Silverlight, Blend 3 & Sketchflow. Has MS merely simplified the complexities of Flash?
Had an interesting day today being shown around the various applications used to create Silverlight projects. It seems to me that Microsoft have gone down the same route that Google went down with their review of email which gave birth to Google Wave. Blend 3 has made simple the tasks that are complicated and drawn-out in Flash and brought rich application development up to date with all the functionality you'd expect of a modern web application.
I'm interested to see how Silverlight changes the way we use the web. There are clearly some functions that are easy to implement and as such i'd expect them to become more prevalent in Silverlight applications. Its dynamic video handling properties impressed me the most and that's where i can see it adding value over Flash. Apart from that, it is a very different (well, Microsoft) way of working and there's many excellent designers out there who are too loyal to their Macs to make the switch (currently it is only possible to develop on Windows). I'd love to produce some work with Silverlight, a subtle excuse to develop something for use with MS Surface. I imagine it is only a matter of time before the Silverlight plugin penetrates deep enough into the average user's browser and developers are willing to propose to their clients that the Silverlight framework is the right place to work.
[…] It is also challenging Microsoft’s Silverlight technology. I’ve spoken before about how Silverlight has great potential when it comes to video over Flash, but if you throw HTML5 and H.246 into the mix then there’s […]