Zone12

When I was young (not that long ago) if you wanted a piece of media to play in a webpage you needed to install the appropriate plugin and find the correct codec. With the help of all these plugins, we’ve come to expect all our content embedded in our webpage. In the past there were varied ways to do this, these days there are three options – java, silverlight and flash.

Java has always been sold as a minimal footprint fast running language, but has been plagued with security issues and not the prettiest interface.

Silverlight is the newest of the three and has now been through several revisions and is a solid and dependable plugin. Being a new language (and Microsoft based) it hasn’t really spread far beyond Microsoft Windows. With help from open-source developers, silverlight has spread to Mac and Linux running in most popular browsers.

Flash is a plugin that has been around for a long time now and has been through many revisions and is on pretty much every device out there. And yet it could still use a lot of refinement. I’ve run it side by side with a silverlight app on an atom based computer (all of the netbooks out there) the flash app jittered and was sluggish but the silverlight app was smooth with no delay.

And then there’s the recent blackberry adverts saying ‘buy it because it has flash and no other tablet does’. That’s bullshit to start with. Pretty much every android tablet has flash and blackberry are late to the game (despite having an awesome operating system).

Also Adobes lack of love for Apples operating systems and the way they write code means I can’t play a 480p video in full screen because it stutters yet I can play a trailer from iTunes at 1080p without a problem.

So where does that leave us as developers? We get a choice from a bunch of broken or limited tools to run our programs with. So how do we choose what to develop with? And do we abandon a run anywhere design style for device native program’s?