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LAS VEGAS — Scott Guthrie from Microsoft took advantage of Wednesday's MIX09 conference keynote to show off the new Silverlight 3. The new beta shows off new hardware integration, interactive controls and the ability to download Silverlight applications to your desktop.
Silverlight 3 takes advantage of the latest in hardware. Most notably, it supports multitouch devices — the kind you'll find mostly on Macs right now. The multimedia software also takes advantage of hardware (GPU) acceleration and 3-D visuals.
Since Silverlight's initial announcement at the MIX07 conference, the underdog software excelled at streaming live HD. Flash has similar high-quality video, but as evidenced by NBC's 2008 Olympics coverage, Silverlight was able to stream high-definition video (720p) without waiting for the video to buffer. The site managed to serve about 1.3 billion pageviews. So successful was it, in fact, that an NBC representative joined Guthrie on stage today to announce NBC will be stream live 2010 coverage of the Winter Olympics in Vancouver.
Expression Blend, the primary tool designed to create Silverlight media, has also seen an upgrade to version 3 as well. Applause and Twitter excitement arose under Expression Blend's Sketchflow tool — a tool designed to prototype sites and workflow. The software allows you to sketch out the workflow of your site, create rough outlines of site design, import images from Adobe Illustrator and Photoshop and even export it as a document into Word format — saving hours of documentation time.
Mac users are able to develop Silverlight through the popular programming editor Eclipse after downloading the SDK from the Eclipse for Silverlight project.
Silverlight applications will also support being downloaded as standalone applications — similar in function to yet another Adobe product: Adobe AIR.
What Silverlight does not have over its rival? Flash has a 99 percent adoption rate. Silverlight claims to have about 25 percent of consumers worldwide. That said, today's announcement is a shot across Adobe's bow. The makers of Flash and AIR should be worried about what Microsoft has up their sleeves. It looks a lot like innovation.
Finally, among today's announcement was the unveiling of Playboyarchive.com. Fifty-four free archived issues of Playboy magazine will be available for free through the site starting late Wednesday night. The site will showcase Silverlight's Deep Zoom technology that pretty much does what its name suggests. That should get those adoption numbers up.
The beta download is available today through the Silverlight site. The cherry on top of the announcement is the Windows download is actually 40k smaller than Silverlight 2. Mac downloads are closer to twice the size of the Windows version, coming in around 12 mb.
