On the 22nd of July I attended the UK launch of Silverlight and Expression Studio 3 over at Microsoft London. As you may have realized Silverlight isn’t really my main area of expertise, and I’m not planning to change that, just in case you were worried 
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The start time was at 1:30pm and the afternoon was split into two sessions but were really just a mix up of case studies and demos for agencies currently using Silverlight in their projects. The first session was about SketchFlow and Blend, and the second was on Expression Web and also on Silverlight it’s self. There was a lot of interesting stuff in the presentations but also some things that I wasn’t quite happy about.
Better Composition and Planning.
Expression SketchFlow is a piece of software which enabled the designers to import sketches, or create wireframes using components provided to create a version of a site for the client that exactly mimics the functionality of how the final product will look. To help with this process, ‘Sketch’ components are provided that function exactly like you would expect components too, for example a scroll bar, but they appear as if they were sketched. This is useful because;
- It saves time having to create any graphics.
- It prevents clients from focusing on the graphical side of things and just understanding how the function will work, not the form.
Once you have created you ‘sketch’ layout and used the components you need to, you can then to mimic even more functionality, can use SketchFlow’s built in states which are used for things like tabs, where you have an over, up, down, etc state. With SketchFlow you can plan for all of these and create basic animation which is not dissimilar to timeline animation in Flash. Also new to Silverlight 3 is built in easing effects to achieve are more professional animation.
The next part of the composition stage of the workflow is presenting the comp to the client. There are many ways in which Blend can do this like exporting to a Word document, but there is an even better way. It can generate an online application which is on your web server and loads in the current composition, and then the client can browse through all the revisions and leave feedback. All animation can be viewed and components can be interacted with, which means that the client can gain the full idea of what the user interaction is going to be like. This method is far superior to most used before like building a HTML version. This was hard to maintain and used up a lot of valuable time.
A streaming experience like never before. Pfft.
With Silverlight’s new media capabilities like real HD and adjustive streaming it’s not hard to see why NBC broadcasted Wimbledon and the Olympics in it.
According to the presenter, loading times are a thing of the past. Silverlight’s streaming capabilities have been designed so that they adapt to the current bandwidth. So if they are being used on a 3mb broadband connection they it will provide if possible full HD video so long as it can load it all without any delays, but if the connection is slow, the plugin realizes this and the decreases the quality of the video being played so that it can still load it all without delays. This is great as the majority of views move off a site after a while if they are sat waiting for something to load. A good example of this is the popular video sharing site YouTube which has an average watching time of 5 seconds! This is because users leave the site if they have to sit there and wait for it to load. When generating revenue from video it is crucial that you don’t loose visitors and Silverlight seems to cure one of the biggest headaches that a video sharing site faces.
Now one of the other problems with YouTube and the main reason behind its 5 second visiting time is that the player loads all off the video right to the end instead of just the first bit which is the bit people are mostly likely only going to watch. Silverlight uses a different method by dividing the video file into separate chunks and then loads them in order. This helps saves a lot of bandwidth as if people only stay the watch the first few seconds then the bandwidth won’t be wasted trying to load the whole video, but just the first bit which the user actually watched.
10 second install.
Those of you who have installed Silverlight know that it is an extremely easy install process, which Microsoft claims only takes 10 seconds. I have found this to be roughly true and I another major bonus is that I don’t even exit my browser! Compared to Flash’s installation which requires you to actually visit the Adobe site, and then quit your browser this is an oasis. It makes accessing Silverlight content even easier.
Let’s not forget good old HTML.
A lot has changed in Expression Web since I last looked at it, which I have to say was quite some time ago. One of the major new features and quite a useful one at that is SuperPreview. This is similar to Adobe BrowserLab which has recently been launched (coincidence?). In a nutshell SuperPreview allows you to view your web page using different browser rendering engines and compare them side by side. It can also tell you the position of every element in the HTML page and then show you how much it differs in one browser to another. This helps you to correct it to pixel perfection.
Also Expression Web comes with the ability to easily create and insert Silverlight DeepZoom and also Flash and other general Silverlight content with ease. Another helpful tool that works in conjunction with the other parts of the studio is Expression Encoder which allows you to take the pain out of converting and resizing video. Web utilizes this well as you can insert, convert and resize video ready for a HTML page right from within the tool with only a few clicks. This is something that is long overdue for Dreamweaver.
A very good question, 3D?
Now when we were in the Q&A session there was a very good question about what Microsoft has planned for gaming in Silverlight and how it compared to Unity3D. The speaker said he wasn’t familiar with Unity3D but that the 3D features would be improved. The next thing that was of interest was that they said that it might eventually possible to develop a game using the XNA framework and the have it run using the Silverlight plugin. Obviously the main problem with improving the graphics on a cross platform browser plugin is that you have to deal with so many different libraries and runtimes, and trying to get all these to the same level of performance and ease of use must be quite a challenge.
If Microsoft pull this off right then they could quite possibly be Unity3D’s biggest competitor and I cant see that they can stand up against something that is already on 1 in 3 internet enabled devices in the world. It’s a shame though that the presenter didn’t seem to give the impression that Microsoft were giving gaming much of a thought for the future versions of Silverlight.
What’s the catch?
So far, I have portrayed Silverlight 3 in a very good light, and with good reason. It has come on along way since I last looked at it, and if it carry’s on it’s rapid production cycle then Adobe better watch out. As the saying goes though, nothing is perfect and Silverlight is no exception. I couldn’t help but feel that all the new features and the tools themselves were aimed at big agency’s and companies with employees in their hundreds. The reason I think this is that for the average freelancer who can sit down and explain to their client what is going on, the new SketchFlow features wouldn’t really help that much. For example, the online tool to show clients what different comps the designer had come up with and the option to leave feedback would be pretty redundant for someone who can be right next to the client and explain. Although spoken explanation can only go so far and there is nothing like having a working demo with full interactivity, with SketchFlow can achieve with ease.
The next major problem that you will have all worked out by now is that the tools are still only for Windows! This is the biggest disadvantage for me as I have a MacBook and a Dell XPS. Although I can run it on my XPS, it would be nice not have to get Bootcamp up and running every time I want to work in Expression Studio. I can imagine that for studios that are 100% Mac, Silverlight will be a straight no. I expect that in time *hopefully* the tools will be released for Mac.
This last one is obvious and one that is to be expected but never the less a very important factor and on that puts of a lot of studios adopting Silverlight for projects other and research and development. It’s the adoption rate. As I mentioned earlier Silverlight is on 1 in 3 internet enabled devices but Flash player 9 is installed on 99% of all computers in the US/Canada and this is pretty much the same over all the world.
Conclusion.
Overall Silverlight has some good prospects if Microsoft carry on the rapid releases they have been while including major features in each release at the same time. Although I still feel that the penetration figures are not good enough for use right now, the easy install makes it easy to access Silverlight content so hopefully this should change. I look forward to playing around with the new Expression studio and I can’t wait to see what appears in Silverlight 4, and hopefully I’ll get invited to that launch as well!
Feel free to leave thoughts in the comments section below, and happy Silverlighting!
Harry.
