Reviews

Kickoff meeting for a new user group for designers, about Microsoft Silverlight and WPF stuff.

ZamDes (XAML for Designers) is a group for designers and developers working with Silverlight etc to share techniques and ideas. This first meeting was presented by Nas Khan and Isha.

The ZamDes website has info about meetings, the user group, and heaps of links to blogs (check out The WPF blog), example sites, and tutorials on Silverlight etc.

Think shiny black, very Microsoft Vista. (I’m not dissing, recently at work I emailed round the team how nice Word 2007 is to use (for me) and some Linux guy replied back that it was “too PlaySkool” )

Nas showed us some of the apps used to encode video, create movies and UI controls etc, all looked very smooth. You can encode video super-quick, then drop it into a design app and make the controls all pretty, layer over/ under photographs and stuff. All in Expression Studio.

Lots of giveaways, goody bags, with CDs, some booklets about the user group, and other stuff. For some reason nobody wanted an Intergen beanie (think they were just kidding. )

What is this stuff about?

In simple terms, Silverlight is a rough equivalent to Flash and runs in a web browser, and WPF is similar, but the results are client applications (on your pc not the internet) and have more capabilities in terms of rich media and interactivity. Check the official sites for a more accurate summary.

We saw Avalon Healthcare Prototype which is a desktop (WPF) application. It’s an interface to patients medical records and charts, made to look a lot like a traditional paper and card filing system. Interesting approach to user interface design (imagine if the internet looked just like books, newspapers and magazines).

Examples of Silverlight websites:

Nibbles Tutorials: this site is entirely in Silverlight. Looks nice, but I found it annoying as the text is set in size, and your browser back button is useless - as you navigate around the site the URL stays the same.

Tafiti - Microsoft Live Search reskinned using Silverlight. This is pretty cool, especially if you look at the tree view.

Browser / operating system vital stats

Silverlight runs in:

• Windows: Firefox, Internet Explorer
• MacOSX: Firefox, Safari
• Linux - not yet, but see the Moonlight project.

Silverlight compared to Flash

Sounds like Silverlight uses less CPU than Flash, and that file sizes are generally smaller.

It’s font support is very basic - only a few system fonts are supported, and these in a very simple manner. I doubt there would be the control over font presentation (line heights, letter spacing, kerning) which is possible in Flash.

Silverlight 1.0 was released this year, and is seen as primarily a streaming video application. Silverlight 1.1 - to be released maybe June 2008 - will have more scope for functionality & interactivity.

Flash is 10 years old! Check out this History of Flash.

What’s the code like?

From what people said, not great so far. XAML (markup used in Silverlight etc) is a lot like HTML before CSS layouts came along, i.e. with lots of presentational markup mixed in with the data.

Accessibility?

Again, probably not great so far. It’s a very new application though and probably far too early to have any idea of what it could become. Doing things like seperating data from presentation, and being able to output data in multiple formats are probably not going to be impossible. It would be good to see some basic user interface accessibility principles embedded in the technology:

• Allowing users to increase the text size (or perhaps, for the Silverlight content to take into account the text size preferences which the user has set up).
• Making the interface keyboard accessible.

Presenting things visually as an accessibility feature, not a fault

Silverlight, as is Flash, can be a good way to present ideas and information to visual people, including those who may have a print disability. Have a look at what Isolani has to say about Flash vs accessibility luddites:

… cutting edge web accessibility is happening in the Flash and JavaScript communities…

Sounds great, though not sure this is the case in New Zealand yet. Wish it was!