April 18, 2007
So, Microsoft has released Silverlight? WPF/E renamed. What is it really like for a non-Windows user? I went to the MS Silverlight page and it wanted to show me a video - but I have to "click here to download" so I clicked and got a blank screen. I waited. Nothing.
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...
Comments
Microsoft have said that they have deliberately neglected the installation experience to discourage the installation of a pre-release plugin by non-developers. As for the browser freezing and awful performance, I fear that that's the result of sloppy coding and Microsoft's JavaScript and XML based approach (it seems that the whole XML file must be downloaded and parsed before anything can happen).
I won't be throwing out Flash and Flex any time soon.
Posted By Big Gary / Posted At
4/18/07 2:54 AM
Shame, I'm actually becoming quite a fan of the developer workflow for WPF and looking into SilverLight which does look like it again will have a decent workflow. But yeah a real shame if that is the end-user experience. I can appreciate it's a first release, but if you're going to enter this space you have to compete with the current standards not the "first release" standards of a decade ago. Possibly too much focus on tools and designer/developer workflow without any consideration of the audience?
Posted By DannyT / Posted At
4/18/07 4:01 AM
I tried to look at the silverlight video using Firefox (on Windows Vista Ultimate even) and all I got was a prompt to install Media Player 11 (as a plugin?), which I accepted. It then couldn't find it, and offered manual install.
At that point, I stopped and left the site.
Posted By Calvin / Posted At
4/18/07 7:31 AM
If that's their version of the Flash player, I can't wait to see what their version of Apollo will be :)
Posted By Ben Nadel / Posted At
4/18/07 8:52 AM
The video seems to run off of the Windows Media Player plugin - not sure how that works on a Mac.
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.
Posted By Matt Williams / Posted At
4/18/07 9:43 AM
I had a very similar experience, except I managed to get the page turning app to generate a Javascript error! Then it would no longer flip pages forward, only back. I also note that you can download the XAML - doesn't this seem kind of.. bad for commercial development?
Posted By Ken Dunnington / Posted At
4/18/07 10:04 AM
flash-killer??? static page?? download video??? ahuahuahauhuahuahauha
Posted By zoh / Posted At
4/18/07 11:54 AM
@Matt, so the video showed me content (the call to action to install Silverlight) before installing Silverlight, but after I've installed Silverlight it no longer plays? Maybe Silverlight has broken my Windows Media Player install? Isn't that just peachy - MS can't even get their own plugins to play nice!
@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...
Posted By Sean Corfield / Posted At
4/18/07 12:20 PM
It looks like Microsoft HAS released yet another program before it is reaqdy. And people wonder why I like Adobe so darn much.
Posted By Gary Funk / Posted At
4/18/07 2:57 PM
My experience pretty much matches Sean's - http://blog.acidlabs.org/2007/04/18/silverlight-indeed/. I've also got some interesting commentary from Shane Morris from Microsoft. Shane's a good guy who's trying to fight the good fight for usability and better user experience *inside the wall* at Microsoft.
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...
Posted By Stephen Collins / Posted At
4/18/07 4:22 PM
I don't know guys.... I loaded the plugin on my Mac with no issues. It installed just like every other Mac program. Everything works fine so far.
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.
Posted By Dana / Posted At
5/4/07 5:53 PM
As much as I would like to see Adobe win this battle, the other side cannot stand Adobe's blatant anti-UNIX attitude; their ignoring of Linux/*BSD/*NIX by way of delivering a decent quality Flashplayer which doesn't result in the crashing of Firefox, or the complete lack of a x86-64 compatible flash plugin for those of us running x86-64, or their complete ignoring of *NIX users by not delivering their software portfolio to *NIX on x86.
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.
Posted By Kaiwai / Posted At
5/7/07 7:14 PM
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