Robert Scoble blogs his take on the recent news that Google is now going to be indexing Flash content. Is indexing a game loser for Silverlight? Not quite, but I think the trends aren’t going in Silverlight’s direction. Flash is as strong as ever.

I wrote a long post how I see the positioning between Silverlight and Flash right now and I deleted it. Why? Because it doesn’t help me to focus on the negative right now.

What are some things I’d like to see in Silverlight?

Device support for cameras, mics, sound libraries, offline capabilities, and support on more devices. That would be good enough for now.

The source code for Moonlight 1.0–well, the pre-beta source code–is available now according to Miguel de Icaza.

Miguel blogs that this release is not a beta release, but rather code made available to developers that would like to contribute.

Sounds like something I should take a look at.

I keep wondering though if Microsoft should really be doing this. Why reverse engineer and recreate everything?

I went to the Phoenix Silverlight User Group meeting tonight, which was MCed by Michael Palermo. I’m not sure of the exact count, but I’m guessing there were about just under 20 people there. Not bad, because there weren’t any extra chairs left in the room. Among the attendees were Tim Heur, Dave Campbell, Bob Blakeley, and Steele Price.

I gave a demo of my Silverlight-based ink-enabled Search and Math TIPs. The search demo went fine, but I had some trouble properly writing the math equations. It goes to show that I need to fine tune the equation recognizer. Anyway, it was fun dusting off these one-year old apps and giving them some attention.

Maybe in a future session I’ll demo my Sivlerlight blogging markup control. Hmm, that means I better get it up on the server for everyone to try out.

There’s more speculation today over the launch date of Windows 7. Uhm, folks, aren’t we getting a little ahead of ourselves? Think about it from the engineering perspective–we haven’t even seen a beta yet. This “marketing-and-business-focused” think is what got things into a pickle with Vista. Let’s not do it again. Sure it’s always a business decision as to when a product ships, but come on, there are tens of millions of people relying upon Windows, this isn’t a game where you can say “oops, my bad” if you make a huge release blunder. So stay calm and watch for the real tell-tell signs of a product launch.

First things first. A beta needs to make its way out into the wild. If there’s no widely available beta, then don’t spend too much time on thinking about release dates. The beta will reveal its secrets in time in terms of its readiness and so on.

Second, we have little idea how much Microsoft is adding/augmenting Vista, if anything. Let’s all wait and see what the official word is.

Till then, no word at all means either of two things: 1) Windows 7 isn’t ready any time soon or 2) the changes to Windows 7 aren’t going to be that great so a condensed schedule will work fine. Either way, it means we’ll have an appropriate amount of time to adjust.

Now for me, I hope that Microsoft does a good job of communicating with developers what’s going to be forthcoming in Windows 7 if there are going to be substantial changes. Surprises are fine for the breaking-news-oriented media, but for people like me that like to write leading edge code, well, not so much.

Of course, we’ll all adjust no matter how Windows 7 is launched–whether it’s tomorrow or 2 years from now. The sun will rise, the world will go on. It’s just software.

One thing I will say is that in terms of product delivery and communicating roadmaps within Microsoft, Scott Guthrie’s .NET and tools team is showing how it’s done. Quite impressive–especially from a C#/ASP.NET perspective. (C++, well not so much, but that’s another story.) I’m not so sure if it would be a wise move to manage Windows the way .NET is, however, in terms of the web side, it sure looks to me like if Scott Guthrie has anything to do with it, that Microsoft’s forthcoming web-based dev tools are going to be timely, valuable, and impressive. I’m giving them a 3 1/2 out of 4 stars right now in terms of execution.

Tuesday I went to a local “Silverlight 2″ presentation put on by AZGroups, a local developer/designer organization. I’m glad I went. It was top notch–especially for a free event. It was kind of like a Readers Digest version of Mix08–although without the party at Tao. Fine by me, I don’t drink.

Scott Guthrie, recently promoted to VP of “all things developer-oriented” at Microsoft was the main presenter–in fact, he gave two presentations. One on the Silverlight 2 Beta and another on the new MVC framework for ASP.NET. Both were easy to follow, well organized and well presented. I walked away with the impression that Silverlight is getting ready for prime time and now that ASP.NET has MVC support, it deserves even more respect too.

I particularly like where Silverlight is heading. You can now develop in it much like you can with WPF. No more clumbsy Javascript, unless you want to. No more struggling with conflicting names when embedding content. Even better performance. Great debugging support. And a developer friendly ability to create UserControls. If you have had any doubt about Silverlight, you’ll want to check out Silverlight 2. If you’re new to WPF, it might take some time to get up to speed, but it’ll be worth it.

In terms of the MVC model for ASP.NET, all I can say is finally. It’s not always needed, but this is a welcome addition to the platform–especially for those of us that like to build out unit tests.

As I sat listening to Scott talk, I started realizing something. And I know this may sound awkward, but for a VP, Scott sure does know his stuff. Further, he’s quite approachable. No entourage. No PR person filtering the conversation. During a break to stretch my back, I took an opportunity to chat with Scott for a few minutes about Silverlight. Again, I could tell he knows his stuff. And he didn’t seemed bothered in the least that I was asking him questions.

I kept thinking about this more and more and while driving home I kept coming back to how impressed I was with Scott. Here he is, giving some technical talks in Phoenix, when he could be back in Redmond, doing….well, VP things. Nope, he’s spending time with local developers and designers.

Between Scott’s excellent blogging and events like this, I can’t help but imagine what Microsoft would be like if more of the VPs were like him. Don’t get me wrong. Variety is good and there are many roles to play in a large company like Microsoft, but Scott’s down to earth nature is refreshing.

I’m so impressed, that I wouldn’t mind if one day Scott took over the whole shooting match–even Windows and Live and Office (it is essentially a dev platform after all). I’d like to see him become the future of Microsoft. That’s just my little take on it.

Please ignore this post—I’m doing some tests with Silverlight 2.

I just did a test to see if I could overlay a transparent InkPresenter over a blog post. Wasn’t successful.

I can get a transparent ink div to overlay an html page just fine in the VS2008 environment, but I can’t get it to work in this blog.

I tried setting up a div that contained a Silverlight 2 beta object which overlaid the text in a post. However, although I could see the Silverlight object (which was the wrong size by the way) I couldn’t get any mouse events to work–so no ink. I’m guessing I did something wrong, but since I don’t have time right now to figure out what it is, I’m going to jot down a couple notes and revisit this issue later.

Here are a couple things I learned along the way, which you should read with beta-colored glasses:

* InkPresenter allows you to define mouse events in Silverlight 2, but they don’t seem to work. I attached the mouse events to a parent control and all worked fine from there.
* I was using a child div with absolute positioning set to 0,0 that held the Silverlight object:

<div id=”silverlightControlHost” style=”position:absolute; visibility:show; left: 0px; top: 0px; z-index:2″>

and with a parent div set to relative positioning that contained the blog post text:

<div style=”position:relative”>

This arrangemnt worked fine in a test setup (the Silverlight control appeared at the top-left of the text div in my test), but not in a Wordpress blog post. Maybe it’s the divs.
* I had to turn off the WYSIWYG editor in WordPress in order to enter my divs without getting things automatically converted to paragraph elements.
* I need to register a MIME type for extension .xap as application/x-silverlight-app within IIS on the server.

I’m probably doing a handful of things wrong. Much more to learn.

Let me double check that I can actually get a Silverlight 2 object to appear in this blog:

I should see an inkable, yellow area 400 pixels wide by 200 pixels high.

Nope…still not working. I need to ask Layne if he can double check whether a mime type for .xap is setup on the server. I’ll ask him tonight.

Microsoft is live streaming the Mix08 keynotes at http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/events/mix/default.mspx. If you want a direct link to the video for Ray Ozzie’s and Scott Guthrie’s keynote this morning click here. It should start at 9:30AM Pacific Time.

Looks like you’ll need Silverlight to watch it the virtual pressroom ;-).

(Aside: Hey, is there a way I can embed/mix the video in my blog??)

I was going to blog this morning that Steve Jobs’ comments the other day stating that Flash would not be coming to the iPhone any time soon was a huge mistake for Apple and a huge opening for Microsoft’s Silverlight and other smartphone manufacturers. However, I see that Robert Scoble beat me too it. Adobe, I’m guessing has been working on it, but since Steve Jobs is the gatekeeper it doesn’t matter how much they’ve done, it’s not going to appear for awhile. Quite unfortunate, for Adobe and users like me that consume lots of video content via Flash.

I think we’ve all seen that a good Internet experience on a phone is worth a lot. The iPhone demonstrates this. No other phone gets as close to providing this as the iPhone. Yet there is still much work to be done. The iPhone browser, for instance, does not support Flash at all. So I can’t watch Robert’s Qik videos on it as he broadcasts them live. I can’t see all the YouTube videos people post, as soon as they are posted. I can’t check out Chris Pirillo’s live feed when I don’t have anything better to do. And this doesn’t even touch on the other, increasing number of online Flash apps that are popping up here and there.

So the users lose on this one. A browser with no Flash at all is not a winning proposition.

I don’t think that Apple’s SDK is going to save the day either–especially since it appears that it’s going to be locked down. Most developers are migrating towards languages that technologies like Flash and Silverlight provide. Yes, I’m a big believer in C++-ish languages, but I can read the writing on the wall from here–no glasses needed. And the growth market in programming has moved on. It’s a reality.

The thing is by the time that Flash may actually get on the iPhone (let’s say summer time) the world will be different–if Nokia and Microsoft have anything to do with it. If I were them, I’d be working round the clock to beat Apple on this one. How hard can it be? Time to get the best working on this. And fast.

I need to used to the fact that the iPhone is just not a good video device. And by video I mean it can’t record video. It can’t broadcast video. It can’t play live video streams. It can’t play most online video content. Unfortunately, that’s the big thing right now.

Is it time to give up the iPhone? If this keeps up, yes. I’m bummed.

I have just a glimmer of hope that this is one of Steve Jobs’ misdirections. You know, when he cuts down something right before he launches his own version. You know what I mean. Could this be it? I hope so. The clock is ticking though. Hope gets me only so far.

With Mix08 right around the corner, Silverlight is in the news. This morning Nokia and Microsoft are announcing support for Silverlight in S60 on Symbian. That’s great news for mobile phone and Nokia Internet Tablet users. It also breathes a little more life into Silverlight, which needs it.

If Silverlight is going to grow where the markets are growing–online and mobile–it needs to be supported in more browsers, OSes and devices. This is one more step.

In other Silverlight news, CNet is reporting that Silverlight will eventually support offline scenarios. Makes sense, although broad deployments are probably more important at this time.

What other Silverlight news might we hear today? More Silverlight dev support? More about Silverlight 2? Looking forward to Mix08. The keynotes will be streamed live tomorrow starting at 9:30 AM Pacific time.

I’m one step closer to getting the Silverlight-based whiteboard app working. Currently it works with two clients. Now I need to extend that to n. 

I’m using a client side timer to pull changes down which isn’t that efficient. I tried an asynch approach, but I couldn’t quite get it. The timer approach should be OK as a starter.

It’s cool to see the ink appear and or disappear in another browser. It’s the first time I’ve gotten this far in a whiteboard app. Silverlight and AJAX have made it relatively easy and somewhat portable (it can run on Windows or a Mac).

How many clients can be in one session? Well, I’ll probably limit it to begin with until I see what the server load is like. Actually, I think I can come up with a “whiteboard” design which is more fun oriented than biz oriented so it might fit the smaller scale nicely. I’ll have to see if I can pull this small-design approach off.

For a similar reason I’ll probably limit the number of sessions to begin with.

Will you have to “register” to use it? I hope not, but I haven’t gotten that far.

I hope to have it running on TabletPCPost as soon as I can, but realistically this is going to take a couple weeks to clean up. Maybe not. But that’s probably the best estimate I have at this time.

Oh, and yeah, the toolbar is in “debug mode” at this point. I need to fix it up before anyone can use it. One more thing to do

It’s so cool to see all the people trying out the inkable Silverlight Search TIP. Just yesterday there were over 123 unique visitors (according to Google Analytics) sprinkled throughout the world.

Most visitors come from the US, then England/Europe, and then Asia. The distribution in the US is fairly uniform. It doesn’t appear to be centered around major tech centers, which suggests that a wide variety of people are trying it out. Most people appear to give it a go and then move on, but still, it’s exciting to see the numbers.

In terms of individual, heavy users many seem to come from China–and not just from one city, but several cities. That supprised me completely. I need to think more about what this means in terms of Tablet software.

I posted a link to and a description of the InkGram Silverlight-based app yesterday.

If you want to dig right in, here’s a temporary link to the InkGram app. Once again, the program (which requires Silverlight so it requires Windows or a Mac) enables you to post a handwritten message or simple drawing to Flickr and optionally Twitter.

The program is one step along the way to a bigger app that I need to finish off now. What’s it? A notetaking-slash-whiteboarding-like app, written in Silverlight. I was working on some rather complicated pieces of it and Bob, a developer I work with, asked why I didn’t try a simpler Flickr and Twitter-based app first. And so InkGrams were born. InkGrams are also inspired by Dave Winer’s work and encouragement for expanding the supported data types of Twitter.

Now that the first pass at InkGrams is running, it’s time to get back to the notetaking app. I’m not sure if I’ll get to it today, tomorrow, or even this week, but I’ll give it a go. It’s one of those things I find easy enough to work on at an hour at a time here and there. So fingers crossed I’ll find an hour or two to get it going.

Here’s the first public look at InkGrams–a first pass tool for publishing ink messages to Flickr and optionally Twitter.

The basics? If you visit http://www.TabletPCPost.com/InkGram, shown here,

you are given the opportunity to sign into Flickr. Yes, you’ll need a Flickr account to save any drawings you make. There is no public Flickr account. Each person must have their own Flickr stream.

If you click right away on the “Ready to Draw” button, you’ll get a chance to sign into Flickr via Yahoo or Flickr itself. After you successfully sign in, you’ll be sent to the InkGram drawing page.

Before you sign into Flickr, you can also elect to have your future drawing sent to Twitter. You can either send the image to a shared, public Twitter stream of InkGrams or you can send the image to your own personal Twitter account. A third option is to not send the image to Twitter at all.

One more thing. Before we get started, you need to know that you’ll need Silverlight installed on your system.

OK, let’s say that we want to post our ink drawing to the public Twitter feed, at http://www.Twitter.com/InkGrams. You can do this by clicking on the radio button associated with “Post to the public InkGrams Twitter account.”

Now once we click on the “Ready to Draw” button we’re taken either to Flickr to sign in (if we’re not already signed in) or to the Drawing page shown here:

(Once again, you need Silverlight installed for this drawing page to appear.)

On the drawing page you can use one of four pens, a black one, a blue one, a red one, and a green one. There’s also an eraser tool and the eraser tip is supported for erasing ink strokes. Each of these tools corresponds to the first five icons shown in the Toolbar displayed at the top-left of the drawing page.

The last button is a publish button and will send your drawing to Flickr:

If everything goes correctly, you’ll get a confirmation dialog and when you visit your Flickr account you’ll see your ink drawing:

Notice that the Title and Description fields are set to “Test.” That’s because the code is still in test mode.

So far so good. The next step is to check out the Twitter InkGrams stream, to see if our drawing was successfully posted there. Since Twitter doesn’t currently support graphics, what you’ll see on Twitter is a message like this with a URL to the actual Flickr image:

Well that’s about all there is to it for now. You’ll notice some problems here and there. This is first pass code, but I think if you like experimenting with early versions of things, then feel free to give this a spin.

In a subsequent post I’ll go into some of the behind the scenes details and maybe list out some improvements I’ve made. Feel free to post your ideas here.

We’ll see how this experiment goes. Like Dave Winer points out with his Twittergrams, it should would be nice if Twitter supported other media that text. A graphic thumbnail with a link to an image would be perfect for InkGrams.

 Update: There appears to be a Firefox bug as well as a resize issue. I’ll track them down.

The drawing code is simple and needs some embelishing, but it’s getting closer–It’s close enough for starters.

Now I need to clean up the Twitter code too.

A little late, but Happy Birthday Sarah! (Posted on Flickr via an ink-enabled Silverlight app I hope to make public soon.)