Silverlight: No Mac Love?
on 04.23.07, 07:05am in mac, microsoft • Comments (12)
I was chatting with a friend yesterday about Silverlight and how it was really good it was to see Microsoft finally supporting the Mac outside of Mac Office. And while I generally agree, I have to admit, it’s pretty clear that Mac users are designated to be consumers of Silverlight’s content (download the runtime here), rather than part of the it’s development community. Here’s why I say that:
- The SDK is “Windows only”. Sure, you can download the SDK, but it’s only available as a .msi (Windows Installer) file. I’m not sure exactly what’s in it since I can’t open it, but I’d think that the documentation and sample code would be something that any user, mac or pc, would want to have. There’s really no reason why Microsoft can’t post this in a .zip file and have the docs in PDF format. Heck, even if they insisted on a CHM help file, you could always use chmox to view it on a Mac.
- The SDK online documents don’t render properly. The next stop I made was to MSDN to check out the online docs. Using Firefox 2.0.0.3, I had all sorts of rendering issues on MSDN which made it impossible to view the online documentation. At least firing up Safari gave me some material that I was able to read, but it’s still annoying that problems like this still exist today.
- No tools. Now that I was able to some of the documentation, I ended up just having to use TextMate to hack around a bit with it. While WPF/E Pad seems to work ok, it would have been nice to have some rudimentary tools available to hack around with.
- The Video Encoder is “Windows only”. Is there a way to encode VC-1 content on a Mac? I know I can use Flip4Mac to encode my video into certain formats of WMV (WMV7, 8, 9, etc), but there doesn’t seem to be a way to get video into the hidef VC-1 format. The Expression Media Encoder is currently for Windows only.
Oh well.
While it was fun to play with, in order for me to even consider using it instead of Flash, I’m first going to need the proper tools on the Mac to enable me make content for it. While I’d love to see some video encoding support for it (both GUI and command line tools would be awesome), I have this strange feeling that I’m going to need to either Bootcamp or fire up Parallels to do that. It’ll be interesting to see what the story will be at MIX ‘07 next week.
Update: Sean asked me to mention that this is based on the alpha bits that are out today.
Antonio (April 23, 2007 @ 8:01 am)
Yeah, I’m stickin with Flip4Mac. It has been the best for me and WMV content. Can’t see why MS would bother with a Mac concern, since it abandoned everything previously.
Master William (April 23, 2007 @ 8:40 am)
Just as I expected.
I figured the ‘Mac support’ would be second class citizen at best and non existent at worst.
And the greater the adoption of Silverlight, the worse it will get for Mac users Initial featuhave done this time and time again. Initial near feature parity only to slowly but surely drop Mac development altogether to reinforce the Windows platform.
Steve (April 23, 2007 @ 8:40 am)
I’m sticking with ffmpeg to covert my videos to flash right now for personal videos on the web. Otherwise, I just use H.264.
Nik Cubrilovic (April 23, 2007 @ 12:27 pm)
It is all plain-text so you can use any text-editor, as you said. I am sure that you will see more and more tools come out, because it is so easy to work with Silverlight. I really like what msft are doing here, my only concern, and it could be a deal-breaker for a lot of us - is that the new audio and video codecs are proprietary again. You don’t have to use VC-1, but it is going to be impossible to have a full Silverlight implementation on Linux/BSD or possibly even Mac OSX if Microsoft don’t open it up or just use an open codec.
I don’t see why they want to keep the audio/video codec closed
Sean Alexander (April 23, 2007 @ 8:02 pm)
Happy to discuss this with you Steve. Please point out next time however this is ALPHA quality- Silverlight beta isn’t until next week so people installing and/or taking your opinions at face value will be doing so based on a 3 month old build.
1. SDK is an .MSI - good feedback and easily remedied- I will talk to the team and post myself as a .zipfile if need be (likely not needed).
2. I’ll check w/ MSDN regarding rendering issues. Hardly a “By design” kind of issue.
3. You’re objecting to tools for an alpha product, hardly seems objective at Alpha but ok :). Did you hear we were demoing tools support at NAB- sneak preview style.
4. Yes, Expression Media Encoder is Windows only. But Expression Media is still available for Mac so there’s no subversive plan here. You and I worked together and you know the economics of limited resources and diminishing returns. Partners including Telestream offer VC-1 encoding on Mac today (it’s just WMV) and plan to add support for Silverlight. Same with Sonic (Roxio) and others.
As for the statement that the video codecs are proprietary by Nik, I’m sorry but you’re mistaken. Anyone who wants to implement VC-1 or WMA on Linux CAN and many HAVE done so. There are even Windows Media streaming servers built on Linux.
tom b (April 23, 2007 @ 8:03 pm)
This is dead tech; it will never be “open” enough to actually see deployment on the web.
Mehboob Alam (April 23, 2007 @ 8:19 pm)
It’s available for the Mac.. for now.. for ever? Yeah.. I’d like to be in the room when Microsoft explains why the cannot keep the Macintosh version upto date..
DBL (April 23, 2007 @ 8:58 pm)
No Mac user wants to have to put Silverblight on his system, period. It is not good news when Microsoft “supports” you. It means that they are about to try to eat you. Ask them what they had for dinner for the past two decades.
Steve (April 24, 2007 @ 11:47 am)
Thanks for the comments Sean. Wasn’t suggesting that there was a subversive plan, and I’ve added an update that this was based off of “alpha” bits. I’ll be at MIX - I’m looking forward to seeing what’s new.
Although Expression Media is going to be offered (do we really need another media library though?) it would be nice to see MS do an encoder rather than just saying “anyone who wants to can implement one”.
Mike Downey (April 24, 2007 @ 6:00 pm)
Hi, Steve -
If you want great development tools, a powerful framework, and a runtime that has supported Mac for over 10 years (and is the most distributed piece of software in the history of the web) I suggest you take a look at Flash and Adobe’s upcoming Apollo project (adobe.com/go/apollo).
If you want a great IDE for developing applications that can reach everyone take a look at Adobe’s Flex Builder 2 Eclipse-based IDE (www.flex.org).
We’ve been supporting Mac and Windows for years, also support Linux with the latest and greatest version of the Flash Player, and continue to do so. It’s in our best interests…
Let me know if you have any questions. I’d be happy to help. I’ll also be at MIX if you’d like to chat in person.
Mike Downey
Group Manager, Platform Evangelism
Adobe Systems
mdowney@adobe.com
Ironchef (April 24, 2007 @ 9:35 pm)
Steve -
Reading the comments on the site, I think Sean is a bit biased (as well he should be since he is the Silverlight Evangelist) on the merits of Starlight. I think Mike has hit the nail on the head with the amount of tools and ecosystem that is now in place.
Go take a look at NTDoCoMo - every phone comes with Flash Lite; it is replacing J2ME in Japan as the application platform for phones. Also, take a look at Europe and the Nokia S60 juggernaut. That also has Flash Lite on the devices and it is gain traction. There are over 20,000,000 Flash Lite enabled web pages in Asia.
Now, you have a platform around Flash + Flex + Apollo that goes from phone to client to service (web page). Wow.
When you think about the “alpha” and soon to be “beta” of Starlight, you have to ask what is lacking. Lots, but one key piece is a controls package. Last I heard from my contacts is that it will take 12-18 months for a controls system to be put in place. So, building apps other than some simple YouTube-like video playback will be hard.
Many people talk about how XAML is text. Have you looked at it? Andrew Layman and his invention of namespaces in XML has killed readability. XAML is namespace heavy. But, besides that, XAML when it was created for Avalon was never meant to be hand edited in EMACS or anyother text editor — it was created with “tooling” in mind. The core goal was all about tooling - never about hand creation. Look at XAML and look at Starlight - nobody is going to sit in notepad and hand author this stuff.
DHTML + CSS + JavaScript and Flash and J2ME is where development is at … not Starlight (unfortunately).
Grover Saunders (April 25, 2007 @ 11:04 am)
Just FYI Flip4Mac’s Episode (a slightly retooled version of Compression Master from the recently bought Telestream…I think this is what Sean was referring to) will indeed create VC-1 video at HD resolution on a Mac with impressive quality. Also a great (though expensive) choice for FLV and H.264 as well.
Also, you can stick with ffmpeg for FLV encoding that looks like QT video from the late 90’s, but to get Flash video that’s even vaguely competitive with H.264 or VC-1, you’ll need VP6 (i.e. Flash 8 video) FLV. And I doubt that will show up in open source tools any time soon. On2 is pretty fervent with their patent protections.
I’m conflicted about Silverlight. On the one hand, competition might spur Adobe to fix some of their long-standing performance problems. On the other hand, the greatest value of Flash is that the plug-in is something content authors can practically assume, making Flash a defacto standard. Any success Silverlight has will only serve to weaken that “standard” and make these kinds of content more troublesome for users.