A Silver Light Around Flash Forward 2008
Just a few minutes ago I received an email from Lynda, informing me that she would be handing over the reins of ownership of this year's Flash Forward conference. Handing them over to Beau Ambur, veteran rich media developer and CEO of Metaliq, a San Francisco-based solutions firm.
Why does this merit your attention?
I find it interesting - neutrally, journalistically interesting - that 4 of the 8 projects currently featured on Metaliq.com are of Microsoft origin. Ambur himself has been working with SilverLight nearly since its inception. If this sounds catty to you, it is just that perception that brings me to my point.
It is my goal as a developer - as a professional - to learn as much as humanly possible about my craft and the media in which that craft is practiced. The end to those means is, ideally, to create experiences for my users so fully abstracted from the nuts and bolts as to eliminate those nuts and bolts from the conversation entirely. The notion that flash developers are flash-centric is outdated and incorrect. Users have control, and we use whatever works best for the job.
Kudos to Lynda in her selection.
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How very forward thinking of you, Will. How open, accepting, and technologically agnostic. How client centric. I applaud your attitude. Too bad Microsoft's doesn't share your sentiment.
Silverlight by itself might be nice. But it is built on the .Net platform, which means the best way to build and deploy Silverlight is to swallow the whole .NET pill whole.
By contast, Adobe is attempting to straddle the open source / private industry chasm. Yes, they certainly make proprietary software to author SWFs. But they are working with Mozilla and the open source community to open the SWF and PDF format to the public. They respect standardization. And they aren't... well... evil.
Silverlight and .NET isn't a platform. It's more like a lifestyle that you either buy into or avoid like the plague. I choose the latter, as often as I can.
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