The announcement of Microsoft Silverlight comes as somewhat a shock to a lot of the design community, with Microsoft introducing a new flash competitor things could start to heat up in the design world. Especially sense they are also developing Microsoft Expression Blend and Microsoft Expression Designer. They have already released Microsoft Expression Web which was the replacement web design product for Frontpage (which was utter crap). So far Expression Web looks like a good program, as far as standards go at least.At any rate the Silverlight product has a couple good features that make it sound very enticing for designers to start using. The first and biggest of those is their implementation of being able to have streaming video play on vector based objects — meaning that you could draw a puzzle and have video playing on various puzzle pieces. This isn’t a huge thing but definitely something that could prove useful for various projects.

Another feature that tops the list is that supposedly you can have XHTML/HTML on top of the Silverlight javascript object, there are countless implementations for this. You could easily have a flash-like animation happening as the wallpaper of a web page. You would of course have to do this with extreme attention to contrast to ensure readability but it could present some interesting designs.

Although not all of the features for Silverlight are available yet it will be interesting to see where it goes and ultimately how Microsoft markets the product. I can see a design software brewing though, with the release of Microsoft’s full line of design products just around the corner and Adobe CS3 being released this Friday things are going to start heating up.

I don’t mind it though, it could produce some interesting results and innovations within the field. If you think about it, the software we are using has pretty much been the same for the past 5 years at least and a new line of products sounds enticing.

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