Hmm. So I refreshed the browser and got my installation instructions. Five steps.
Step 1. Verify System Requirements. "Make sure you have a Silverlight compatible Macintosh operating system and browser." How? It doesn't tell me. So let's assume I'm compatible.
Step 2. Download Silverlight. Click. A new page. Click "Download" button. Thank you page. WPFe.dmg downloads in the background. At this point, there is no call to action. I downloaded something and the page I'm on says nothing about what to do next.
Fortunately, I'm smart, so I click the browser back button twice to get back to the page that listed the five steps. OK, so now I need to go to my desktop and double-click WPFe.dmg and see what happens... It just mounts the disk image. Now I have to click on the mounted disk and then double-click on the WPFe.pkg file.
Click Continue. Click Continue. Click Continue. Click Agree. Click Continue. Click Install. Enter my password and click OK. Click Close. Close and restart my browser.
Go back to Microsoft's Silverlight page.
There's a big blank space where the video should be... I wait... and wait... OK, so it isn't going to load anything.
So, let me see if I got this right... I downloaded a 3.5Mb disk image and installed the application (after lots of clicks) and... nothing! No errors, nothing. Just a big white space.
Maybe one of the other demos will work?
I click the Page Turn demo and wait while it loads 14 page and then wait and wait and wait while it does... something... with a spinning beachball locking up the entire browser... finally it runs again...
A red page. There's a turned up "tab" on the bottom right of the page. I click it. Nothing happens. I click it again, several times. Nothing. I notice a small icon below the page so I click on that. I get a row of thumbnails.
I mouse over the first one and the whole row jumps away. It's like one of those terrible click-on-the-monkey ads on the web! I finally manage to click on a thumbnail and I'm rewarded with a full-size picture.
I finally try to click and drag on the "tab" on the page and it actually turns like a magazine. Wow! I'm sooooo impressed. No tooltips, no mouseover hints. It's supposed to be intuitive.
I have to wonder if Microsoft has actually tried installing and using Adobe's Flash Player...
I won't be throwing out Flash and Flex any time soon.
At that point, I stopped and left the site.
As for the video content - you aren't missing much. It starts off like some sort of MTV-style commercial for skateboards. Then you see people pointing at and moving screen-type things in a "Minority Report" fashion. After watching it, I have no clue how it relates to Silverlight or RIA technology - unless of course it so high-tech that users will be able to do pointing and moving like in Minority Report, but I'm skeptical here. :D.
@Gary, that may be so - but the Flash prerelease install is a *much* smoother process and MS has *lots* of resources so there's really no excuse for just how terrible the experience is...
Unfortunately for him, a big part of his job at the moment is also showing off Expression and Silverlight to the Australian developer community. He's up against it as far as I can see...
I'd also point out that this product is NOT released. It's BETA. So let's extend some grace here. Flash is at version 9 now. I wouldn't expect any company to do that much catching up in a Beta 1 release.
I will say this too... the Expression toolset and the integration with Visual Studio is going to make this programmer's life MUCH easier! It's not going to win everyone over, but for us who have stayed away from Flash because we simply didn't have time to learn a whole new toolset... this is a lifesaver.
Hence, my secret longing for Mono to implement Silverlight, and finally force Adobe to realise that the world doesn't revolve around them at Windows.
You sound like a total anti-MS tool (typical of linux nerds)
Silverlight is the future, like it or not.
