Silverlight on the Apple Mac- The Story Continues

by Don Burnett

Since the 1.0 version of Silverlight has shipped on the Apple Mac platform, it has become a very popular plug-in, not just with users but with third party developers. It's hard not to see the potential for the plug-in's great cross platform video solution Silverlight presents. Sure it's new, and there are a few things they are still working out on it, but for most people it's a trooper.  The Mac community has been clamoring for a way to natively on OS X encode Silverlight Video and output it directly on the Mac, especially in broadcast arenas. The Apple platform is famous for it's digital video solutions in QuickTime and  Final Cut Pro is one of the most used professional editing tools out there.. Having said that, to create Silverlight video, until now you could only go part of the way, producing a WMV output file. To create Silverlight video then you'd have to import video into Expression Media Encoder (either .MOV (QuickTime) or .WMVs). That still left no native way of producing Silverlight video natively in OS X until now..

 

Enter Flip4Mac's Silverlight Support..

 

 

 

 Flip4Mac makes a set of well known Components for Quicktime that allow it to play and manipulate Windows Media Video and Audio formats.  The latest beta supports encoding to Silverlight directly and will add the well known media player and media skins that are available with Expression Media Encoder. This is exciting news for those looking to create Silverlight Video and not having access to a Windows box to do it.

Check out the new support today at Flip4Mac.com right now..

 

Technorati tags: Flip4Mac, Native Silverlight Encoding, WMV components for the Mac, OSX, Silverlight Video

Sunday Night News

By Don Burnett

Hob Noble Gobbles!

Happy Thanksgiving to you all. I wish you and your family all of the best. The holiday week is coming up, however there are some really cool and important events coming up that you should know about just after the holidays and I am not talking about "Black Friday" sales. It's going to be a December to remember in the design community, but more about that a little bit later. First onto XAML adoption..

Moonlight Madness (Surveying Open Source Blogs featuring XAML and the Moonlight Plug-in)

Bringing Silverlight to the Linux community is starting to bear some really cool results.. Over at Jackson's Activity Log it's noted back in September that they got the plug-in working to allow layers of html elements on top of a Moonlight control. That meant sites like tafiti.com now works within the Moonlight plugin.. Apparently this wasn't supportable until Firefox version 3.0 and that meant also that other plug-ins like Flash couldn't support it. Score one for IE flexibility..

Also at Jackson's Blog he has written a nice beginners guide to writing XAML by hand.. It's actually very useful for even Microsoft Silverlight developers and will talk about how to right XAML, well formedness, properties and collections. It's a good introduction if you have never looked at XAML before. He even explains how to define custom tags.

A December to Remember...

If you haven't heard about it, all next month the Phizzpop Design Challenge continues regionally, in Austin, Boston and New York, as well as Los Angeles and Chicago. What's so important about this event ? It will bring together the best of the best designers in a competition to see who can come up with the best design solution in the shortest amount of time. You will see some really skilled people attacking problem solving situations in real life. The winners will compete at the South by Southwest Interactive Conference in Austin, TX. The regional competitions will be open to the public (you do have to register to attend) and space is limited and filling up fast, so please register soon. On top of this all Microsoft is also giving out some free beverages (woo hoo!). This sounds like a totally great time, seeing design professionals in action in a swanky "hotspots and free beverages, what more can anyone ask!

Regional Locations

New York
Hiro Ballroom
http://www.themaritimehotel.com/hiroBallroom.html
363 West 16th Street
New York, NY 10011
212-242-4300
Doors Open: 6pm
End Time: 11pm then club opens to public welcome to stay
Directions
Chicago
The Underground
http://www.theundergroundchicago.com/
56 West Illinois St.
Chicago, IL 60610
312-644-7600
Doors Open: 6pm
End Time: 10pm
Directions
Los Angeles
Elevate Lounge
http://www.takamisushi.com/
811 Wilshire Boulevard, Suite 2100
Los Angeles, CA 90017
213-236-9600
Doors Open: 6pm
End Time: 12am
Directions
Boston
Saint
http://www.saintnitery.com/
90 Exeter Street
Boston, MA 02116
617-236-1134
Doors Open: 6pm
End Time: 10pm then club opens to public welcome to stay
Directions
Austin
J Black's Feel Good Lounge
Black's
710 W 6th St Ste B
Austin, TX 78701
512-433-6954
Doors Open: 6pm
End Time: 10pm
Directions

Technorati tags: Silverlight, Moonlight Plug-in, PhizzPop Design Challenge

Silverlight on Linux

By Don Burnett

I found this little GEM on YouTube.com and just had to share this with you. The Silverlight plug-in (with .net support thanks to the Mono project) has added the power to run Silverlight applications on the desktop (not just from a Website), called Desklets..

Here's an example video of Desklets in action. This is pretty cool all in all... Also a video of the Surface technology demo running in Moonlight in Linux.

YouTube - Clock desklet

YouTube - Moonlight's sample screencast

Technorati tags: Moonlight Plug-in, Silverlight, Linux, Mono Project