I had the fortune to be invited to MIX08 this year and one of the most interesting topics for me was Microsoft's plans for Silverlight on mobile devices. I have not followed the Silverlight story until now, but for those of you not aquainted with it, Silverlight is a presentation technology, not unlike Flash, for building rich content applications, typically published on websites as an alternative to standard web pages (written in HTML) or their dynamic cousins (HTML + AJAX).
Flash has been available on mobile platforms for a while now. It is available as a full implementation of desktop Flash on some Windows Mobile platforms. There is also a special version of it, called Flash Lite, available for a wider range of mobile platforms including the Windows Mobile family, Windows CE and Nokia Series 60.
Silverlight v1.0 for Windows Mobile was launched last week at MIX08 and is the first implementation of Silverlight for mobile devices. It is based on v1.0 of the technology (a beta v2.0 of 'desktop' Silverlight was also much discussed at the conference) and implemented as a plug-in to Internet Explorer on Windows Mobile 6.0.
My own interest in both Flash and Silverlight is to evaluate them for use as a rich application development environment on our own platform (a device running Windows CE 5.0 with 'mobile characteristics' including a 240x320 screen and keypad data entry).
Unfortunately, since it looks like Silverlight for Windows Mobile will only work through Internet Explorer and on Windows Mobile 6.0, it currently rules out using Silverlight on our platform which does not include Internet Explorer and is based on Windows CE, not Windows Mobile.
Oh well, maybe Microsoft (or a 3rd party) will expand support later and maybe de-couple the Silverlight engine from Internet Explorer so it can be used for standalone applications.
I did see an impressive demo of the engine in use on a Windows Mobile device and it will be interesting to see if, and how, this takes hold in the mobile space.
You can find the slides and a video of the presentation here:
http://sessions.visitmix.com/?selectedSearch=T12
Wednesday, March 12, 2008
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)