Daily Archives: May 28, 2008

microsoft, vista, windows

Microsoft wants to end the Windows release circus?

I’ve just received a press release summarizing what Microsoft is willing to say about Windows 7. Perhaps the most interesting comment is this one:

  • Microsoft’s goal looking forward is to focus on building Optimized Desktop infrastructures including an OS versus single point-in-time OS releases.

That sounds sensible. It also suggests that Microsoft is beginning to treat its client OS as mature, at least when it comes to the kernel and core. The problem with big OS releases, as we saw with Vista, is getting the drivers lined up and working properly. Treating OS upgrades more casually is fine as long as the drivers continue to work.

What else? Here are a few more snippets:

  • Windows 7 will ship around January 2010. Actually, the release says “approximately three years after the general availability of Windows Vista (January 30, 2007)”. Of course January is a terrible month to release a new OS; Vista ended up there by mistake. More likely is September 2009 (optimistic) or say  June 2010 (realistic).
  • Windows 7 will be available in both 32 and 64-bit.
  • Microsoft “will be baking touch right into the OS …the user interface is designed to make touch a natural part of the user experience – even on the smallest laptops.”
  • The goal with Windows 7 is that it will run on the same hardware as Windows Vista and that the applications and devices that work with Windows Vista will also be compatible with Windows 7.
microsoft, silverlight, software development

What’s coming in Windows? Check the PDC 2008 agenda

Microsoft’s Professional Developer’s Conference is traditionally where it shows developers its forward plans. Sometimes these do not work out as expected. Notorious examples include Hailstorm web services, and pre-reset Vista, in which Windows Presentation Foundation was more at the core, and which included the WinFS smart file system.

It follows that the just published session list for the PDC should not be treated as an infallible guide to the future. Still, there are interesting snippets here:

  • .NET and ASP.NET for Windows Server Core
  • Silverlight for Mobile devices
  • Touch computing in Windows 7
  • A “new networking API with support for building SOAP based web services in native code”
  • and of course the Live Mesh developer platform
adobe, internet, microsoft, silverlight, web authoring

Mac users refusing to install Silverlight

1 Comment

The New York Times has run into a hail of criticism from Mac users over its use of Microsoft’s Silverlight plug-in for its offline reader, Times Reader, in its new Mac version, now in beta.

I took a careful look at the comments. There are 122 at the time of writing, of which around half are complaints about the choice of Silverlight. Here’s a few:

Nope. Not going to use *anything* from Microsoft. If reading the NYT requires MS products then, for this reader, goodbye NYT.

Silverlight? Why? I’m using Mac to escape Microsft’s crappy technology.
No thanks

PLEASE listen to your readers. Macs have a long, successful history of superior page layout, design, and rendering of published content. There is absolutely no reason to require a Microsoft plugin to display text and graphics on a Mac.

Silverlight will not install on Firefox on an Intel Mac (all versions current.) Why, O, why did you choose to go with a proprietary Microsoft technology with all the predictable Microsoft flaws and prejudices?

I was really looking forward to this, but I cannot support Microsoft’s Silverlight platform. Not only is it proprietary, but it runs more slowly than any alternative (Java, Flash) and it does not support end-user choice of browsers (Firefox, Safari not supported).

By way of balance, there are some dissenting voices:

Sometimes I find it hard to admit I’m a mac user. What a community of loud close-minded drama queens. “I’m canceling my subscription because you built an app that requires silverlight.” Please.

I took a look. My Mac is running Leopard (OS 10.5) and Safari is the default browser. I downloaded the beta and ran the installer. It duly invited me to install Silverlight:

Clicking the button took me to Microsoft’s download page, where I clicked the big button:

Downloaded, opened the download, and Silverlight installed:

Installation was quick, and at the end invited me to restart the browser – though it seemed to do so automatically. Microsoft’s web page now informed me that Silverlight was installed and showed an animation.

At this point, I was able to continue the Times Reader installation, which said “A suitable version of Silverlight has been found”. A couple of clicks later, I was up and running:

The application worked well in my brief test. The most obvious difference from the Windows version is that there are four fixed window sizes, rather than on-the-fly reflowing of text. It will be interesting to see if the more advanced Silverlight 2.0 can come closer to the full WPF (Windows Presentation Foundation) version; if it can, there would be a good case for implementing both versions in Silverlight. It is an interesting project, since it runs Silverlight within a desktop application, rather in the manner of Adobe’s AIR.

Maybe Flash would have been as good or better, though as I understand it the New York Times finds XAML, the layout language in Silverlight, an excellent fit for what it wants to achieve. Nevertheless, my experience suggests that blanket hostility to Silverlight on the Mac is hard to justify from a technical perspective. In fact, Microsoft has done a good job in respect of keeping the download size small and making installation smooth. Admin rights were requested, but no restart was needed.

Still, if Silverlight attracts so much bile from readers of the NY Times it suggests Microsoft has a considerable problem on its hands. I’d imagine it is off-putting to others who are considering the development of Silverlight apps, since Mac support is a critically important feature.