Silverlight 4 Update is now available bringing a large number of new features to the table: Out-of-browser execution, HTML support, localization, rich text features, and more.
Silverlight 4 now lets developers write apps that access your webcam, microphone, and even provide local recording features out of the box. Flash has supported them for years, but Adobe is now seeing downfall thanks to Apple.
So what that means is a typical Silverlight 4 app will be able to capture and edit voice or video and allow you to store the video locally or publish online at youtube, or even attach it to an email. This is something Flash was never designed to do.
Silverlight 4 also brings hardware-accelerated (GPU) video decoding, that makes 1080p H.264 playback possible even on an Intel Atom-based netbook that runs Nvidia’s ION GPU. Adobe announced similar feature in it’s Flash 10.1.
Apart from that, Silverlight 4 also includes support for adaptive streaming, DRM, and DVR-like capabilities.
Trusted Silverlight apps can now read and write files to local system, access attached peripherals.Various localization enhancements that include bidirectional text, right-to-left support, and complex scripts such as Arabic, Hebrew and Thai, as well as 30 new languages, seems like a big deal.
Silverlight Beyond Computers
The Silverlight platform would soon be seen across a number of gadgets like set-top boxes, internet TVs (aka connected TVs), Blu-ray players, and DVRs, etc.
With Silverlight now installed on nearly 60 percent of all connected devices around the world, I see good prospects for Microsoft to take over the lost share of Flash. And if it works better than Flash on Mac OS, there’s a one in a hundred chance that Apple considers making it a choice for RIA on iPhone, iPad.
The launch event and some demos are available Developer Tools Newsroom.
Download: www.microsoft.com/getsilverlight [Windows & Mac OS]
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Silverlight is faster at rendering to the screen. No surprise there, since most of the heavy lifting is being done by the .Net framework (hardware bitmap drawing). This would be a bit more compelling if the tweening algorithms had been the same for both.
If you need raw easing equations, there are many out there, and I have several that could be used in both environments.
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You can say it’s faster but at least from all the demos I’ve seen Flash is faster and smoother.
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hell yea!! go Silverlight!!!!
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Your title is misleading because it is untrue. Of course since you wrote it Flash 10.1 has come out as well as CS5.
Another thing, while crowing about the Apple vs Adobe debacle over the summer you leave out one very important fact. Apple does not support Silverlight on its mobile devices either and has taken as firm a stand in regards to that as Flash. Flash just made the headlines.
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