Flash vs. Silverlight, My Official Opinion
“What’s better – Flash or Silverlight?” Enough people have asked me that I felt I should post my opinion on the question.
Designers will prefer Flash. Programmers will prefer Silverlight. There. I said it.
Having used both tools I can still confidently say that Microsoft’s design tools and design workflow are still generations behind the sophistication of Adobe’s tools. Adobe has had a better track record of satisfying the needs of the design community for more than a decade. A Flash workflow with Photoshop, Illustrator, Flash and Flex Builder is still far easier, more powerful and flexible for designing user interfaces than Microsoft Expression Studio. Expression Design has the capabilities Illustrator and Photoshop had four generations ago. Expression Blend has nice integration into the development workflow (though Adobe CS3 finally has similar integration) but Expression Design is not, and probably will never be, the powerhouse Photoshop is.
On the other side of the coin, programmers have always felt like they were working in an alien environment with Flash. While Actionscript 3.0 and MXML make magnificent strides toward creating a workflow that programmers can understand, the Flash and Flex frameworks don’t even compare to the sophistication and maturity of the .NET framework. On top of the framework itself, there’s also the massive advantage Silverlight has that it works with any language that supports the Common Language Runtime. I can’t stress enough how valuable this is to the viability of the platform. There are thousands of Actionscript developers in the world. There are literally MILLIONS of developers that use C++, C#, Visual Basic, Ruby, Python, Javascript, JScript and the other languages Silverlight supports. Instantly, Silverlight has a larger potential developer base than Flash.
All this said, I feel that Silverlight and Flash will continue to coexist for a long, long time because of the simple fact that they are really made for different types of developers. I can’t imagine designers ever preferring Microsoft’s toolset and I can’t imaging programmers coming from other languages being satisfied with developing exclusively in Actionscript. As for me, being both a designer and a developer, I intend to master both.
Tags: IdentityMine
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13 September, 2007 at 3:05 pm
Eeek.. yet another 9 hundred pound gorilla attempt to takeover another market. Whateva. I’m not impressed. Flash has created a major niche in the market and I don’t see many animators or flash developers easily switching over when they have a platform/application that works already. If its anything like the experiences with .net’s other applications and MS’s way of approaching design, I’ll pass thank you very much.
On the other note, truly I don’t blame OS X users either.. LOL. Why, the only thing that keeps me on the windows OS right now is, 1. the fact that I have to use it at work. 2. games that I play are windows only. but that may soon change when I get my first Intel based mac and run a dual boot OS X/Windows system. Just my 2 cents.
13 September, 2007 at 3:06 pm
I’ll go for the really open solution: SVG
And so do many: http://svg.startpagina.nl
14 September, 2007 at 9:13 am
I have used both religiously at this point. One because I love to.. and the other because I have too! (not saying which one) I have found that as per video, FLV compression (v2 codec) is by far, much more clear / robust.. Silverlight video is remnant of the early 90’s (grainy, rasterized).. even with the new Expression Encoder (http://www.microsoft.com/expression/products/overview.aspx?key=encoder)
Not bad for V1.. but miles to go
12 February, 2008 at 3:04 pm
Although Silverlight is in its infancy, I believe it has much more promise in the future based on the potential to be seamlessly integrated within the Windows platform. True that Blend may not have the bells and whistles today, but it will… The idea of an integrated design, development, and deployment platform is very enticing.
For now, the challenge seems to be the critical mass it will require for Silverlight to even take off….no designer, no developers, no innovation… In fact, I’m working on a hot little start up building a Silverlight app for the video gamers, and our team consists of everyone but the front end UI guru. Know anyone??
22 November, 2008 at 4:41 pm
[...] This is not about Flash vs. Silverlight. I’ve already covered that topic here. [...]