Silverlight 2 is out! Now what?
A big congratulations to Scott Guthrie’s team for releasing Silverlight 2, a developer’s Nirvana and the way the web ought to be: any programming language you want, a rich and consistent object model, beautiful animation, and integrated design tools. The kinds of things that people have built using Dynamic HTML + AJAX are amazing, and libraries like JQuery makes thinks workable and fun, but having a platform that was designed from the ground up with rich applications in mind will certainly bring web applications to a new level.
There’s just a tiny bit of trouble in paradise… Silverlight 2 has two gaping holes in it:
No meaningful printer support – Sure, you can print a web page, and people like Jonas Follesø are building some very sophisticated work-arounds but those don’t come close the Flash’s simple but powerful printing support. This may be a show-stopper for quite a few applications.
No camera support – Social platforms have suddenly become very important. Facebook has built-in Video, Seesmic is quickly gaining popularity as a conversation site and video commenting tool. Silverlight cannot afford to miss this revolution.
Other remaining issues:
Distribution, distribution, distribution! Flash has incredible ubiquity, even with the latest versions of the Flash player. I hope Silverlight can catch up soon. Windows Update where art thou?
First class Mac support – I hope issues about the Mac version of Silverlight being slow and CPU-intensive have been addressed. I do want to say thank you for releasing the Mac version on the same day as the Windows version, including developer tools. That is very impressive!
So again, awesome release! Beautiful, terrific, a dream-come-true, this-is-heaven, I’m-so-happy, WOW! Thank you, and please keep pushing to complete the vision.