Next in our “testing” series, after the Office test, today we click trough to the belgian iWatch site and have a look-see.
The verdict? It Doesnt Work!
– Besturingssysteem: Microsoft XP/Vista/Windows 7.0 of Mac OS X
– Internet browser: Internet Explorer 7.0, of Safari of Mozilla Firefox.
– Silverlight* plugin
– 512 MB ram
Yes, they require Silverlight. In this time where flash is Everywhere, where html5 is replacing flash for video playback, where apple wont even allow flash on their hardware .. they require silverlight, the failed MS replacement for flash. Unused and obsolete since the day it first hit us in April 2007. Yes, 2007! Its been around for 3 years and is still mainly unused and generally unknown except if you’re in the web spectrum of the tech community.
And the whole iWatch thing works great with flash on the several Belgian sites where its embedded; why the switch to Silverlight?
We ll probably never know nor understand 😦
blog.cone 
I think silverlight is there to stay, Gert. It also covers more ground than Flash, offers out of browser experiences, is faster, integrates nicely with visual studio, .net,… ‘WinMo 7’-phones e.g. will have restrictions on programs. They will have to be made in silverlight or .net only except for a select few premium partners. Also don’t forget, under linux there’s moonlight which works quite allright, or so it seems on my Ubuntu-laptop.
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I do know that there is moonlight, but I haven’t seen a reason to install it except for recently iWatch, which is saying a lot about how much its being used.
I am convinced that its here to stay, but not because of the quality of the product or use or whatever, but rather just because its Microsoft made and probably aggressively marketed and lobbied towards initiatives like iWatch
I like Darwinism in software and the fact that MS wont let it die and tries to push it on everyone (those phones are another fine example) is quite contrary to that.
The .net tie in used to be a good argument; that is until I saw what a mess they made of that asp.net heap and their endless, constant copyright trolling. The later finally persuaded me that I dont want to put time into developing using their languages; not when there are free alternatives that are (except for the programming tools, Visual Studio is nearly unparalleled in usability) equally good or even better.
In short, while Silverlight might be a technical possibility, it is in fact dead to me 🙂
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