Well, too early to do a comparison but Bill has a nice post describing the current status and more infos coming soon.
Anyway, I got few questions:
- Is Silverlight mobile a “plugin” for the browser? Or is similar to the Flash Lite runtime?
- Also as far as I understand, the media part allows only WMA, mp3 and WMV. Are these codecs part of the Silverlight runtime?
Well, some more R&D to do! Like I have nothing to do already!!! 
Alessandro
it seems that you have a great job… =D
Maybe you can just wait for a day and Microsoft will tell you…
Ciao Alex,
I believe so, the N95 is perfect for on stage demonstration as it is the only one with TV out. Still trying to find a way to show output from my iPhone to TV….
Ciao,
I have a N82 with TV out!
I personally think it’s the killer feature of these phone. They become you Media/Game center, no need of a TV, just a screen to output what ever you are doing on the phone!!
What do you think of SilverLight?
Alessandro
yes… sorry mate, can’t keep up with Nokia models!
With SilverLight on desktop I have mixed feeling, maybe too little too late. To be honest I HATE xml declarative coding, I have built my own version of SL a few months ago and 70% of the time was spent decoding XAML constructs and the many ways they can be interpreted (why you would ever need 5 different ways of specifying a color, just to mention one?). The sheer simplicity of SWF format (whole in one) is second to none and it is critical when transposing to mobile. With SL you can’t embed anything binary within the XAML, so everything should be external and packed into a zip to make it easy to transport; unfortunately ZIP file need to be decompressed before being able to be used.
SWF, even compressed, allows for bitstream usage, you can use things from the file without the need to decompress it; SL required the whole file to be received before even start using it. Of course not many people will code a SL plugin, so let’s concentrate on the user side of things.
For coders it is pretty flexible: Javascript and any .NET language can use of it, I like particularly the fact that animations can be defined using time span paradigm, rather than exclusively as frame actions as in Flash. MS Blend provides an adequate support for graphics and simple coding, but it is nowhere near the Flash IDE in term on features, at least at the drawing department. I agree anyway that integration with coding IDE (Visual Studio) is far better than the ridiculous Actions pane of Flash ID. MS has to do a huge job in convincing people to use their stuff especially when people like it to be multiplatform.
Regarding mobile, I’m not sure, apparently it is up to Nokia to port the code. If Nokia will learn from Adobe mistakes, beside providing plugin and runtime, they will integrate rendering services at a lower level, so a native application can make use of VG rendering without the need of being written in the runtime own language. Treating this thing without being fan boy of either side, I see it as just another opportunity to leverage skills.
Cheers,
Lev
Ciao Emanuele,
thanks for the infos.
Alessandro
…..and I really hope they won’t call it SilverLightLite
Uhm.. not sure… a weather displaying application isn’t exactly exciting and the cheap shot againt FL could have been avoided. Three weeks to make this? It would be a luxury if I had the same time for many of my much more complex projects. I was more interested in watching the rendering speed, but beside some basic screen transition I didn’t see much animation there. And I really hope that the slow snow falling animation was really meant to be at that speed.
yeap, I saw it too !! Agree. You can do the same demo with WRT !
Hopefully we will see more demos with the media part if is implemented.
Alessandro
Hi Alex,
I can answer one of your question: it is implemented as plugin to IE….. the worst possible choice
Cheers,
Lele
Hey,
@Emanuele Cipolloni: Your finding are correct. SL works the other way. On the desktop it seems no issue, but on mobile, it could be a big concern. But lets see.
I was also not impressed with the performance that was show. Maybe it was because its early builds.
// chall3ng3r //