my.blog
My.Projects
Game Baker Easy to use, graphical Game Designer for linux.
Social Comic Book Display your twitter posts in a comic book layout.
Seam Resizer Implementation of seam removal and insertion for photo editing.
Viral Ad Network Make money from your website by showing viral ads on your site.
Santa's Snowy Workshop A highly playable Christmas Real Time Strategy game..
My.Papers
Average Views on YouTube The average daily views/video on YouTube doubles at the end of 2007.
My.Blog
Nerdy news updates and articles
Tim Wintle's Blog
Tim works at Team Rubber, where he uses Python, large computers, and some clever maths to look at the web in new ways. In his free time he codes various other bits of software, and web apps.
.
Fri, 07 Sep 2007
Microsoft Silverlight - "cross-browser, cross-platform" media
So, Microsoft have released their new silverlight platform, designed for "Cross-browser, cross-platform" media content, and have released Tafiti, a silvelight frontend to windows live search. Eager to view it, I searched for "tafiti" in Google and recieved the following description:
Apart from their obvious skill at ranking for the term "tafiti" (the term is repeated five times in the entry on the SERP), I couldn’t help thinking that the people who designed this search engine could do with a little training in SEO - this wasn’t the most descriptive text.
Assuming that Microsoft clearly just hadn’t yet finished their version of silverlight for the (rather unpopular) safari I continued to the page, to a blank page with a small button telling me to download silverlight. Note this is not the fancy screen you will see in Windows using Internet Explorer, but a very plain black page with a button that seemed totally out of place. Still the optimist, I clicked to download it and eventually got redirected to the download page for my operating system, which can be found here (I encourage you to open this in a new tab and download the version of silverlight available).
Confused, welcome to the "cross-browser, cross platform" part of Microsoft’s new venture. I know I am using Linux, and there are only 29 Million of us out there, but I had hoped that "Cross-browser, cross-platform" may include us. I had also hoped that my browser (Firefox) would at least be able to display the download page correctly. Clearly it does not include anybody using *nix or Apple users who use Safari. What is more, I am unable to find exactly what Microsoft defines as "cross-browser", since whenever I try to find out I get send the usefull page above.
I did try to look at the source code for tafiti for more information of supported browsers, however I gave up after noticing 40 lines of Javascript code to catch Silverlight errors (I can't remember seeing that for a flash movie). Anybody else have any news about silverlight? Leave a comment.
TrackBack ping me at:
http://www.timwintle.co.uk/blog.pl/Web/silverlight-tafiti.trackback