Anybody know what Microsoft Silverlight is about?

[philbo]

Every time I go to MS's website, this thing pops up asking me to install it. I've learned from bitter experience to avoid anything from Microsoft that's been released for less than 2 years, to let the foolish and/or brave discover the bugs... but I find my curiousity piqued nevertheless. Anybody know what it is?

[Jon Gnash]

Every time I go to MS's website, this thing pops up asking me to install it. I've learned from bitter experience to avoid anything from Microsoft that's been released for less than 2 years, to let the foolish and/or brave discover the bugs... but I find my curiousity piqued nevertheless. Anybody know what it is?

It

[Phil O'Keefe]

They want your soul - and your money. The money part is optional, but they WILL own our souls if they can get away with it.

[philbo]

Oh... Well, my curiosity is sated, anyway. I think I'll steer a wide berth around it, though. Thanks for the info, guys!

 

Plus, it was a long-awaited opportunity to say 'nevertheless'

[Etienne Rambert]

Don't download it. BUT...I don't worry about Microsoft dominating

anything anymore.

 

M$ is roadkill on the Google Highway.

 

Vi$ta is so screwed up, I wish I could go back to XP.

M$ has screwed up the WORD GUI so bad - I switched to

the Open Office suite, that I downloaded from Google BTW.

 

I will never use WORD again.

 

M$ is an armadillo that had the misfortune of trying to cross the road at the time

Google's 18-wheeler rolled by. It may still be breathing on the side of the highway,

but it won't be for long.

 

It's roadkill.

[Jon Gnash]

Don't download it. BUT...I don't worry about Microsoft dominating anything anymore. M$ is roadkill on the Google Highway. Vi$ta is so screwed up, I wish I could go back to XP. M$ has screwed up the WORD GUI so bad - I switched to the Open Office suite, that I downloaded from Google BTW. I will never use WORD again. M$ is an armadillo that had the misfortune of trying to cross the road at the time Google's 18-wheeler rolled by. It may still be breathing on the side of the highway, but it won't be for long. It's roadkill.

I bet MS will continue to own the desktop OS market until it (the desktop OS market) dies. And there is still a huge amount of damage they can do there

[Liam Nixon]

VIVA LINUX!

[blue2blue]

Adobe Flash... that still doesn't ring true to me.

 

I used Macromedia Dreamweaver and Flash content creation tools for a over a decade and I have to say I'm in no hurry to get in bed with Adobe. I was ambivalent about Macromedia in many ways but I certainly had much greater affection for them than I can ever imagine having for Adobe. (Adobe's own web design program was particularly unimpressive as was there aborted attempt at a Flash wannabe tool. It's certainly no wonder they had to buy.)

 

I haven't drank the Silverlight Kool Aid, primarily because, well, Flash is almost everywhere and I have the second most recent edition of Flash Pro, the last Macromedia version. That said, the Flash programming paradigm is a friggin' mess, if you ask me.

 

But I will say that I have ever-increasing respect for some of MS's free content creation tools. Laugh at them if you will but I have a very capable set of free programming tools that are quite powerful and quite well integrated. And, though I'm quite comfortable with Dreamweaver, there are some aspects of Visual Web Developer which are much superior to DW (and vice versa, of course). And the free version is... well... not $400.

[Anderton]

And there is still a huge amount of damage they can do there

[spokenward]

I used Macromedia Dreamweaver and Flash content creation tools for a over a decade and I have to say I'm in no hurry to get in bed with Adobe. I was ambivalent about Macromedia in many ways but I certainly had much greater affection for them than I can ever imagine having for Adobe. (Adobe's own web design program was particularly unimpressive as was there aborted attempt at a Flash wannabe tool. It's certainly no wonder they had to buy .)

 

When will you kids ever learn? Before there was Flash, there was SuperPaint and its amazing vector layer...

[scud133]

man oh man I LOOOOVEE the new Office interface.

 

It is so much easier to make great looking documents now, everything is just right there at your fingertips. Don't have to go digging through menus anymore to find stuff.

 

Best thing they've ever done to Office, IMO. Quick learning curve and then it's off to the races.

[Etienne Rambert]

 

man oh man I LOOOOVEE the new Office interface. It is so much easier to make great looking documents now, everything is just right there at your fingertips. Don't have to go digging through menus anymore to find stuff. Best thing they've ever done to Office, IMO. Quick learning curve and then it's off to the races.

 

 

Congratulations.

 

I will never use WORD again.

 

My view:

 

There should be zero learning curve. I paid for an OFFICE license expecting that it

would operate like the version of OFFICE I paid for three years ago.

 

Wrong! MS has redesigned the GUI for all the OFFICE programs. And there is no option

for a "classic" view! There is no transition. You go cold-turkey into an entirely new system.

And for those people like me who don't have time to learn a new system, it was much

faster to simply move over to a different suite, especially since it's free!

 

I guess M$ thought customers would do it their way - or else take the highway.

They were right. Like thousands of others, I took the highway. And Google owns it.

 

You're correct about one thing though. It was "...off to the races,".

After I took one spin around MS Word's new GUI, I raced off as fast as I could

to download Open Office Orgs suite from Google.

 

And I'm never going back.

 

blue2blue:

"Coincidentally

[blue2blue]

scud, are you being ironic/sarcastic or do you really like it?

 

I have to say that the folks I've talked to, with one other exception, seem to be leaning a lot more toward marcellis' reaction.

 

 

marcellis

 

Even though I use Access, I've avoided buying the full MS Office suite so far.

 

I tried Open Office right around the time it was introduced, but it was just a little too primitive for my tastes, things really didn't come together. (I got WordPerfect with one of my computers and used that for a short time -- I always hated WP and while it was better on Windows than those hideous DOS versions with their utterly wacky F-key menus -- it is still a POS, as far as I'm concerned; I was glad to get rid of it.)

 

But when OO 2 came out, I tried it again and, overall, I like it really pretty well. It's still a little rough in places but it's free and, for the small amount I do with Write and Calc or whatever the spreadsheet is called, that's just about the right price. I've had some document compatability issues on occasion but, overall, I'm entirely satisfied. Heck, it'd be a bargain at twice the price.

[blue2blue]

When will you kids ever learn? Before there was Flash, there was SuperPaint and its amazing vector layer...

Ah... that takes me back.

 

I followed Go Software for a while. I was intrigued.

 

It's amazing that on a personal level, the early 90s doesn't seem long ago to me at all.

 

But when I read something like that, it just seems like a million years ago.

 

 

In the late 80s and early 90s, I prided myself on running PC's that were free of any MS software. I didn't run MS- or PC-DOS (I was a partisan of Digital Research's DR-DOS) -- I resisted Windows by using Geoworks for a long time (and only when I needed to do some combo bitmap and vector editing in CorelDraw did I finally break down and try Windows 3.0 -- which was buggy and awful, of course. I didn't find myself liking Win 3.1 a lot better -- at least not until I realized that I could have just skipped the idiotic pseudo-window interface and simply been double clicking on documents and programs in the File Manager -- a real revelation that suddenly made it so much more usable. I basically only saw that idiotic desktop right after boot and went straight into the file manager and stayed there. (By contrast, buggy as it was and rough as the transition was, I took to Win95 right away, with its much more sensible windowing and X-Windows style GUI.)

[rasputin1963]

 

Adobe Flash... that still doesn't ring true to me. I used Macromedia Dreamweaver and Flash content creation tools for a over a decade and I have to say I'm in no hurry to get in bed with Adobe. I was ambivalent about Macromedia in many ways but I certainly had much greater affection for them than I can ever imagine having for Adobe. (Adobe's own web design program was particularly unimpressive as was there aborted attempt at a Flash wannabe tool. It's certainly no wonder they had to buy .) I haven't drank the Silverlight Kool Aid, primarily because, well, Flash is almost everywhere and I have the second most recent edition of Flash Pro, the last Macromedia version. That said, the Flash programming paradigm is a friggin' mess, if you ask me.

 

 

You've hit the nail on the head. Why would anyone want to compete with or supplant FLASH? What a Tower Of Babel that would yield!

[Anderton]

I downloaded it to see what would happen, after (of course!!) setting a System Restore point. As far as I can tell, it does...uh...nothing, really.

 

But if Silverlight does nothing other than force Adobe to get its act together with Flash, it will have served a useful purpose. I'm always running into incompatibility issues with programs that depend on Flash.

[Will Chen]

Silverlight and Moonlight are a new quasi open souce collaboration will Novell providing a cross platform (including linux) Flash/Javascript competitor which can be coded in XAML in any text editor. The advantage over flash is that it is reported far more SEO friendly and of course you do not have to buy a Flash editor to write the code.

 

Everyone keeps talking about Microsoft wanting your money, but offering up Visual Web Developer, SQL Express, and now Silverlight for free seems to be showing a different side of the company. Combine the free MS web development tools with Paint.NET or GIMP and you have a 100% free and extremely effective web development studio which would have cost thousands of dollars 5 or 10 years ago.

[spokenward]

 

It's amazing that on a personal level, the early 90s doesn't seem long ago to me at all. But when I read something like that, it just seems like a million years ago.

 

 

It was the great multimedia scare of the 90s. I used to attend meetings of a multimedia developers group that grew out of the Macromedia Director users group. Flash was toylike compared to the great buttoned-up clicky clickiness that was Director or the ponderous Authorware, or the platform specific HyperCard or SuperCard, or the weirdbeard Oracle Media Objects...or...Asymetrix ToolBook.

 

Flash won in the same way that mp3 won. It was light enough to sail over the transom.

[the stranger]

Thanks for the tip about visual web designer. I'm checking out the page and it looks like they have a whole bunch of nifty tools. I'll probably try it and go back to notepad, but it looks cool.

 

I'll check out paint.net, whatever that is. And I already have Open Office.

[Will Chen]

Thanks for the tip about visual web designer. I'm checking out the page and it looks like they have a whole bunch of nifty tools. I'll probably try it and go back to notepad, but it looks cool. I'll check out paint.net, whatever that is. And I already have Open Office.

 

Paint.NET is an open source graphics editor. Be sure and visit the forum as there are a bunch of great effects desgined by independent developers.

[blue2blue]

 

That shouldn't be too hard.

 

Thanks for filling in some of the details on Silverlight.

 

 

Why do I always think of silverfish when I hear that name, though?

 

photo source: http://www.activepestcontrol.com/learn_more/

[Jon Gnash]

 

[nwtsnma]

 

Good answer.   When I described Silverlight as Microsoft

[Jon Gnash]

 

you will edit it on your 11x17 touch screen linux based tablet pad thing

Right. And Google will own my WAV files sitting on their server in cyberspace.

 

If I subscribe to their WeOwnAllYour{censored}AndWereNotGivingItBackToYou

[scud133]

scud, are you being ironic/sarcastic or do you really like it? I have to say that the folks I've talked to, with one other exception, seem to be leaning a lot more toward marcellis' reaction. marcellis Even though I use Access, I've avoided buying the full MS Office suite so far. I tried Open Office right around the time it was introduced, but it was just a little too primitive for my tastes, things really didn't come together. (I got WordPerfect with one of my computers and used that for a short time -- I always hated WP and while it was better on Windows than those hideous DOS versions with their utterly wacky F-key menus -- it is still a POS, as far as I'm concerned; I was glad to get rid of it.) But when OO 2 came out, I tried it again and, overall, I like it really pretty well. It's still a little rough in places but it's free and, for the small amount I do with Write and Calc or whatever the spreadsheet is called, that's just about the right price. I've had some document compatability issues on occasion but, overall, I'm entirely satisfied. Heck, it'd be a bargain at twice the price.

 

i'm being completely serious. I really do like it better.

 

I can create better documents in less time. It has honestly made my life easier.

 

If people would just stop whining about change for change's sake and actually try to use it, I think they would come around...

 

i think comparing Open Office to Office2k7 is like comparing the relative merits of Audacity as a DAW to Pro Tools. Audacity is great for simple stuff.... but it's really limited as a DAW (i know that's not the purpose of the software, but it's free so it makes for an easy comparison). Open Office is great for typing a letter to someone... but Word 2007 lets you draft great looking documents, automatically generates works cited pages and in-text citations, has a built in dictionary & thesaurus, and makes insertion of graphs, tables, photos, or any other non-text element infinitely easier. And there's a lot more than that, but those are the features I use most.

 

Plus it's just plain faster. Rather than digging through the "insert" menu, you just go up to the ribbon gizmo and find the picture that correlates to what you want. It is waaay more intuitive --- indeed, more Mac-like