4. Silverlight for Mac and Mobile

Interviewing Steve Ballmer, Guy Kawasaki called his ex-employer Apple a “chihuahua company”. Ballmer didn’t disagree, but he did credit Apple with doing “a nice job on music players” and “a very prominent product” in the iPhone. He doesn’t see the Mac as major competition: “At the end of the day, of course, we have a much bigger footprint than Apple does, certainly in the PC business”. And Expression group product manager Wayne Smith doesn’t see a contradiction in creating a design tool that doesn’t run on the Mac—not when key designers from Adobe and Macromedia have come to work on the Expression team.

“A lot of people working in design today are working on the Windows platform. The original creative may come from a Mac, but the assembly is done on the platform you’re going to deliver on. We’re not getting that much push back from it. Yes, creative pros around the world do tend to use Macs—but it may well be the price you pay if you want to work in this world, to run Vista. A lot of people on my team run on a Mac: we have a bundle of Expression that has a copy of Parallels to run Vista under a Mac OS shell. I’m not saying the Mac is not important, but the platform does need to be Windows because that’s where WPF is - it’s a Microsoft technology.”

Silverlight already runs on Macs the same way it does on Windows (inside a Web browser). The next step is mobile devices, and that means more than browsers. One panel on the mobile Web was extremely optimistic about the mobile world, riffing on the iPhone’s status as a device that has changed the relationship among developers, designers and operators. Some of that optimism is unfounded today: many areas of the U.S. are only beginning to see mobile broadband services, and users elsewhere in the world have found them expensive and poorly connected to the wider Internet.

Applications designed for phones will give you a better experience than Web sites designed for PCs. Microsoft promised at MIX that Silverlight will be bringing rich Internet applications to phones by the end of the year, for S60, S40 and Nokia Tablet Symbian devices, as well as Windows Mobile. You can run desktop Silverlight applications on the mobile version, but Microsoft doesn’t recommend it. First of all, Microsoft won’t be bundling any codecs with Silverlight Mobile, so you’ll be limited to what ships with a phone. It’s also a good idea to avoid large content files, as these can take a long time to load over a mobile connection. There are tags in Silverlight to help developers manage the shift from desktop to mobile, so they can scale components and images, as well as reflowing layouts onto smaller screen formats. Even so, expect to see separate desktop and mobile versions of applications.

The first version of Silverlight Mobile will ship as a plug-in to Windows Mobile 6’s built-in browser. It’ll be equivalent to Silverlight 1, so there’ll only be support for JavaScript-powered applications—although that was enough for WeatherBug to build a weather app that runs on Windows Mobile and S60. VP Tamir Melamed of WeatherBug said that it had been impossible to write the same tool in Flash Lite; “we had to keep leaving out features, and we still couldn’t get the performance”.

WeatherBug’s mobile app runs on Windows Mobile and S60 phones with Silverlight.

A beta version of Silverlight Mobile will be available in the second quarter of 2008, with a final release sometime in the fourth. This will be accompanied by a beta of a mobile version of Silverlight, letting developers write apps in more powerful languages like C#, Visual Basic, Ruby and Python. And in the future, says Brad Becker, it will run apps outside the browser, “so you can use it for the user interface of applications on phones.”

Brian Goldfarb, Lead Product Manager of Microsoft’s Web Platform and Tools team, expects the mobile version of Silverlight to be widely available: “if you have an old phone, we want to make sure you can download it.” He’s aware of the problems in distribution, but claims it’s the same for all technologies. “Mobile’s a challenge because of the latencies of the operating system and device availability. There are a number of things we can do to alleviate the problems, but you are always going to have those problems. Take Adobe’s Flash Lite; Flash Lite 2 is the only one you ever see on phones even though version 3 is out; they have the same distribution problem.”