Windows & .NET Watch: Will you too be SLOOB?

By Larry O'Brien

May 1, 2009 —

I don’t have a good record when it comes to predicting trends in user interfaces, so I’m not going to try. UI trends are as predictably fickle as miracle diets, and I’m fatigued from too many years of doggedly following the arguments and thinking, “That makes sense.”

In the days of CUA, I thought that it made sense to make all interfaces look like minimalist text editors. In the dot-com days, table-oriented layouts with a sprinkling of custom bullets seemed sexy. And today, I guess there’s no stopping the appeal of a cover-flow widget. Whatever.

Personally, I like native clients on the one hand and hyperlinked text on the other. I understand that this is as philistine as insisting there is no finer food than pizza, but I like process lists and taskbar icons that map directly to specific applications. I like hypermedia as the engine of application state (the fundamental philosophy of REST) and feel confident that if an application is built with such an architecture, it can be tarted up with whatever effects are in vogue.

Part of the reason I don’t like DHTML-based applications is, undoubtedly, too much knowledge of what goes into the sausage. With Internet Explorer’s loss of total market dominance, every release of a browser application has a constant pitter-patter of browser incompatibility flaws: the popups don’t work with Firefox, the text wraps in Chrome, the sliced images don’t look right in IE. I find those defects demoralizing; when I see a burndown chart flattened out because we can’t make rounded corners look right when the page scrolls or somesuch, I feel like we’ve barely progressed since the days of making windows on 80x25 screens with ASCII “line drawing” characters.

A bigger part of why I don’t like browser-based applications, though, is that for all the surprising capability of DHTML and CSS, as well as the recent arms-race in JavaScript performance, there are still huge performance benefits to be had from a local application running at full speed on the Common Language Runtime and with reasonable access to local resources. And, darn it, there are some times when you just need to draw an actual graph.

Silverlight has been an unqualified success, at least for those who understood that the prospect of a Flash “killer” was always more hype than reality. Silverlight has just entered beta for its third major release, is quick to install, and is programmed using the familiar and powerful tools of Visual Studio. Silverlight UIs are programmed using Windows Presentation Foundation, and Silverlight 3 supports three-dimensional transforms and (get this) pixel shaders.

In case you are not an avid video gamer, shaders are the massively data-parallel pipelines that are used to beautify effects such as water, shadows and highlights. Shaders come in a few different varieties, and it’s unlikely that Halo 4 will be ported to Silverlight, but it’s also easy to imagine an uptick in specular highlights and raindrop dissolves.

Silverlight 3 also features an “Out Of Browser” experience, and the success of this, more than the use of Silverlight inside the browser, is what I simply refuse to commit myself to. It looks great: You essentially call a Detach() function, and up pops a dialog giving the user the choice of installing your formerly browser-based Silverlight application into the Programs menu or onto the Desktop.

So, presumably, you can introduce a person to an application running inside their browser, and then, when you’ve convinced them it’s something they’ll use regularly, they can install it as something “more like” a native app. Will people want that? Or will the prospect of Silverlight Out Of Browser (SLOOB) run into resistance from people who don’t really understand security (i.e., “If it runs inside a browser, it’s safe. If it runs outside the browser, it might be a virus.”)?

Choosing Silverlight over the “complete” Base Class Library involves some tradeoffs, including a different security model and the loss of quite a bit of internationalization support, but it gives you tremendous advantages in size and install speed. As a technology, I think Silverlight is a sure bet. As a fashion statement, you’ll have to ask someone else.

Larry O'Brien is a technology consultant, analyst and writer. Read his blog at www.knowing.net.

Related Search Term(s): Silverlight

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