Friday, May 25, 2007

Silverlight: WMV for OS X Intel

MS is porting a media centric portion of the .NET framework to OS X. This is Microsoft's Flash-killer. Nothing for Linux, but a Mac client is promised. Alas, the next version will be Intel only, no PPC support.

The lack of PPC support is revealing. This is a project to kill QuickTime/Windows and Flash. Once that is done Microsoft will abandon the Mac.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Since most graphic designers and (professional) webdesigners use OS X, I doubt that Silverlight will ever become a serious alternative to Adobe's Flash for them. They sure won't give up their Mac for Silverlight.

Anonymous said...

Flash is popular with designers, but is very limited in terms of building applications. The Silverlight framework has all the features of Flash, plus a full development system.

Flash will be around for a while, but Silverlight has the potential to take over. I'm currently working on a video website (like everybody else) and found flash to be severely lacking in features. You can skin players and add some Javascript controls, but that's about it. I'm running with Silverlight.

It's technically superior, but Flash is ubiquitous and shiny.