Silverlight: Bearing Down on Flash?
Ars Technica is reporting that there's now a Linux-based browser plugin for Microsoft's Silverlight. Silverlight is a cross platform "media plugin" that looks to be positioned as a very nice Flash competitor. With all the brouhaha about YouTube not working so well on WM phones (er, not working at all except on a select few, like the HTC Touch in my pocket, Nyah Nyah!), Silverlight's cross-platform abilities could make it a real competitor in internet multimedia. There was already a great demo of a Baseball app on Windows Mobile that looks really slick.
Anyhow, the good news here is that Microsoft made the necessary tools available for Silverlight to work cross-platform and somebody got it working on Linux. There are big players on board (hello streaming movies on Netflix!) so I'm hopeful that we're going to see some really dynamic, media rich stuff on mobile phones soon.
Actually, what I'm really hoping is that Photon (the next version of Windows Mobile, also known as "The Second Coming") is going to sport a Silverlight-based UI. That would add a lot of fancy graphical features without much overhead and help Windows Mobile have the speed and eye-candy of a certain other mobile phone that you may have heard of.
After 20 days of "intense" programming, Novell's Mono development team has successfully produced a functioning prototype of Moonlight, an open-source Mono-based implementation of Microsoft's Silverlight rich-media application development framework
Read: Mono Silverlight implementation emerges after epic hackathon
