical choice. But please, stop making it all about features - neither Adobe nor Microsoft would be foolish enough to leave out obvious options and with Flash 10 on the way, possible existing gaps will be closed and the difference will be minimised.

Instead, both parties should be happy with the competition because it will probably mean a better effort from the developing companies.

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Apart from the fact that preloading is so 2000, it's almost weird to see that the
promotional site for VS2008 is a Flash application and not, as you might expect, a Silverlight application.

The PV3D implementation doesn't really add to the quality of the application, though. There's nothing to interact with but the navigational buttons. No clicking on trees, no walking back or front ...

There is however the "make your own" option which allows you do some mashuppy stuff with video's and voiceovers. I still don't get the meaning behind this concept, but it makes me wonder why they did it in Flash.

Edit: it looks like Microsoft came around and replaced the Flash by Silverlight.

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After twiddling around with the AIR UI, I found a few tiny bits that bothered me and as I continued using the AIR UI, they only bothered me more. The bits that bothered me are actually basic parts of the FLASH UI but they never bothered me there.

The problem is the way UI items are styled. While I can live with, and certainly appreciate, custom icons for maximising, minimising and hiding windows, I have a hard time dealing with the custom scrollbars, the dropdownboxes that simply look and feel different ...

Somehow, it never bothered me while running in a browser because my mind was set on "it's Flash, it's in a browser, it's a plug-in, it's not running on your O/S so it doesn't have to behave like it's running on your O/S".

But now, we have AIR and, from a user POV, AIR is at least making it look like the application is running on my O/S. It's a detached window, floating around on my desktop and so I expect it to look more like it belongs on my desktop and not in a browser.

The whole UI thing is also a lot less bothersome on the MacBook. On the Wintop, it seems ... out of place. It makes all AIR applications look like a gadget instead of an application. It's okay for an application like Thwirl which I consider to be a gadget, but it may actually make life just a little more difficult for full-blown AIR applications to make it onto the commercial market.

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In an effort to keep things more user-friendly and to make sure you don't miss any of the available visualisations, I decided to enhance the demo player.
(more...)

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It's 23:06 and I can't seem to figure out how to add a checkbox to my movie ...

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