I’ve been looking at some of the silverlight websites, and they look awesome!

Acropolis is Visual Studio on WPF, not WPF/e (very different.) And while I think there may be a future for 3D (or at least in non-traditional multidimensional interaction UX), it is just not new by all means or, most importantly, what I was saying was that the MS XAML 3D UX is not feature-rich enough yet nor is it honed enough in its user interaction model. It is still playing catch-up.

As for MS “surface”, while I am from the U.S., I freelanced with a group out of Canada two years ago that pioneered a “surface” like application that would project onto any surface including glass (which means that it worked like MS Surface) and allow people to interact with and alter the state of the screen (it used two cameras to determine interaction in three dimentions; something MS isn’t doing yet.) Check out http://www.gesturetek.com (specifically GestureFX is who I worked with.) And you won’t believe what was being used to develop the actual applications that interacted with the hardware… (drum-roll please) FLASH! Yes. You can see this technology in place today at movie theaters on the floor, outside businesses in Chicago on Michigan Ave. and in NFL stadiums across the U.S.

I contest that we continue to experience the marketing of Microsoft and while I am fine with that, we don’t need to go all googly-eyed and think that we are becoming early adopters to a new technology front. I am fine with a free and open market and want MS to get good at this. We can only benefit from the competition. But right now, this is not new tech, just new marketing for a less-than fully-featured alternative.

The world changes…echo boomers have all the power and money in the marketer’s eyes. If you look at other WPF/XAML projects like Acropolis and Surface, Microsoft is for far ahead in recognizing the market trends and developing products that address their needs that they will be leaving the competition firmly in the dust. The reason the compettion is struggling is that they are still looking at things like they we’re 10 years ago and assuming the same demands and requirements for the web exist…they don’t….and yester-years technologies don’t have what it takes to address what users will be demanding from the web in the next decade…..Web 2.0 is entiely about Bling, and 3D will be firmly at the center of it….

Silverlight/Linux: This is actually a comment to Aral Balkan’s blog, which I’ve typed out and submitted twice, but which has disappeared twice, so I’m republishing it over here. Aral wrote on Friday about that “Ported to Linux in 21 Days!” story, …

Checked the moderation queue, nothing from you in it. I think your previous comment may have been lost. Sorry. Can you please resubmit it (or send it to me via email and I’ll post it for you.)

I am a Microsoft developer (VB and C# to 2005 … started VB in version 3, including the Visual DOS version) and have been working with ASP (to .NET 2005) since 1993, so I am not new at this. Mind you, I have also been working with Adobe Flash (to CS3) since Macromedia Flash (version 2.) I am in now way just jumping on the bandwagon and confused about what web 2.0 actually is.

Let me explain what I mean by “I completely disagree.” About half a decade ago there was a very popular product called “Shockwave.” Shockwave content was built, first, using a tool called “Macromedia Director.” Director was quite popular but twice as expensive as it was popular. Soon grew up Flash, which did a lot of what Director did minus the 3D stuff. Soon, so much focus went into building both the visual design elements of Flash and then later the advances of the ActionScript language. Director and it’s 3D capabilities were soon left behind.

Here is the funny bit. Nobody seemed to care that Director and its 3D went away. Business and marketing groups didn’t feel the demand for that required an continued investment in Director. Firms like ElectricRain built some cheater 3D tools for flash and the market was more than satisfied.

The bottom line is that the whole full comunication loop is completely functional for flash, in getting the front and back end systems to communicate. There are no holes. No juryrigging required. And Flash can talk to web services and retrieve and create XML and submit data. If Flash suddenly wanted to implement some robust 3D engine, I am confident that they could convert some retired Director code, but I think you will find that the eye-candy microsoft is pimping right now (called Silverlight) is just eons behind what is already out there.

The trouble with this whole thing is that MS catches you with the eye-candy, but after you take the time to investigate and invest you only then realize that there isn’t enough under the hood yet.

I am not saying Flash doesn’t do the eye-candy thing. They just have a mature engine under the hood (and did I mention the player is open source, and so is ActionScript, and so is Flex, etc.) If anyone has anything more to complain about with Adobe Flash, then people are just wanting something for nothing.

I hate to say it, and I am all for alternatives and competition, but trading down to Silverlight from something like Flash would be like choosing an abacus rather than buying a computer.

More power to the MS community for trying to grow this up, but right now it isn’t nearly mature enough. It is another MS geek-toy (notice that the vector precision isn’t good enough to pass QC in any art department anywhere!) I wouldn’t recommend backing this product in your companies any time soon. If your biggest argument for pursuing this is that you don’t want to learn another programming language (ie. ActionScript), but you know JavaScript (JScript) and/or C#, then there is good news for you. ActionScript shares the same parents as C# and JavaScript (JScript): ECMAScript specification. You are likely already more than equipt to start banging out code behind Flash and Flex (which, the flash player 9 already has a 83% market saturation with 98% for Player 7) than you think!

Off topic i know, but i have tagged you with the 8 random facts meme. If you have the time, please join in.
Regards

James

I AGREE!