Tafiti and Silverlight
© September 2007 Anthony Lawrence
2007/09/09
Silverlight is Microsoft's shot at a cross-platform web application development thingy. If your idea of "cross-platform" includes Linux, well, you'll have to wait a bit, but I was able to download Silverlight for Mac and then use Firefox to visit https://www.tafiti.com/ to see it in action.
Umm, yawn? Yes, Tafiti has some nice features - dragging results you like to a "shelf" is helpful, and I have long wished that Google would let us filter results. I suppose even the developers realize that "Tree View" has no value beyond showing off Silverlight, and if that's the main point of Tafiti I guess it is pointless to note that Tafiti's search results are pretty poor.. no, we're supposed to be wowed by the "potential".
Yeah, OK: boost my Internet speed five fold, do the same thing with the graphics on my MacBook, and maybe this would suck my breath away, but I'm still breathing quite normally now.
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Mon Sep 10 07:21:55 2007: 3119 drag
The happy folks working on Mono have already implemented the current version of Silverlight for Linux.
And not only that Microsoft has given their blessing and have licensed codecs for Linux on x86 and x86-64 to be used with Mono's version of Silverlight.
Of course due to the uber-duber hackers at ffmpeg we've had open source codecs for Microsoft media aviable for a while now, but obviously that is a bit troublesome in the US due to the patent situation. And that is what Silverlight used before Microsoft came along (and is probably what most people will use as most Linux users have the excellent ffmpeg codecs already installed)
(link)
(link)
(it took a full week of programming to make Silverlight for Linux)
(link) is were they announced they were working with Microsoft and are able to license codecs for legal support. To bad for the USA patent system otherwise I'd probably of had Moonlight for Linux available before Silverlight for OS X or maybe even Windows.
Of course it would of been better to have one single open source cross platform version of Silverlight for better bug-for-bug compatibility sakes, this situation is already better then what Linux users face with Adobe Flash.
It seems that at least portions of Microsoft are coming around. But we all know how big corporations are.. often the left hand does not know what the right hand is doing.
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Tafiti and Silverlight Copyright © September 2007 Tony Lawrence
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