Microsoft: WPF/e = Silverlight

April 16, 2007 at 11:19 am · Filed under RIA, Video, User Interface, User Experience

Microsoft announced the public release name for the technology/plug-in previously known by its code name “WPF/e” (Windows Presentation Foundation Everywhere) today as “Silverlight.” Although Microsoft has preferred that the technology not be compared with Adobe’s (formerly Macromedia) ubiquitous Flash plug-in, it’s hard not to make the comparison. Both plug-ins leverage vector based graphics and scripting languages to allow the delivery of richer-than-HTML multimedia experiences, and both have a focus on the delivery of video content.

I worked at Microsoft last year for a few months prior to returning to my post at Terralever. While there, I participated in a program in which Microsoft brought in multimedia designers to put Silverlight through its paces. They were working on a version of the plug-in that was still in development and were working without documentation. Even with those limitations, the resulting demos did show promise in the hands of the highly qualified multimedia designers.

But, who would consider Silverlight over Flash? Here’s some thoughts on Silverlight:

• For designer-developers who are more fluent in JavaScript (or AJAX) Silverlight may be easier to transition to than Flash
• For RIA’s (Rich Internet Applications) that involve communication between an HTML page and multimedia content housed within it, Silverlight may prove to be a more seamless solution as the Silverlight object is a part of the DOM
• This is a v1 product for Microsoft, who usually starts firing on all cylinders around v3, and, Microsoft seem serious about its movement into this space
• Video is the hot topic on the web right now. Flash is currently able to stream a maximum of 576 lines (per Ars Technica) whereas video encoded with Microsoft’s VC-1 codec can be streamed at 720 lines. Silverlight also handles scaling video while it is being viewed beautifully.

Silverlight’s biggest hurdle? Gaining the mind share of multimedia designers—and doing so with a PC-only development ecosystem (Microsoft Expression).

The cross-browser plug-in is currently available for both Internet Explorer and Firefox on the PC as well as Safari and Firefox on the Macintosh.

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Serving OS X Apache to a Parallels Windows client

March 29, 2007 at 3:42 am · Filed under Hardware, Applications

I’m currently creating a Vista Sidebar Gadget, and needed to work with it on a PC to ensure my HTML was rendering correctly. All of my HTML and image files are own my Mac, and I have Parallels running Windows as a guest operating system. All I needed to do is to allow the PC guest OS to have access to the Apache web server on the OS X side.

I found a few articles on how to do this-most involve network configuration settings on both the OS X Parallels Network Adapter and on Windows. It also involves cracking open the C:\WINDOWS\system32\drivers\etc\hosts file and making an update, which is easy, but I doubt the generalist is interested in doing.

Here’s a simple, quick solution: Bonjour. I didn’t know there was Bonjour for Windows, but there is (which in retrospect makes sense with iTunes having a PC program). Here’s the drill:

1. On the Parallels Windows guest OS, download and install the Bonjour for Windows client.
2. On the Parallels Windows guest OS, open Internet Explorer, and enable Bonjour by clicking on the Bonjour Icon in the Toolbar (this might not be necessary-clicking it will, at the least, show a list of printers Bonjour has detected on the network in a pane on the left-hand side of IE, confirming that Bonjour is running).
3. On the Macintosh, go to System Preferences > Sharing and enable Windows Sharing and Personal Web Sharing. When you enable Windows Sharing, make a note of the IP address that OS X assigns. In my case, it was 172.20.1.111
4. On the Macintosh, verify your Apache Server is fine. Open a browser instance and navigate to:http://localhost/You should see the Apache web server default page (”Seeing this instead of the website you expected?”).
5. On the Parallels Windows guest OS, open navigate to the IP address that OS X declared when you enabled Windows sharing in Step 3:http://172.20.1.11/If everything is clicking right, you should be seeing the same Apache web server default page you’re seeing on the Mac.

That should be it!

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Parallels Desktop - thumbs up

March 27, 2007 at 1:16 pm · Filed under Beta, Applications

I’ve been running Parallels Desktop for Mac for about a month now; how’s it been? Great.

First off, why Parallels? My setup is so I can run Mac OS X and all of its applications as my primary OS, but to still have the ability to run the following Windows applications: Internet Explorer (for viewing web pages on projects our company is working on), and Microsoft Office. My last setup used Mac Office 2004, but I always had issues here and there, not with Word and Excel, but with Entourage. Boot Camp is nice, but I don’t want to access one OS at a time; it’s simply not realistic for my work habits.

The Setup:

• Build: Parallels Desktop build 3188
• Hardware: MacBookPro with a 2 GHz Intel Core Duo and 2 GB of Ram
• Parallels OS: Microsoft Windows XP
• Installed PC Software: Office 2007, Internet Explorer, Firefox

I run Parallels in Coherence mode, which allows you to have one desktop with both a “Start” menu for Windows and the standard OS X dock. Windows for either OS just sit atop one another as they would if you were just using OS X.

I’m thoroughly impressed with Parallels. My only gripe would be that when in Coherence mode I do get some occasional lag with the graphics card repainting underneath where a window has just moved from (when minimized or dragged). To minimize the effect (when what is below during the rendering is the Mac desktop), I set both the OS X and the XP desktops to run a background color only (no image). Insofar as performance, I was expecting the Office Applications to lack responsiveness, but they seem fine.

Side note: I had to get in touch with Parallels Support to get my Authorization Key resent to our office. It was slightly more complicated than that as we were ‘deauthorizing’ one Mac, and ‘authorizing’ another. The wait to talk to someone was about 10 minutes, at which point I got a motivated, positive Tech Support Representative who solved our problem and stayed on the line until it was all sorted out. Kudos to the Parallels support team-great customer service like this is awesome, and further impressed my take on Parallels as a company.

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Multiple versions of Internet Explorer on a PC

March 6, 2007 at 3:32 pm · Filed under Usability, Programming, Applications, User Experience

For all the web designers/developers who have been wishing for a solution that allows running more than one version of IE on a PC at a time without having to run Virtual PC-someone has tackled the problem with an elegant solution. A company called Tredosoft has come up with an installer that allows you to select which versions of Internet Explorer you’d like on your machine, and then it does the dirty work.

From the feedback on their site, most are finding it to be a relatively simple installation. Others are having challenges with some features on certain versions of IE. Early bugs people are finding aside, this is the type of solution HTML authors have been envisioning for years (and it’s currently free).

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