Okay Geek Farm
Silverlight is coming to iPhone - Who knew!
Brandon Davenport
There is an old and tired argument based on the fact that the iPhone does not have flash. Sure, it can make pages load faster, crash less, and avoid the "Slap the monkey ads", but we miss out on other things; Facebook games, and videos on other places besides Youtube.
Enter Microsoft Silverlight. But wait, what is Silverlight? The project was launched by Microsoft in 2007, and provides a toolset that developers can use to build rich multimedia and interactivity into websites. It is a lot like Flash, but it is based on a flavor of XML, which is a very nerdy subject. Go read up on it.
From Betanews.com, Scott Fulton writes:
It was an impressive demonstration, once they got it working: H.264 video streaming wirelessly (and slowly, at least during the caching sequence) using Microsoft’s Silverlight video streaming, to an Apple iPhone… You’d think Apple would have stood firm against Microsoft at least as aggressively as it has against Adobe, if not more so. How did this happen? We asked Microsoft User Experience Platform Manager Brian Goldfarb last week at PDC 2009, and the answer was a huge surprise…followed by some caveats. But it contained these four amazing words: “We worked with Apple.”
So what does this mean for you? Start hoping that either Silverlight or Flash finds its way to the iPhone, and when, and by that I mean if they do, expect websites to start supporting a bit of Silverlight to bring videos, and other interfaces to the iPhone.
Who would have thought that the sole solution to our video streaming needs on the iPhone would be none other then Microsoft. Great minds think alike.
