October 14th, 2008

Digging into the Silverlight 2 announcement

Posted by Ryan Stewart @ 12:01 am

Categories: Microsoft, Rich Internet Applications, Silverlight

Tags: Microsoft Silverlight, Eclipse, Numbers Game, Linux, Java Development Tools, Microsoft Development Tools, Open Source, Operating Systems, Software, Development Tools

(Update: It also looks like you can grab the final bits as of 12:01 this morning: http://www.microsoft.com/silverlight/resources/install.aspx?v=2.0)

After listening to the Q&A from the press conference today (recording here), digging into some of the details, and reading some of the commentary on various blogs, there are a few things that I don’t quite understand about the announcement today. I think part of this is because there wasn’t a whole lot of new news from the announcement and it was more of a direction announcement than anything. Of course, I work for Adobe, so I look at the world differently. The end result is that it’s great Silverlight 2 is finally out in the wild. As an RIA enthusiast and an Adobe employee I’ve witnessed that Adobe does its most innovative work when both our community and our competitors push us. But there are a few things that struck me as odd from the release.

The 1 in 4 Number
Scott Guthrie said that “already one in four consumers worldwide has access to a computer with Silverlight already installed” but I’m not quite sure what that number means. Ben Romano from the Seattle Times noticed it too and it seems like an odd metric to use. The numbers game is a little bit bogus everywhere because there are so many ways to measure things: downloads, penetration, etc. The other numbers show that Silverlight is gaining traction, but it’s hard for developers to do a direct penetration comparison with Flash right now.

Linux
In the Q&A, Tim Anderson asked about Linux support. Right now Silverlight has partial support for 1.0 (though it doesn’t include video or MP3 playback, two of the main features of Silverlight 1.0) and there is no support for 2 on Linux right now. As Tim notes, it’s misleading to tout the cross platform aspect of Silverlight without an actual release. It’s also surprising that there was absolutely nothing in terms of a roadmap for Linux. My hunch is that they wanted something to announce for PDC and this may be it. As Brian Goldfarb mentioned in the Q&A session, Miguel de Icaza, who runs the Moonlight effort, has a session at PDC although his session doesn’t say anything about Silverlight/Moonlight so I’m not sure what to make of that.

Eclipse Support
This is the one I was most bummed about. The announcement about Eclipse support for Silverlight is a big deal. As a Mac developer I’ve been waiting for a way to build Silverlight apps on my Mac (what better way to scope out the competition than to start building apps on their platform). But the release of Eclipse4sl is currently Windows only with support coming from others “soon”. I agree that it makes sense for Microsoft to woo developers outside the Microsoft ecosystem, but why use Eclipse on Windows when you have Visual Studio? Ask any developer and they will tell you Visual Studio is basically a gold standard for IDEs. Even more, as part of the press release they announced that Silverlight support extends to Visual Studio 2008 Express, the free version of Visual Studio. So if I can use the free version of arguably the best IDE out there to create Silverlight 2 apps, why do I want to use Eclipse? Hopefully “soon” really does mean soon for Eclipse Silverlight support on the Mac.

The other parts of the announcement are significant. Opening up the components is great, especially considering the gigantic ecosystem of Microsoft developers out there. Nick Hoover asked about Silverlight inside Microsoft and the response was that over 100 campaigns had been run with Silverlight. Most of these seem to be very video centric, but I can only assume more actual applications will be coming from the world’s largest software maker.

Now that Silverlight 2 is out, the RIA battle heats up more. As I mentioned above, that’s a good thing for me or anyone who wants to watch Adobe and Microsoft add features and functionality. I’m looking forward to being able to start talking about Silverlight 3 and Flash Player 11 soon.

October 13th, 2008

Silverlight 2 is released, available for download tomorrow

Posted by Ryan Stewart @ 9:16 am

Categories: Microsoft, Rich Internet Applications, Silverlight

Tags: Microsoft Silverlight, Silverlight 2, Productivity, Corporate Communications, Linux, Open Source, Marketing, Operating Systems, Software, Ryan Stewart

Microsoft announced this morning that Silverlight 2 will be available for download tomorrow. So after a long beta period that included big events using Silverlight including the Olympics and the DNC, the bits are going to be out there. The press release includes some impressive numbers:

Silverlight adoption continues to grow rapidly, with penetration in some countries approaching 50 percent and a growing ecosystem that includes more than 150 partners and tens of thousands of applications. During the 17 days of the 2008 Olympics Games in Beijing, NBCOlympics.com, powered by Silverlight, had more than 50 million unique visitors, resulting in 1.3 billion page views, 70 million video streams and 600 million minutes of video watched, increasing the average time on the site (from 3 minutes to 27 minutes) and Silverlight market penetration in the U.S. by more than 30 percent. Broadcasters in France (France Televisions SA), the Netherlands (NOS), Russia (Sportbox.ru) and Italy (RAI) also chose Silverlight to deliver Olympics coverage online.

The 50 percent penetration in some countries is what jumps out at me right away. I’m not sure if that’s for Silverlight 1 or the Silverlight 2 beta. I’d assume the latter. But there are a few other very interesting announcements in the press release.

One is that Microsoft is going to be working with Soyatec to bring Silverlight development capabilities to Eclipse, which in theory means that we could finally have Mac and possibly even Linux development tools for Silverlight. According to the press release this will also be free. A technology preview of the tool is available now (I’m downloading as we speak - but the current tool is only available for Windows).

There was supposed to be an event with Scott Guthrie this morning but the dial in doesn’t work for me. I’ll be watching the recording later and should have more info later today.

October 10th, 2008

Is Google working on the synchronization problem?

Posted by Ryan Stewart @ 7:55 am

Categories: Adobe, Google, Microsoft, Rich Internet Applications

Tags: Google Inc., Rich Internet Application, Microsoft Corp., ReadWriteWeb, Zoho Mail, Ryan Stewart

ReadWriteWeb has a post up about the fact that Zoho has added offline access to Zoho Mail using Gears. Zoho continues to do a really good job of innovating when it comes to Ajax-based RIAs. They were very early to the game in creating offline support for Zoho Docs before Google beating them by almost 5 months.

As I’ve mentioned before, the hardest part of the online/offline problem is synchronization. I’m not exactly sure how Zoho is implementing that part of offline Zoho Mail but I have to wonder if one of the reasons that Google hasn’t added support for Gears yet is that they’re spending a lot of time on the synchronization problem. Both Adobe and Microsoft have products that help handle online/offline synchronization. Adobe has LiveCycle Data Services and Microsoft has the Microsoft Sync Framework. It wouldn’t surprise me at all if Google was working on something similar and looking at how to bake it into Gears.

An open source synchronization platform would be a big deal and would go a long way towards blending the browser and the desktop. In a lot of ways I think that’s one of the major problems that has to be solved before we move on to the next generation of RIAs. I’ve been doing some thinking about the cloud and RIAs recently but you can’t fully jump into that unless you make it easy for developers to use the same piece of data wherever they are.

September 29th, 2008

Busy week for Microsoft: Silverlight and jQuery

Posted by Ryan Stewart @ 5:59 am

Categories: Ajax, Microsoft, Rich Internet Applications, Silverlight

Tags: Developer, Microsoft Silverlight, Microsoft Corp., Silverlight.net, Silverlight 2 RC, AJAX, Strategy, Internet, Software/Web Development, Web Development

I’m traveling so I wasn’t able to chime in on the availability of a Silverlight release candidate. One of the most important thing for developers is that it sounds like this will be the last round of API tweaks so there will be no more updating your applications. Silverlight.net has some information about what those API changes are. In addition to the API changes, there are some new controls to play with. Silverlight 2 RC includes a progress bar, a password input, and a combo box. The new controls are also included in a new service pack for Blend 2.0. Finally, there are some changes to the skins as well as some changes in how the skins render which will make Silerlight applications look cleaner in some cases.

We keep getting closer. As ScottGu says, it’s not that far off, and I’ve heard rumors to that effect. Microsoft recently had a bunch of independent developers in Redmond to go over the Sivlerlight roadmap, so I expect big things once Microsoft ships Silverlight 2. I think in general most developers are happy with the level of innovation that Adobe and Microsoft have been throwing into their respective projects. Eventually, however, I wouldn’t be surprised to see Flash Player and Silverlight diverge a bit. I think they’ll always compete at a basic and feature level, but I think it’s pretty obvious that the larger strategy of the two companies is different and I think Flash and Silverlight play a core role in those respective strategies. As each runtime becomes more driven by a larger strategy, innovation may start to happen in different areas. I just hope that everyone keeps swapping ideas.

Microsoft has also been busy on the Ajax front. They announced today that they’re incorporating support for jQuery into Visual Studio. I’m a big fan of what Microsoft has done with Ajax going back to the way they supported it in Silverlght 1. What’s really interesting is seeing the support for ADO.NET Data Services, which is a very, very big deal. Now more JavaScript developers have an easy, native entry point for writing apps that include Microsoft’s Data Services stack. That’s going to be significant.

September 22nd, 2008

Silverlight snippets from reMIX UK

Posted by Ryan Stewart @ 2:03 pm

Categories: Microsoft, Rich Internet Applications, Silverlight, WPF

Tags: Microsoft Silverlight, PDC, Web Browsers, Desktops, Internet, Hardware, Ryan Stewart

Microsoft held reMIX UK last week in Brighton which as others have noted was an addendum to the MIX conference in Las Vegas which unfortunately came in the shadow of PDC where we should probably see a Silverlight 2 release as well as a bunch of other goodies from Microsoft. But there was some good/new Silverlight info that came out from the conference:

There were some snippets of Silverlight news, or perhaps clarifications. Guthrie said the plug-in is getting 1.5 million installations a day, and that these will upgrade automatically to version 2.0, the .NET version, when it is released later this year. Unlike the beta, Silverlight 2.0 will have proper accessibility support, but H.264 capability will not appear until a future version. Guthrie also hinted that a 3D API is under development. Further controls, such as a Rich Text Editor, will be delivered as add-ons within the lifetime of version 2.0.

The 1.5 million download number is interesting, and I’d assume that most folks are downloading the beta which will auto upgrade. I also like the strategy of rolling out components as add-ons. That would even allow them to ship third party components if required, like Telerik’s Silverlight set. I’ll be curious to see how that process works but it could be a great community builder if they have some way of approving and adding components instead of just a standard dot release.

PDC is shaping up to be a big deal of an event for RIA developers. Along with what I’m assuming will be a Silverlight 2 release, we should get more info about the next gen of WPF as well as some additional info (and hopefully SDKs) around Live Mesh. Microsoft has so many pieces and I like the new focus on design as well as creating a pretty wide-ranging platform on which to deploy. You get the desktop story, the browser story, the cloud story, and everything else. One thing I heard came out of reMIX UK was that they’re doing a ton of API changes to Silverlight to make it more like WPF. Keep an eye on that. Silverlight can act as an up sell to WPF and by blending the two technologies it’s easier to get developers to hop back and forth.

September 9th, 2008

H.264 support coming for Silverlight

Posted by Ryan Stewart @ 10:05 am

Categories: Microsoft, Rich Media, Silverlight

Tags: Microsoft Silverlight, H.264, Corporate Communications, Marketing, Ryan Stewart

At the IAB conference in Europe, Microsoft announced that they would be supporting both the H.264 video codec and the AAC audio codec in a future version of Silverlight. Up until now, Microsoft has focused on VC-1 which powers all of Windows media. One of the differentiators of Flash was that the latest release of Flash Player 9 supported H.264 and AAC which are becoming something of a standard in the video industry. Apple heavily relies on H.264 and AAC to power it’s rich media offerings.

This is a pretty big deal as it makes Silverlight a possibility for companies that don’t want to use Windows Media for whatever reason. And when you combine this with last month’s news that Microsoft invested in Move Networks, and it’s clear Microsoft is very interested in online video. There’s no word on when this version of Silverlight would be available. I suppose there’s a chance that it could be released when Silverlight 2 goes out (which should be sometime soon) but more likely this is a Silverlight 3 feature. Update: Josh Catone got confirmation of this.

August 26th, 2008

How the world watched the Olympics online

Posted by Ryan Stewart @ 4:33 pm

Categories: Adobe, Flash, Microsoft, Online Video, Rich Internet Applications, Rich Media, Silverlight

Tags: China, Olympic Games, British Broadcasting Corp., Video, Flash, Corporate Communications, Marketing, Ryan Stewart

Much has been made of NBC’s Olympic numbers, which had the rights for online video in the US, and what that means for Silverlight. I thought the app was solid, the video quality was good, and all in all it was a win for Microsoft and RIAs. In that vein, I’m pretty impressed with how Adobe did across the rest of the world. The BBC in the UK and CCTV in China were both big Flash users. There were a number of other countries using Flash as well (and a couple using Silverlight). I think the numbers show that there’s worldwide interest in rich media and strong adoption of Flash.

In fact, the majority of online video for the Olympics was delivered in Flash. There’s a great blog post up by John O’Donovan, the Chief Technical Architect at the BBC about their Olympic numbers. For Beijing they streamed nearly 40 million videos with up to 5.5 million Olympic videos watched each day at an average of around 3 million. In total there were 6.5 million hours of video delivered using Flash by the BBC. What those numbers don’t include are streams from the BBC iPlayer or the mobile platforms. It’s all Flash in the browser. Compare that to 72 million videos in the states, and it shows that in a country much smaller than the US, online the Olympics was a hit.

More importantly, the numbers out of China are fantastic. In the first 10 days CCTV’s website streamed Olympic coverage to 100 million people according to the New York Times (registration required). CCTV used an innovative system which combined Flash Media Server with their own P2P technology which made it easy for anyone in China to watch the Olympics regardless of bandwidth. So in China we’ll have 2,900 hours of Olympic content backed up and ready to watch with Flash Video.

What’s also interesting to see is how the BBC got more comfortable over the course of the Olympics with their video content. By the end of the Olympics they were actually putting the live video stream on the front page of the BBC News homepage as the lead story. That’s pretty impressive and I think it’s a very good sign that rich media is creeping even more deeply into a role as a primary way to consume content.

August 25th, 2008

Updated: Democratic National Convention site requires Silverlight and Move

Posted by Ryan Stewart @ 12:31 pm

Categories: Microsoft, Rich Internet Applications, Rich Media, Silverlight

Tags: Microsoft Silverlight, Plug-in, Democratic National Convention, Move, Ryan Stewart

There was a lot of buzz around the fact that Silverlight was going to be use at the Democratic national convention for video (my post here) and off the heels of the Olympics, it seemed like a good thing for Microsoft to get into and I was really looking forward to a good RIA experience for the convention. The application was built by Hard Rock Deep Zoom demo. With a great agency that can show off the technology, it seems odd to me to add Move to the mix.

Update: Got a note from Eric Schmidt, Director Media and Advertising Evangelis about the Move plugin:

The DNCC chose to use Move as a means to tackle their live high definition streaming needs. The Move install is part of any Move experience (Silverlight or Flash).

We are leveraging Move’s CMS system to manage content and Level 3’s CDN infrastructure to deliver the video to the Silverlight player. The Move “plugin” hands video frames to Silverlight for compositing, etc.

Last year Microsoft and Move announced a partnership which would allow Silverlight content to be used on top of Move’s dynamic streaming technology. At the time I didn’t think the Move plugin would be required, but if they’re using that for the DNC site then it looks like it will be required. Or this could be a helper to Move to get more plugin distribution.

Anyone have more info on the reason or purpose of the Move plugin?

August 24th, 2008

5 Photosynths that let you jump into another world

Posted by Ryan Stewart @ 11:09 pm

Categories: Design, Microsoft, Rich Internet Applications

Tags: Photograph, Photosynth, Ryan Stewart

Photosynth launched last week to a lot of fanfare and it’s definitely one of the coolest things I’ve seen come out of Microsoft. It’s also one of the more interesting RIA examples out there. It provides a really great user interface and a level of richness for photos that the web hasn’t ever seen. A week after launch there is a decent collection of “synths” out there which show off the technology pretty well. I found 5 that are unique, interesting, and will absolutely take you away from whatever you’re doing and put you in another world. I can’t wait to see more people use this (and to see it available on a Mac). So put on some music and get ready to jump around the planet.

Boats by Chihuly
Chihuly has always been famous for his glasswork. In this Photosynth you get to see it like never before. You can zoom around the boat, and drill into detail. It’s a perfect example of how art and technology can blend to provide a really great user experience.

Climbing Aegialis
Not only is the scenery good, but making a person the focal point of a synth makes for a very interesting visualization. As you click through different views you can watch the climber move along the rock. As the background changes you almost get the sense that you’re the one doing all the hard work.

Halo 3 Zanzibar
Played Halo 3? Then this level will be familiar. Using screenshots of the game we’re able to jump into the middle of the Halo world like it was any other place on Earth. It’s got a bunch of photos and it’s really cool to zoom out and watch the 3D shapes form.

Stonehenge
National Geographic did a bunch of Photosynths and I thought Stonehenge was one of the best. They took more than 400 photos of the ancient monument which gives the user complete control over what and how they want to see it. It’s one of the more complete synths on the site and you can spend hours crawling over the rocks and stones.

Scoble Family Room
Yup, Scoble synthed his family room. But in doing show he proved that Photosynth is also great for small spaces and family memories. With only 50 photos, Robert was basically able to recreate his room which makes for a great way to share with friends and family (and the entire Internet). But the small space means it’s easy to move around and is a great demo for showing how well Photosynth can stitch together basically anything.

August 11th, 2008

Numbers on the NBC's Silverlight Olympic Coverage

Posted by Ryan Stewart @ 11:05 am

Categories: Microsoft, Online Video, Rich Media, Silverlight

Tags: NBC, Microsoft Silverlight, Coverage, Tom Steinert-Threlkeld, TVs, Tv & Home Theater, Personal Technology, Home Entertainment, Ryan Stewart

Tom Steinert-Threlkeld has a great rundown of the numbers behind this weekend’s Olympic coverage. The highest day of coverage was on August 10th and it saw about 3.42 million video streams with 66.7 million page views and an average time spent on the site of 15 minutes. Pretty good numbers but as the BTL piece notes, that’s only about 2% of a typical YouTube day. So it didn’t exactly take the world by storm.

But one number I thought was interesting was that according to the Wall Street Journal, 90% of people watched the TV exclusively while only 0.2% watched the online version exclusively. But a decent number, 10%, watched both TV and the online version. This is the number I’m most interested in tracking through the games because I think that’s the best example of how people are changing their viewing habits towards rich media online. Giving up TV entirely would be a little ridiculous, but if the big media companies can augment TV coverage with more detailed (or more obscure) coverage on the web, that’s a winning formula.

In general, I’ve been pretty happy with the NBC and the Silverlight Olympics experience. Though some of the criticisms are well founded, that’s more to do with failure in the actual application than it is technology.

More info at Beet.tv.