F·L·A·S·H·I·S·M

Yes, thats true. 2GB of free space from Adobe. Plus an online version of Photoshop to fix / enhance your photos.

Update: New screenshot

So far it feels like a great service. On some blogs I read an impression maybe its too late for such service where there are already number of other services with similar features.

Well, I think coming late in scene have its disadvantages, but the biggest benefit could be, learning all the good things from earlier services. And offer something which users are expecting — Just like Microsoft did by bringing Silverlight, learning everything from Flash.

At this time, beta of service is ready. You can start here.

// chall3ng3r //

I watched the keynote live from visitmix.com, and was thrilled to see great demonstrations done with Silverlight 2.0.

I was just waiting for the mobile part of the Silverlight. There were two demos of Silverlight Mobile, one on a Windows Mobile 6 device, and other was on Nokia N95 8GB. Both applications looked great.

The on-demand stream of the keynote is now available, you can watch the entire keynote, or if you want to just skip to the Silverlight Mobile part, goto 2:12 time, where the demo of the two mobile applications were shown.

You can download Silverlight Beta 1 from Silverlight website, and also download the SDK and tools to develop Silverlight applications from the tools section.

If you are unaware of what is Silverlight, you might also want to take a look at this overview.

MS also released beta version of IE8, which some cool new features. For example, Activities and WebSlices. I really enjoyed the WebSlices idea. Check out the IE8 website for more.

Unfortunately, Silverlight Mobile beta was not released, but there’s a recent update on MIX website about new sessions for IE8 and Mobile.

I’m currently scheduling downloads in my download manager. I’ll post some experiments with Silverlight 2.0 soon.

// chall3ng3r //

WOW, Nokia and Microsoft getting together to put Silverlight on Nokia devices. This includes Nokia S60, S40 and Tablet (Maemo) devices. Thats really cool!

Nokia’s official press release is here.

Here are some notable excerpts from deferent sources:

The expectation is that Silverlight will be embedded on new Nokia devices and downloadable to those already in the market.

^ view source

At MIX, Nokia will demonstrate Silverlight applications on its Series 60 and Series 40 handsets, and announce a beta program for its runtime. Phones with Silverlight should be on sale from the end of this year.
…
Microsoft will be developing a portability kit so Nokia can port Silverlight from the desktop to its mobile platform; that kit eventually will be available to other handset providers as well, Honeybone said.

^ view source

Microsoft chose to work with Nokia because it has the largest market share of mobile phones, but it will sign on with other handset makers to create ports of Silverlight, Case said.

All the main features of Silverlight, including video and interactive Web application development, will be included in all mobile versions.

But there will be some device-specific restraints, which means Microsoft will create editions of Silverlight for different mobile platforms, he said.

^ view source

Support for S40 platform is great move. So, Nokia making Silverlight to their own proprietary S40 platform means other companies can do it as well = more number of devices from mid-level to high-end smartphones.

Microsoft is now looking quite aggressive with Silverlight strategy, which is a good sign. Its always good to have competition.

My thoughts about Flash Lite and Silverlight Mobile

Adobe Flash Lite is here for long time, but it has been moving forward really slow. We have seen three updates to Flash Lite from 2003, but all the updates focused on performance and memory management, except from Flash Lite 1.x to 2, which added AS1/2 support.

Flash Lite is implemented in deferent modes. Which include wallpaper, screensaver, MMI/Phone menu system (Man Machine Interface, only available to OEMs), and standalone. The standalone implementation is something which offer developers to make applications and casual games, but its very much limited with access to device specific functions, like simple File I/O.

Recently released Flash Lite 3 adds FLV video support, but it adds limitation for application to be local-only or network-only. Applications made for Flash Lite 1.1 and 2 which use network fails silently on Flash Lite 3.

The other limitation is Flash Lite player available from Adobe is for developers “only”. Developers cannot distribute it with their games / applications or suggest users to download from Adobe’s website. They have to wait for a year or so, for devices to come with pre-installed version of Flash Lite that application requires.

Adobe have two big products (Flash Cast and Flash Home) which are based on same Flash Lite technology, but targeted towards mobile operators. Not available to developers, even for development.

For what I see is, Flash Lite standalone was developed to prepare developers for Flash Cast and Flash Home products. Flash Lite does not feature proper pack-and-distribute system, like J2ME, PyS60 and now Nokia’s WRT have. But there are solutions like SWF2Go, to tackle that.

Microsoft is coming from behind, and they have been learning from mistakes Macromedia/Adobe made in past. Silverlight Mobile can learn a lot from J2ME and Adobe’s Flash Lite *experiment*.

In another article, I found that Silverlight will eventually come as offline as well, just like AIR. So, we can expect an offline version of Silverlight Mobile as well.

I’m now waiting for the beta version of Silverlight Mobile *runtime* to see what it have to offer for developers.

This post looks a bit anti-Adobe, but its a fact that I’m a long-time Flash / Flash Lite developer and I hope Adobe could see what I have been trying to highlight here

// chall3ng3r //

Microsoft has recently been quite active with big announcements, updates to developer tools and Windows OS.

On Monday, MS announced they will give away VS, Expression and Windows Server absolutely FREE to students worldwide.

Read more here, and here.

Very impressive move to get crowd stick to MS, seems quite workable idea :)

Adobe also recently made available Adobe Flex Builder free to students. MS following the same idea making it head-on competition for RIA development tools.

Microsoft is very good with getting their technology to masses quickly. And they’ve proven record of it. For example, MS .Net Framework. They made it available to public in early beta, released comprehensive SDK with documentation. And did not charged developers to ship .Net runtime with their applications.

Giving away Expression and VS2008 will also boost Silverlight adoption rapidly. More Silverlight applications means, greater number of users downloading Silverlight runtime daily.

Lets see how it goes.

// chall3ng3r //

I have been keeping my eyes open for latest developments on Silverlight and AIR.

I just read Daniel’s post about AIR is not a competitor to Silverlight, well that’s correct. Also, Flex is not a direct competitor as well. Its just about client runtimes, Flash and Silverlight, which actually renders content in browser and provide APIs to developers to create interactive experiences.

AIR can run Flash and AJAX based applications on desktop, which is great. I think it will be awesome if AIR could also host Silverlight applications.

Silverlight v1.0, released a few days back, renders XAML for content and provides APIs for creating interactions via JavaScript. And it run in WebKit based Safari browser as well.

I have pretty bad experience getting my words to Adobe (formerly Macromedia). So I hope they will get my wish from my blog

// chall3ng3r //

Finally Microsoft released Silverlight v1.0 to masses. Before 5 Sep 2007, only developers were using it. it had 0% penetration on Internet connected systems. Lets see how it goes.

Also, there is new update of Silverlight 1.1 alpha.

I’m really excited about this new technology. As i love to R&D, i will surely give it a try. i already have some ideas where to use it

// chall3ng3r //

I noticed this nice comparison, where Silverlight is actually compared with its correct counterpart, the Flash Player, rather than Flex.

http://shoutat.blogspot.com/2007/08/microsoft-silverlight-vs.html

I don’t call it that accurate as it misinforms about some features of Flash, but it worth a look.

don’t forget to read my comments over there, and post yours if you like

// chall3ng3r //

Microsoft is improving Silverlight in every new release. the new thing i noticed from many others, is a better version information for currently installed Silverlight runtime through right-click context menu. It shows complete version info including build numbers. User can also set Silverlight Update options under the Updates tab.

Adobe Flash only shows major version number when you right-click on Flash content. When you click About Flash Player 9, it opens new browser window and redirect you to a page which contains a Flash movie and JS code to detect and show the Flash Player version. Its a bit lengthy process i suppose.

// chall3ng3r //