Microsoft Silverlight Supports Mac

The demo stage reportedly had a number of Macs with a large portion of the demo devoted to their usage. Unfortunately, authoring support is only available on the Windows platform.

And there's the kicker... I wonder what the chances are of there ever being a compareable Mac authoring package. :rolleyes:

Looks like Microsoft is trying to muscle it's way into the creative market by once again leveraging it's OS market share.

Hopefully this will translate into Macs being able to use Netflix's Watch Now feature.

And there's the kicker... I wonder what the chances are of there ever being a compareable Mac authoring package. :rolleyes:

Looks like Microsoft is trying to muscle it's way into the creative market by once again leveraging it's OS market share.


edit: First post worth reading :rolleyes:

The real question is...how long until they abandon the Mac client like with WMP. My vote is for Adobe and their Flash player. They have no OS agenda like MS.

This needs to be killed early....

Its just another MS attempt to kill off rival standards - be it Flash, GoogleVideo, YouTube, Quicktime etc etc.

Avoid like the plague, or we will all suffer later....

Hopefully this will translate into Macs being able to use Netflix's Watch Now feature.

I was seriously about to buy Parallels just for the Netflix thing. If this really happens, I won't ever need Windows.

I think i'll stick to Flash.

Microsoft have enough products in m home, don't need any more.

I hope Microsoft lose lots of money in this. :mad:

This needs to be killed early....

Its just another MS attempt to kill off rival standards - be it Flash, GoogleVideo, YouTube, Quicktime etc etc.

Avoid like the plague, or we will all suffer later....

Flash doesn't really have any real competition out there, so I wouldn't go on such an extreme and call for an immediate boycott. In the end, SOME competition is most often good for the consumer as it drives companies to make their products better.

Isn't this screenshot from the demo video rather like the iPhone....:eek: :p

http://www.microsoft.com/silverlight/

David

There are a lot of websites delivering WMV content out there that don't work at all on Macs - like the Netflix player (due to use of ActiveX for player control). Anything that works cross platform, no matter who produces it, is welcome to me.

I put the wpf/e beta (aka silverlight) on my Mac several weeks ago, and it works just as well as in Windows. The team has promised Linux support later.

As for the development tools - you don't need MS's tools. Silverlight is based on XAML and javascript so you can use any text editor to create content, albeit with a lot of trouble. If this takes off, there will be third party OSS projects to create such tools.

By the way, Flash isn't a "standard", any more than Windows is (i.e. it's a de facto standard). It's proprietary. You have to pay Adobe for the Flash development tools.