In the end, though, I probably won’t be doing much with Silverlight, for the same reasons that I’ve written about before. The technology has definitely gotten stronger, but the other issues haven’t really changed much: there are no tools for the Mac or Linux, and as far as influencing the technology, you’re just standing outside the Big House, pressing your nose up against the window.

Ted Leung On The Air

Something that I think is seriously in favor of Flash/Flex is that the development tools are cross platform. Macs have been big in design shops for a long time, and still are. And, many of the Mac OS X “switchers” over the past few years have been software developers (go to an open source development conference like PyCon and you’ll see what I mean). The fact that I can develop Flex applications on my Mac is a big deal. And I don’t have to settle for text editors and command line compilers. The Flex Builder IDE and the full Flash environment are both available for the Mac. This is not the case with Microsoft’s tools for Silverlight.

Blue Sky On Mars

Personally, I’d like to pick up more time with Flex but given the “ooohs” that Silverlight is drawing from the digerati I’ll keep an eye on it as well (and maybe give it a whirl).