A blog about User Interface, User Experience, Design, Flash, Product management and all that goes in between.

Mrinal Wadhwa:

Microsoft Silverlight is a browser plugin and is sort of similar to Adobe’s Flash Player and Flex Framework taken together

Adobe AIR is cross platform desktop runtime that allows developers to build desktop applications using web technologies, it has no real equivalent in the Microsoft world.

Peter Elst also finds it important to differentiate..

So many people ask me – “How is Silverlight?” or “Is Silverlight a real threat to Flash?”.. well, I never even tried Silverlight. (I did install the plugin, but simply never got to a website that uses Silverlight..)
So the only answer I can give is: when aiming at the web industry (us developers), such a difference in user/client perception must result in different adoption trends, evident: I did not try.. but the logo looks kinda cool.

Eric Dolecki wrote an inspiring post about “what Apollo might bring“, I must admit I share his excitement, I witnessed Flash evolve from a graphics and animation oriented application into a global standard RIA platform, empowering new approaches to User Interface, and changing the web application experience.

Apollo is a cross-OS runtime that allows developers to leverage their existing web development skills (Flash, Flex, HTML, Ajax) to build and deploy desktop RIA’s.

Apollo will probably do the same to desktop applications, enrich our desktop apps experience – applications will talk to each other, be updated without user involvement, be more personalized, and best of all – platform independent.In addition to that, imagine the impact open source projects such as Red5 will have on the way we communicate – as the costs of server applications to “talk” to (or through?) are dramatically diminished.I am definitely optimistic.