Posted on by JesterXL

Windows Phone 7 – Episode #8 of JXLTV


			
			
			
			
				JXL TV Episode 8


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10 Replies to “Windows Phone 7 – Episode #8 of JXLTV”

  1. Here’s a Silverlight blog, pointing out some of the differences between the Silveright plugin and Silverlight Mobile for Windows Phone 7:
    http://www.silverlighthack.com/post/2010/03/16/Silverlight-for-Windows-Phone-7-is-NOT-the-same-full-Silverlight-3-RTM.aspx

    Basically despite Microsoft’s marketing, Silverlight Mobile is a subset of the features found in the Silverlight plugin. Perhaps not as wide of a difference between say Flash Player 9 and FlashLite 3, but still some differences.

    Also as pointed out in that blog post is that Windows Phone 7 won’t have Silverlight installed as a browser plugin, but can only run Silverlight Mobile apps as a native application. So that would be like Android being able to run AIR applications, but without Flash Player 10.1 to run Flash content in the browser.

    Anyways, just some Silverlight limitations to be aware of.

  2. @Matthew Thanks a lot for that link! I was afraid someone might post something like this, but I’m glad they did. Sounded too good to be true, and it was. That said, I don’t know enough about Silverlight to really know if this is a deal killer or not?

    Flash Lite is a pretty big deal; it uses the old virtual machine, thus, pretty useless to the majority of traditional application developers.

    The browser doesn’t bother me at all. While consumers expect the browser to show the same internet, the processors still just aren’t there yet. Again, I’m thinking strictly for myself here on developing applications, not the user experience of the browser. Sucks for consumers, but doesn’t bother me.

    #3 is a big duh, so that’s ok.

    #4, who cares.

    So again, it comes back to #1; is that a deal killer? I don’t know. I’ll say this: I’d rather code C# in Visual Studio than Objective C in XCode.

  3. I really like where MS has been heading with their application implementations of Silverlight (i love the zune on pc interface). And I think that Silverlight on WP7 will be really cool and the integration for your Silverlight apps will be really easy on WP7. But as a RIA developer when do you make the decision that a true integration is more important then developer efficiency in the case of me using flash over Silverlight for a WP7 experience (mainly because I know flex/flash/as3 better than I know silverlight/c#).

    And also how much have you been playing with Silverlight?

  4. Oh man — you’ve got to give double bock another chance. Check out Salvator by Paulaner — it’s billed as the original and it’s a little stronger and has more complexity.
    These are “Lenten” beers (liquid bread), so they’re a little out of season and not really summer drinks. But I dig anything that ends in -ator.

  5. @Earl To me, the determining factor is fun. Right now, Flex & Flash are really fun. I don’t have to emotionally struggle to get up in the morning, knowing I get to do what I want to do.

    However, the more I branch out, the more I learn how far we are behind the times on on mobile from a variety of fronts (tools, runtimes, actually having a future, etc), as well as on the traditional desktop & web. Adobe’s piggy backing on top of Google’s Droid, whereas Microsoft is creating the whole package. That strategy has worked well for Apple, and appears to have the possibility of working “well enough” for Microsoft.

    Yeah, right now, there isn’t a whole lot of work for mobile, but I’ve been seeing a slow increase of Silverlight work in agencies; not software, just agencies. It seems most organizations that are on the Microsoft stack utilize WPF, not Silverlight since they already have IT declared hardware. That, and this is just a gut feeling, a lot of the Microsoft companies are very desktop focused whereas those that aren’t seem more to embrace the web. Like, they’ll use Gmail, and other hosted applications like Salesforce.com, etc. So, even if Microsoft delivers, the culture they’ve created I think is what’ll be challenging to change. That change starts with people like us. We build AJAX and Flash apps that hit Ruby/Python. We now go into a large corp and do the same thing, just with a different runtime. Seems obvious, but most of the larger projects are top down; requiring a Director/Manager who isn’t old skool and uncool.

    Thus, that’s why the agencies are getting it first, doing small Silverlight experiences for clients; some Microsoft paid for, some just naturally requested.

    There are 3 reasons why I’m interested in this stuff. First, Microsoft has a mobile strategy, Adobe doesn’t; they just piggyback on other phones. They’ve been talking shit for 10 years, and I’m tired of it. It’s time for results. I’m not sure Adobe’s current CEO, Shantanu Narayen, is as focused on mobile as his predecessor, Bruce Chizen. 1/6th of the companies revenue invested in online metrics vs. invested in product teams that sorely need to be brought up to par with the rest of the industry’s expectations. Actions like that make me, and others, question wtf Adobe is doing. Clearly not mobile.

    Second, Microsoft has been pushing the designer developer workflow for 8 years. They’re almost as bad (almost) as Google in that they don’t seem to have a lot of design talent in their industry. Yet, what you hopefully saw as that they’ve made extreme headway, MORE SO THAN ADOBE WITH THEIR OWN BLOODY TOOLS, in having a good story there. I want to learn from that, and hopefully find out why Adobe hasn’t done it yet.

    Third, while everyone says the mobile revolution is here, that isn’t reflected in the current market. Many schools still teach programming, HTML5, and some Flash/Flex. While half of this is marketing, a lot of my clients ask for Flex and HTML5, not mobile. The DRM and ROI they need just aren’t there yet. When looking at a platform that actually has a future, I want to find one that I want to develop for. I’ve tried iPhone. It’s horrid. I love my iPhone, but the development model for it just isn’t fun to me. Many others seem to enjoy it, and more power too them. That said, Microsoft actually likes developers… and aren’t racist against if you if you don’t like pointers.

    So when? When the time is right. That time isn’t now, but it certainly wouldn’t hurt to start learning Windows Phone 7 Silverlight dev. If it takes off, you’re effing set, AND you could get a free phone out of the deal. If it’s not, you learn a lot you can use in the Adobe camp. Like bitching about the tools.

  6. @adamcodes Thanks for the recommendation Adam, I’ll check it out! I liked Shiner’s Bock, and Samuel Adam’s Double Bock (and Triple Bock). I’ve had 3 so far, so I don’t think I got a skunked one, and actually the 2nd wasn’t so bad. That said, I won’t be buying it again.

    You’re the 2nd person to highly recommend me to get a liquid bread beer; now I really want one (and I don’t care it’s summer, I’ll drink Stout in 100+ degree weather; BRING IT!)

  7. I really like your perspective on this. You hear a lot of flash fanboys saying “hey this is how much Silverlight sucks” and that’s it. Instead of also saying hey this how Silverlight (or ajax) is progressing the RIA industry and this is how it’s doing things better then Flash. Like you, I think it’s about fun. The flash platform is fun as hell to me right now. But that might not always be the case. I hope it is, but who knows. It’s my goal to create cool shit by any means necessary.

  8. @Earl “It’s my goal to create cool shit by any means necessary” <– MINE TOO!

    Build custom charts to show thousands of data points, and suddenly, you'll either A) wish you were smart enough to know how to utilize PixelBender for multi-threading via Shaders or B) wish you were using Silverlight since it has multi-threading in the language itself.

    To be fair, a lot of the early Silverlight bashing was valid; it was pretty dumb. Not anymore. They're doing some cool stuff. Hell, even 1.0 you could download, install, and use fonts… in a web browser. HOT!

  9. From what I’ve read Silverlight Mobile has *most* of the functionality found in the Silverlight plugin, it’s just a few features here and there that are turned off. It only becomes a deal breaker if you need one of the features in the app that you’re building. Also unfortunately, from what I’ve read, Microsoft seems to be trying to hide the fact that there’s differences, for a better marketing push. So from what I’ve seen it’s not clear where the differences are except when you go digging around the documentation between the plugin and mobile apps. So mainly the danger is expecting a Silverlight app to do something and discover while in development that a feature isn’t available for mobile apps.

    As for the stragedy of Microsoft versus Adobe, Microsoft’s stradegy is going to sink or swim based on the success of Windows Phone 7. Microsoft might be doing some cool things for Windows Phone 7, but so was Palm for the Palm Pre.

    Short-term Adobe’s current stragedy is riding on the success of Android and long term making apps for multiple platforms. Even if Adobe just pulls off getting mobile AIR on just Android and RIM’s Blackberry, that will be pretty big.

    That said, while I’ve paid close attention to the mobile world, just as I’m paying attention to Silverlight (with 1 month or 2 of actual development in Silverlight version 2) all my work continues to be for web apps targeting the desktop.

  10. Pretty good. I’ll only point out things with which I don’t agree.

    I’m not sure “Silverlight lite” is really a dig on Flash lite. I’d speculate that 90% of the .net dudes who might use Silverlight probably haven’t even heard of Flashlite (let alone all the capabilities of Flash). In my opinion, it’s not some 60% threshold that will be a tipping point. Rather, there are a bunch of .net dudes who would never consider Flash and are (rightly) excited about Silverlight. Those folks are doing stuff with Silverlight (some percentage of it is cool too).

    I don’t see much impact on Flash/Flex projects. Maybe some, but for the most part, this is new work. Ultimately, it still helps “programmers” (whether they’re flash heads or not). This is the same for all the hype/energy behind HTML5. Great for programmers.

    Anyway, I was interested in seeing the better and better workflow tools for Silverlight. With all due respect to some good additions to Adobe’s tools–overall, I think they’re bloated and unstable.

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