I like silverlight and i think it has the potential to replace flash and Ajax and becomes the platform of choice for ” Ric Internet Application “.

I visited the site to see the demo and it asked me to download Silverlight 2 , which i didn’t do .. why?

Because since Silverlight was announced , i recall installing it more then 6 times!

Beta 1 , beta 2 , silverlight with (dot-net compact) , etc.

Heck , i have even installed a new version 2 weeks ago!

If Microsoft wants to win . they should make obtaining it easier and it should stop confusing us with all these releases and features.

Adobe ( Macromedia ) greatest strengths for flash was making it widely adaptable and easy to obtain.

This is reminding a lot of all the ” Live ” brand , which keeps changing until it lost its meaning.

if you build a windows based product, then you should use sliverlight and .net!

if you build a web/browser based product, only noob use sliverlight+.net!

use java/adobe! check the world stats! you don’t want to build a website that 99% user browser unsupported right? or you want build a website that wait 2-3 years waiting for all browser support!

nothing special. all GIS software has this capability.

I didnt instal silverlight (for the nth time) but when I visit the hardrock website nothing loads. 2 minutes of life wasted.

Yeah - this is crap. Zoomify has been doing this for years! I also hated seeing ” this might not work very well since you’re on a mac” message after installing Silverlight. I wish Microsoft would just f#$& off and stick to word processing and leave the web alone.

Installed Silverlight for the 5th time only to see an effect I have seen for the 15th time.

*YAWN*

Just saw the demo.. this is really neat stuff!

So , is this why Scoble was crying?

I wonder how Silverlight would hold up in a handheld environment. One of the issues with Flash is that it’s only engineered for Desktops, and Flash Lite is really only for bare bones mobile phones.

AppleInsider has a really interesting article on why Flash will probably never make it into the iPhone (or any handheld browser for that matter). Flash hogs so much power and memory that there’s no handheld on the market that can keep up.

Which begs the question… Are RIAs like Silverlight and Flash really good ideas when they only perform well in desktop browsers??

SEO and handheld support are far too important to dismiss. Obviously a move towards Web Standards (away from proprietary formats like Silverlight and Flash) are more beneficial for a site when it comes to interoperability.

Silverlight installs “successfully” but upon re-opening the browser I still get the “Please install Silverlight 2.0″ message.

It’s only later I find a page that say Silverlight 2.0 doesn’t work on Mac PPC.

Ummm, shouldn’t the install program tell me that in the first place instead of saying the install was a success?

.sigh.

Silverlight is giving me these crazy “please install” messages after I have just installed it. Think i caught a bug…

-iTunes, eat your heart out…
http://www.myspace.com/soundbeastdigital

Tried several times to view on both FF and IE (winXP) yet depsite installing I still get the “install Siliverlight error message.”Still waiting for the silver light…

In response to Chris’ comment, “Zoomify has been doing this for years”. Wow, that is so unbelievably wrong.

This is butter smooth. Zoomify is a dinosaur in comparison. Do you realize that you are looking at over 2GB of data (over 1 billion pixels worth!), while seemlessly zooming and panning around almost 300 hi-res images? If i go to zoomify.com, all I see is a crappy map and a bunch of gray tiles that have yet to download. HAHA!

Zoomify does a really good job at displaying large files. The 2GB you refer to is an aggregate total for the composited image. The quality of the photography is weak. When you zoom in it does nothing more than zoom in on a low res image. With Zoomify the more you zoom in the higher the quality of image you get. Zoomify is a flash based version of the Ajax that powers Google Maps. It takes a high res image and creates numerous levels of resolution then runs a script to slice and dice the images then stacks them in layers. It’s pretty efficient. That’s why everyone loves ajax maps, and why MS tried to repackage a technology that is already used widely and spin it and say they did something new. Piclens is more engaging and powerful than this.

Install. Shut down browser. Doesn’t work. Install another version. Shut down browser. Doesn’t work.

I expect my users to 100% enjoy that experience.

This product should help Microsoft overcome all the presumed issues they have
with user experience. That’s, on average, 4 installs less than what typically is experienced before you realize an MS product doesn’t work.

Agreed: F- on the whole installation process.

At least Flash has already gone through the growing pains of intermittent updates and can minimize the disruption.

Hell, I think the installation/upgrade path for running meez.com’s java applet is smoother than this.

CG

I agree that the photography could be better. But if you watch the keynote, the speaker mentions that all they could get their hands on were the images used by Hard Rock for print work.

But did you see the Bo Diddley guitar at the end? That *one image* alone is 400 MB.

Choke on that zoomify!

Why is everyone having such a bad install experience? When I went to the main page, I got a nice screenshot with the Silverlight install logo, clicked it, which installed the plug-in, then I went back to the page and it worked fine as expected.

It does seem like the site is a little slow right now. Probably choking a bit with all the traffic from all the attention from this morning.

Silverlight 2 is in beta 1. Released for 1 day. I imagine that the installation process is in beta, too. Even then, it’s not that bad. I could figure it out. Go to the memorabilia page, click the Silverlight badge, run the SL installer, refresh the page. It works. Not that hard.

Isn’t Microsoft Dead Yet ???

I believe Seadragon is based on the JPEG2000 standard, which allows for the real-time unencoding of arbitrary levels of detail on arbitrarily high-resolution imagery. As a poster above mentioned this has been common in GIS applications for a while (including some stuff I worked on when I was at http://www.idelix.com), but I think there is some real promise for it in consumer-level apps. I look forward to seeing where this goes.

This is gr8!

For all those who bitch about the technology, go to http://blogs.msdn.com/expressi.....poser.aspx and create a DeepZoom control of your own photos and see how it works.

Take a look at http://xrez.com/sea07_giga.html This is a much more powerful example. These guys have been doing hi res giga-pixel imagery for a long time. If you do a demo that supposed to make Scoble cry the least you could do is acquire imagery that is worth a lick. If you look at the Hard Rock demo, it’s the same idea. It’s sliced images loading off a grid system.

Ha Ha Ha, I think you’re missing the point. This is nothing new. It’s been done before and done a lot better. The PhotoSynth demo at Ted, that was inspiring. This is pedestrian. Go look at the xrez examples. Multi Gigapixel images. Many well over 10 Gigapixels. The Bo Didley example means Didley, it doesn’t load a 400MB file, it shows a glorified thumbnail of the image. As you zoom in it calls for a higher resolution image in the same location within the image. It’s a layer. Same as Google Maps. Just with a slicker UI.

The point is that people have been doing this using tools that are FREE and can be loaded as an AJAX page. No need for a Beta plugin that doesn’t install for some.

There’s no need to bash other technologies, just to buy into the PR spin. Go look around. It’s nothing new.

If you feel compelled to develop using MS development tools good for you. But being brand agnostic and just striving to deliver a User Experience that is engaging, I’m not impressed and I think most who have actually seen sites like xrez, won’t be either. Because there is nothing new. It’s mature technology that MS is just bringing to forefront and trying to extract the PR benefits from. Nothing more. It’s just another example of how MS has lost it’s innovation capability.

Unfortunately if you were one of the few that installed silverlight 1.1 alpha you may need to uninstall it manually. This may be the issue you guys are getting!

When flash was version 1 moving int version 2 I’m sure it would have had the same teething problems so don’t give me the all mightier than god argument that flash is better than silverlight because their install process works..

As for the adoption rates, so what if flash is 90+% Doesn’t mean that new technologies shouldn’t try to enter this space. That is where innovation is stimulated. If there was no-one to push flash then they would be moving at a much slower rate! You should all be thanking Microsoft for stiring the flash adobe/flash giant!

And for your information seadragon is nothing like zoomify or GIS systems or any other technology out there! Get your facts straight before you compare. Seadragon is in a league of it’s own, it really is a new technology that came out of the labs that no one else in the world can do!

Do your research before making stupid comments that make you look like idiots!

Ha Ha You quoted photsynth as inspiring.. Guess what seadragon is the technology in photosynth that you so highly praised!!!

@23: The problem here is that Silverlight 2 is competing with Flash 9. Flash might have had trouble in its early years, but that was a long time ago. Silverlight is competing against a relatively mature product now, so there’s no valid “well, Flash 1 was probably buggy too” excuse to be had here.

completely agree.. my point was that what they’ve achieved in 2 versions is amazing. In my opinion they install process is flawless.

As for the install issues people are saying they are experiencing, i believe it may be because they had the issue of having a version (1.1) installed which is a developer version not advised to be installed by ordinary people. Just guessing here thou!

The install process I’ve had with SL has been flawless, and I put my dummy user hat when I installed it!

Not so much a “bad install experience” as a non-existent one.

“Microsoft Silverlight may not be supported on your computer’s hardware
or operating system. ”

…and indeed it isn’t.

For those of you questioning Zoomify - check out this site that I developed last year: http://www.tooheysnewworldreco...../main.html

Then tell me that it doesn’t compare to Microsoft’s ‘new’ technology.

JPEG2000. Wavelets. This is supposed to be the revolution?

advertboy. Yes Seadragon is a component of PhotoSynth that was Acquired (not developed in the lab), but that’s not innovative. That’s not what makes Photosynth inspiring nor revolutionary. The ability to synthesize 1000’s of images from numerous sources into a single psuedo 3D image, now that is revolutionary. The algorithm that point cloud uses is what makes Photosynth really sing, now that’s revolutionary.

Maybe you can articulate what makes Seadragon innovative. You probably will do a much better job than what MS was able to do. I know you’re a Silverlight developer so maybe you can educate us on the technological advances that Seadragon makes. I think most of us would love to advance the UX of our users, if Seadragon can do it, I’d love to expend the time to learn it.

But it appears to me and others that it isn’t anything new, nor does it do anything better than what Zoomify does. The backend for zoomify is very easy to use, it democratizes the use of advanced technology to those who aren’t coders. I’ve used both Zoomify and a free application that produces the processed images you use in Google Maps to navigate giga pixels images.

I agree with you that if Silverlight pushes Adobe to make Flash and other applications better, we all will benefit. And you are right that should be the point.

Chris, sorry…what is your site supposed to do exactly. I haven’t been able to figure it out

@skc - when you visit the site, click the ‘view the mosaic’ button - from there you’ll be able to zoom in (and out) of a very high resolution image of a photo-mosaic (we broke the guiness world record for the creating the largest ever photomosaic).

chris - I cant see the link to the site!!!

I only had a small issue with it not reloading after installing the latest Silverlight. But other than that, it’s AWESOME.

Zooming in and out of all that data was quick and simple. Info came up as I got into more details, and it’s quite compelling. Very interesting.

You can make your own Deep Zoom (or SeaDragon thingy) here.

http://blogs.msdn.com/expressi.....poser.aspx

The same technology I think.

And for you Mac users, you would think OS X is the most highly support for OS in the world, isn’t it? Silverlight is still in beta btw.

“You can make your own Deep Zoom (or SeaDragon thingy) here.”

Where??

Lots of claim with no real understanding of the underling technology of SeaDragon. The real difference with Zoomify or Google Maps, or HD View from MS research, is that SeaDragon allows zooming on a COLLECTION of images. That’s what different, and that’s what hard. Images can be of different resolution, and still it zooms seamlessly. Pretty hard stuff to do when you think of it. I know because we do it, and it’s hard. BTW we do it in Flash, and we also zoom on video.

For those interested they can see here hi-res pictures of Van Gogh paintings: http://www.zoomomail.com/b8612.....dc9b284ec9

Or check out the site: http://www.zoomorama.com , download the authoring tool and start having Zooming fun time with your 10Mpixels pictures.

Hi chris,

but the website you posted is very bad example to compare to deep zoom.
The example is slow and not smooth. When i zoom in i have to wait nearly 30- 60 seconds before the resolution change. Its big pixel look when you zoom in. And the user feeling is bad, because to use the big buttons can´t be compare to use the mouse like the demo in deep zoom.

jens

This is quite annoying - it doesn’t support Safari on Windows. If Microsoft is going to try to take on Flash, then they need to make their product available on as many platforms as Flash. Trying to force users to use their web browser just isn’t going to cut it. And if Microsoft isn’t putting the resources behind Silverlight to make it work on browsers like Safari, then they can’t expect it to succeed. They either need to do it right or they can’t expect to be taken seriously as a platform provider. Whatever happened to the “new, open” Microsoft?