“Move Media Player and Microsoft’s Silverlight To Create The Most Flexible, High Quality Streaming Video Platform”
Here’s a strange one. Move Networks is offering a HD video player “powered by Silverlight” that comes in the form of a Firefox extension. Once installed you are redirected to a page that shows a HD video, but a look at the source shows the video player header and controls/progress bar are all made in Flash, it just overlays a block, streaming in a QMX file (doesn’t open in Windows Media Player when renamed asx).
It seems a lot of effort to go to, cross communicating between Flash, JavaScript, Silverlight and Firefox, when you could have made the whole player using just one technology. I don’t get the point of the Firefox extension in the first place, the video controls require Flash Player anyway, and if they had used Silverlight for them you’d need that plugin so why bother with this extension at all?
There are a fewposts out there relating to Shantanu’s disclosure of a standalone Flash Player being developed for the iPhone using the newly released SDK, but of course that doesn’t answer the question as to whether people will be able to browse the web and view Flash content in-line, given that Flash makes up a huge chunk of the web, and also provides the revenue for a great many sites through advertisements (fallback GIFs are not what advertisers are paying so much money for).
I’ve been learning Objective-C and the iPhone SDK over the past week and it seems to me there might be an alternative option in using the WebKit engine, available in the SDK. Potentially identifying SWF embeds in web pages and replacing them with a Flash Player control. One thing I’m not clear on is whether this violates the agreement put forth by the SDK. In particular…
“No interpreted code may be downloaded and used in an Application except for code that is interpreted and run by Apple’s Published APIs and builtin interpreter(s).”
As a side-note, the iPhone SDK is a pretty well made package. If it weren’t for the possible confusion between the various frameworks and component parts that have arisen over the years, Carbon, Cocoa, QuickTime, Core Graphics, Core Animation (Leopard and iPhone/iPodTouch only) it would have been even better. But overall the video tutorials, reams of documentation and samples make learning these things fairly easy when compared with what you might have to go through; considering Objective-C is only a very thin layer on top of C, and for me had a much stranger syntax than C++ (when you assume Java, C#, ActionScript are all strikingly similar).
Ran into a couple of issues today with Flash Player 9. I’m communicating with a server which uses REST-based services and is very “standards compliant". So when PUTting* to the server, it was responding with a HTTP 201 code (that’s a “created” response) and a 204 status code for a DELETE*. The Flash IDE was choking on this and generating an IOError, unable to read the stream. (*as a sidenote Flash Player doesn’t support the PUT or DELETE verbs right now, so we were using POST instead, and using a request header ("X-HttpVerbOverride") to specify the correct verb.)
The IOError is of course pretty fatal, but I wondered whether it was just the Flash Player in my CS3 IDE which is not the most up to date (I still can’t install the 9.0.2 CS3 IDE update for some reason). So I tried everything in the browser and all seems well. So right now that’s good enough for me, if anyone can confirm this is fixed in 9.0.115 or later that would be great.
The other issue was with the X-HttpVerbOverride custom request header I was adding to overcome the lack of support for PUT and DELETE. It wasn’t being sent (using Charles to check). This one is easy to fix… just make sure you are sending some data in the request and that the request is a POST and all’s well again.
In a press release today Nokia announced that Symbian OS will include Silverlight. This includes both high-end S60, and low-end series 40. Silverlight is of course the cross-platform RIA runtime from Microsoft, that can be considered a subset of WPF (at least with version 2.0 which has a substantial feature list).
I wonder if Microsoft charged a per-device license fee to Nokia like Adobe did, and if so what the difference is. On top of that there was of course the controversial price to pay for the developer edition of the Flash Lite runtime for Series 60 which is thankfully now free. Clearly there is a fierce competition to be had in this space as the web continues to leak out onto what we currently call “devices", and Microsoft have made it crystal clear Silverlight is high on their list of priorities.
Personally I see Windows Mobile taking a bit of a dive with the strong competition from RIM and Symbian, and more interestingly Google’s Android which I have extremely high hopes for. With that in mind, it’s sensible for Microsoft to find alternate, more up-to-date platforms for continued expansion, and just like the Flash Platform, a ubiquitous WPF/Silverlight stack would provide this.
When the iPhone came out, I thought it was a brave move, but I couldn’t see myself getting one, even though I’m a bit of an Apple fan (my MBP and Nano/Nike+ are irreplaceable). But since then I’ve been using a friend’s Jailbreaked iPhone I’m utterly sold on it (and the Touch), but for a different reason….
The combination of large touch screen, fast processor and accelerometers makes this device a sleeping giant in the handheld games market. The Nintendo DS and PSP have widened the audience considerably, with games like “Brain Training” on the DS, and World Series of Poker et al on the PSP squarely aimed at adults, and many games specifically targeted at girls. They are making gamers of people who would probably not consider themselves gamers at all… even after spending 3 hours straight playing 42-in-1
Apple are soon to release an SDK to game developers, I imagine these will be sold on iTunes. Like Nintendo, Apple prefer to keep a firm handle on anything that can alter the overall experience of using one of their products. Having said that if you haven’t seen some of the stuff coming out of the iPhone/Touch homebrew community take a look at some of the videos below.
Table-top Labyrinthe/Maze
I was amazed at the sensitivity of this one, no lagging at all, highly intuitive and tactile. Tilt the device to roll the ball.
Trism
A classic puzzler that uses the touch screen to slide “prisms” to form combinations… also uses the accelerometers to let the rows slide in the direction you are tilting the device.
iPhysics
You may have seen similar for desktop and DS, this delivers the same sort of experience as line-rider but involving many more objects.
It’s my birthday later this week, and I was lucky enough to have been bought an iPod Touch by my girlfriend so I’ll be Jailbreaking it later today and getting some of this on there. All in all, I expect the iPhone/iPod Touch to prove to be a significant contender in the ever expanding games market. One to watch.
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