May 21, 2008
Rich Internet Applications have been gaining a lot of popularity lately, but I had recently written about how some of the most popular tech blogs like TechCrunch, All About Microsoft and ReadWriteWeb had not done their homework and published information that is ridiculously wrong.
One of the most ludicrous results of their posts has been the several ill-informed comparisons of Adobe AIR and Microsoft Silverlight all over the web. Even thought both AIR and Silverlight enable developers to build Rich Internet Applications, both of them are very different beings and cannot be compared…
Microsoft Silverlight is a browser plugin and is sort of similar to Adobe’s Flash Player and Flex Framework taken together
Adobe AIR is cross platform desktop runtime that allows developers to build desktop applications using web technologies, it has no real equivalent in the Microsoft world.
In response to my posts, Peter Elst started a badge campaign to let the world know that it is wrong to say the words AIR and Silverlight in the same breath.
So here’s my badge, feel free to use the image in whatever way you like and help spread the word.
May 10, 2008
Yesterday I wrote about how several A-list bloggers are confused about various Rich Internet Application technologies and don’t exactly know what each one is. I also shared an example of how Mary Jo Foley’s recent post was wrong in so many ways and how I had noticed a similarly confused post on TechCrunch a while back.
Swaroop just twittered me the latest example from ReadWriteWeb … read more
May 9, 2008
Mary Jo Foley, who blogs about Microsoft on her very popular ZDnet blog has an article titled “Microsoft Live Mesh to get more competition from Sun” where she says …
Robert Brewin, Sun Chief Technology Officer and Distinguished Engineer, described Hydrazine to me as a combination of Amazon’s Elastic Cloud, Microsoft’s Live Mesh and Google Analytics all rolled into one. It’s a platform that Sun is building on top of JavaFX ….
Wo !! something seems wrong already … read more
April 29, 2008
My last post was about how I doubt Microsoft’s cross platform commitment with silverlight since I see the player behaving differently on different platforms even on a page that’s supposed to be the face of the technology … today i had a different experience with the same page i.e Silverlight.net Showcase Page.
This time the page told me that I do not have Silverlight 1.0 when I actually have the latest Silverlight 2.0 player installed … read more
April 21, 2008
Given history, its sometimes hard to believe Microsoft’s cross platform commitments.
Here is a screen shot of the siverlight.net showcase page, it throws an exception when opened on my Mac on Safari 3.1, Silverlight 2.0 Beta .. but it does not throw any exception when I open the same page on my Windows XP virtual machine also running Safari 3.1, Silverlight 2.0 Beta.
I am willing to cut Microsoft some slack given that Silverlight 2 is in beta, but I hope to bring home the point that they do need to pay some more attention to cross platform compatibility, a truly cross platform plugin should behave the same everywhere.
Click here or on the image to enlarge it.
