Monday, April 23, 2007

Where are the Silverlight developer tools for Mac? Also, new Bubblemark tests.

The Furrygoat Experience says Silverlight: No Mac Love? Wait, Silverlight (I actually like this name, but given the first name, how could it not be better) WPF/E runs on the Mac, what's this person talking about? He's talking about no Mac developer love, no development tools, no documentation, and no HD VC-1 encoding (required for Silverlight, hello, get H.264 in there) tools are being offered by Microsoft, and in some cases for no good reason (at least through the documentation bone).

I downloaded Silverlight, the runtime formerly known as WPF/E, back in Feb when it was first released, and I too was disappointed that on the Mac all you got was the runtime, but then I didn't think much more about it because this is Microsoft and it is exactly the sort of thing you expect.

Speaking of Silverlight, bubblemark.com has a new 3D demo. This is in addition to all the other 2D tests I had run back in Feb, which compare Silveright to Flash/Flex. There are now some Apollo apps to run as well. The 3D Silverlight demo on my MacBook Pro was getting 9 fps, that's not a typo, and Safari is using about 105% of my two cores. The Apollo 2D demo was getting 93 fps using 60% of my two cores. I didn't shutdown anything to run my tests, including Parallels.