MIX’08 in Taipei

Posted by jepoyzter under Applications

I get the chance to join an event hosted and by Microsoft held at the Hyatt Hotel last Tuesday. It is called MIX 08: The Next Web Now.

The primary focus of this event is to promote Silverlight, a cross-browser, cross-platform, and cross-device plug-in for delivering the next generation of media experiences and rich interactive applications for the Web. Which is currently competeting with Adobe’s Flash and JavaFX.

Now the question is will Silverlight be able to beat and replace Flash? Will Silverlight be the standard in creating RIA (Rich Internet Application) or how Microsoft calls it as RIA (Rich Interactive Application).

Microsoft is really doing lots of marketing stuff for Silverlight and is really raising the bars of beating the current competitors. In perspective Silverlight is still far far away from beating Flash. Looking through some demos sites during the event. I am sure Flash is also capable of doing the same stuff they shown us and I think Flash can do way more better.

The one and only thing that impresses me a lot during the event is Silverlight DeepZoom, which is a technology first implemented by SeaDragon which is bought Microsoft for Silverlight Applications. DeepZoom allows users to pan around and zoom in a large, high resolution image or a large collection of images. It reduces the time required for initial load by downloading only the region being viewed and/or only at the resolution it is displayed at. An example of this can be viewed at Hard Rock’s Memorabilia Website
(Note that you must download Silverlight to run the application). It feels like zoom on a picture at an instant without downloading the image. Cool huh?

Also during the event  a demo was presented on how to create a simple video player using Microsft Expression Studio 2 which is a tool for creating and developing Silverlight applications. The guy doing the demo is surely someone who is not yet familiar with the tool and surely knows more on how to develop in Flash. The guy keeps on saying keyframe which is really a Flash term. And then, during the last few minutes of the demo. The guy tell something about the next version of the tool. He really dont know what he’s saying. He went blank and says “actually I don’t know what the next tool is gonna be”, and everybody laughs.

After the event, I still cant find myself using Microsoft’s Silverlight in a distant future. I’ll stay with Flash, till Microsoft shows more useful and innovative way to improve user experience.