I am interested in creating a desktop application using HTML5+webkit, and I'd like to be able to build a stand-alone executables for various target platforms like a .exe file for Windows and a .dmg image for Mac OS. I have played around with node-webkit, which seems nice except for the packaging / distribution portion. I also stumbled on TideSDK, but that project seems to be inactive. For example, the latest release I saw was a beta from November of 2012. Yet, it seems the core developers have switched to developing TideKit instead.
Does anyone here know if TideKit is intended as a replacement for TideSDK? Is TideSDK going away? etc.
Well, TIDE is now officially a dead project. I just got this email about 15 minutes ago.
TideKit.com and TideKit have been discontinued.
TideKit was software for developing apps for all platforms
simultaneously with a single base of code written in JavaScript.
The scope and complexity of the product made it difficult to
assemble the platform all at once. This stemmed from a holistic
approach to app development for all platforms. While creating a
platform for JavaScript developers, much of the core engineering is in
a variety of lower level languages that affect the speed of
development. We considered delivering parts of our platform as we
reached milestones, but this was not suitable for the start of trials.
We were widely criticized for not revealing our technical innovation
in advance of our release. In a competitive environment, revealing
advantages as you go can also mean assimilation as you go. We had
already witnessed how quickly our technical advantages could be
assimilated by competitors to our open source TideSDK product.
Therefore, we held back with a view of delaying the duplication of
features by competitors, increasing our technical barriers and working
to protect our IP and business case until we felt we were ready.
In a startup, we talk about a Minimum Viable Product (MVP). In our
case, our minimum viable product was much larger and more difficult to
achieve. In total, approximately three years of research and
development was committed with multiple developers working greater
than full time hours. A factor that extended the development was an
expansion of scope that aimed to lower friction in the app development
process.
In Feb 2014, we created a system to queue developers with
reservation system for the earliest possible access to TideKit. Our
goal was to provide an early trial when it became available. Since the
development itself was complex, we could not provide a date when
ticket holders could start the trial process – but it would be
following our betas, then moving forward as we scaled the platform.
We were clear with our language on the site concerning reservations.
As a result, we expected little confusion about what was being
purchased, our expectations of timing to market, or the terms of
purchase for a reservation ticket. Purchasers were not paying for our
product at this point, but for their position in a queue for a trial
of our new technology. We also included a refund policy to ensure the
terms of purchase for your ticket were available. The wait has been
long, but not nearly as long as other difficult engineering challenges
including Myo that pre-sold their product and were also delayed before
successfully rolling out.
Throughout the development cycle we provided updates of our status
via posts roadmap page, email to our ticket holders and communications
on our social channels. We did our best as a team to open ourselves to
questions and maintain a social presence.
At the end of May 2015, we communicated our strategy to execute a
series of focused betas that would have seen the platform revealed
publicly and incrementally. We were at a stage that parts of the
platform needed developer feedback as we rolled these out
consecutively.
In the days preparing for our first public beta, we recognized the
extent to which our brand had been poisoned by our timing to market. A
campaign of negativity that had begun several months earlier with
followers and ticket holders had taken its toll on our team, brand,
and business.
We believed the beta releases would soon bring an end to the
negative talk. On July 8 and 9 we faced further eruptions on social
media that reached the tipping point. With the discussion no longer
about the product nor its future, this was far more serious.
We failed to bring the product quickly enough for you. As a result,
we came to the serious decision to discontinue TideKit and dissolve
our company.
We wish to thank everyone involved that worked on the product and with
our team. This includes businesses, entrepreneurs and supporters of
our vision for app development.
Your TideKit Team
you are right, TideSDK is aging and pretty inactive today. And you're also right, we as a core team completely focus on TideKit now. TideKit is the future!
If you want to know the full story about why we stopped working on TideSDK and started TideKit, I recommend you to read our first Q&A. There you'll also find an answer about how we compete with node-webkit:
https://blog.tidekit.com/post/your-questions-our-answers-01
We've just reached the highest HTML5 score any app development platform ever achieved. If you want to know more about builds, like the ones you mentioned for Windows and OS X, you should read this
Desktop Builds
https://blog.tidekit.com/post/from-a-desktop-perspective-tidekit-for-tidesdk-developers
There is a new kid on the block for this sort of projects: atom-shell Based in nodejs and used to create the great Atom editor
Technical differences with node-webkit: https://github.com/atom/atom-shell/blob/master/docs/development/atom-shell-vs-node-webkit.md
Presentation at JSLA about "Native NodeJS Apps": http://vimeo.com/97881078
If you look at this blog post, they talk about how unsustainable the economical situation is
http://www.tidesdk.org/blog/2013/04/11/tidesdk-in-numbers/
and I can't find the tweet that was stating the reasons behind the transition from one project to another. But I guess that the blogpost speaks for itself.
Anyway, I'm delivering a project written in node-webkit ( because I starded on Tide but for the obvious reasons I had to switch ) and I'm using grunt for packaging and in the end is not that bad.
Electron (http://electron.atom.io/) is the new way to go.
I also had an app running on TideSDK (https://github.com/vinyll/worktimer.titanium) and I'll have to migrate it to Electron.
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I am planning to develop a cross platform standalone app to support windows and Linux. TideSDK is my personal choice to go with. But, I have been actively following tideSDK(tidekit) for last 6 months and does not see anything about their product launch.
Can we expect tidekit to launch by near future?? or should we approach some other tool.
Just to be clear - you're not expecting to provide a version of the platform for us to use in 2014, but you're committing to releasing a plan in 2014 in which you will let us know when you plan to release the platform (which could be 2015, 2016, 2017, ...)?
Just trying to get my development options in place for 2015 and I'd like to know if you plan on having something available in 2015 that can be used for development, and if so, in which half of the year?
TideKit.com and TideKit have been discontinued. (This tidekit response mail)
TideKit was software for developing apps for all platforms simultaneously with a single base of code written in JavaScript.
The scope and complexity of the product made it difficult to assemble the platform all at once. This stemmed from a holistic approach to app development for all platforms. While creating a platform for JavaScript developers, much of the core engineering is in a variety of lower level languages that affect the speed of development. We considered delivering parts of our platform as we reached milestones, but this was not suitable for the start of trials.
We were widely criticized for not revealing our technical innovation in advance of our release. In a competitive environment, revealing advantages as you go can also mean assimilation as you go. We had already witnessed how quickly our technical advantages could be assimilated by competitors to our open source TideSDK product. Therefore, we held back with a view of delaying the duplication of features by competitors, increasing our technical barriers and working to protect our IP and business case until we felt we were ready.
In a startup, we talk about a Minimum Viable Product (MVP). In our case, our minimum viable product was much larger and more difficult to achieve. In total, approximately three years of research and development was committed with multiple developers working greater than full time hours. A factor that extended the development was an expansion of scope that aimed to lower friction in the app development process.
In Feb 2014, we created a system to queue developers with reservation system for the earliest possible access to TideKit. Our goal was to provide an early trial when it became available. Since the development itself was complex, we could not provide a date when ticket holders could start the trial process – but it would be following our betas, then moving forward as we scaled the platform.
We were clear with our language on the site concerning reservations. As a result, we expected little confusion about what was being purchased, our expectations of timing to market, or the terms of purchase for a reservation ticket. Purchasers were not paying for our product at this point, but for their position in a queue for a trial of our new technology. We also included a refund policy to ensure the terms of purchase for your ticket were available. The wait has been long, but not nearly as long as other difficult engineering challenges including Myo that pre-sold their product and were also delayed before successfully rolling out.
Throughout the development cycle we provided updates of our status via posts roadmap page, email to our ticket holders and communications on our social channels. We did our best as a team to open ourselves to questions and maintain a social presence.
At the end of May 2015, we communicated our strategy to execute a series of focused betas that would have seen the platform revealed publicly and incrementally. We were at a stage that parts of the platform needed developer feedback as we rolled these out consecutively.
In the days preparing for our first public beta, we recognized the extent to which our brand had been poisoned by our timing to market. A campaign of negativity that had begun several months earlier with followers and ticket holders had taken its toll on our team, brand, and business.
We believed the beta releases would soon bring an end to the negative talk. On July 8 and 9 we faced further eruptions on social media that reached the tipping point. With the discussion no longer about the product nor its future, this was far more serious.
We failed to bring the product quickly enough for you. As a result, we came to the serious decision to discontinue TideKit and dissolve our company.
We wish to thank everyone involved that worked on the product and with our team. This includes businesses, entrepreneurs and supporters of our vision for app development.
Your TideKit Team
I am a Web Developer student still in uni, hoping to start my own business in the future. I have built and deployed several static websites, and have recently built and deployed a couple of WordPress sites. My DB experience so far is largely conceptual.
I have been approached by a 'friend of a friend' to build an e-commerce website for an international company (they sell incontinence products). I'm not specifically sure of the sales volume but estimate it to be around a maximum 500 transactions per day. Being an international site, it would obviously need to facilitate, shipping and payments from a number of countries. This company knows that I am a novice, and are not expecting a site launch for a year.
Starting a career as a Web Developer, I'm assuming jobs similar to this may arise time and time again so I am hoping to pick a framework that is accessible to my current skill level, but can also 'grow' with me as I develop.
I do not want to use 'template solutions', so obviously with some WordPress under my belt, that was the first place I turned, but reading the word 'glitchy' repeatedly in several forum threads has diminished my confidence.
Magento is the word I'm hearing everywhere, but it is mostly described as 'complex', while Shopify seems to be the 'quick fix'.
Can anyone recommend a framework that won't take me a decade to master, but is powerful, and reliable enough to stand the test of time? Do I just bite the bullet and surrender this year to learning Magento? Are these WordPress/Magento Hybrids any good?
Any advice would be much appreciated :)
Since you handle quite ok WP I would recommend this http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wp-e-commerce/ . However you need to test it quite heavy to make sure nothing escapes.
Magento is one of the best (some say the best) and I suggest you might start reading some documentation about it since you want to make a career in this.
Good luck!
There are a number of open source e-commerce platforms out there. The most popular use PHP which is definitely a transferable skill (so you wouldn't be wasting your time).
This gives you a decent list of the best apps out there:
http://www.opensourcecms.com/scripts/show.php?catid=3&category=eCommerce
My personal preference is http://www.oscmax.com which is about to release v2.5 of its platform. Built on osCommerce (the original open source e-commerce platform) code but with all the common modules installed for you but that is because I like the freedom to code the store how I like it not how the software company likes it!
However, if you are looking to get a job deploying e-commerce then Magento is probably the way forward since it is the most "commercial" of the open source platforms.
I started as a software engineer at the company I'm currently at. Over time, I was either the only one willing to or capable of taking responsibility for various systems, and so I was "promoted" to being IT Manager. Now, during my time as software engineer, I would create functional tests for the various software modules I would build, and as a result, even today I am able to quickly test various parts of the system that I have worked on. However, there is a large large code base with little to no coverage from the other various developers who have been working here.
Now, as IT Manager, I want to be able to test that all the parts of the system are working, but there is:
A) no budgeted time dedicated to creating code test coverage
and
B) No desire from the "chief software engineer" to start creating testing suites to help me monitor that the software is functioning.
I don't expect the software team to drop everything they are doing and spend 2 weeks creating test suites, but it would be nice if they started expanding the test suite
coverage over time so I can confirm that the various parts of the system are working.
So boiling it down, how do I get the software team to start building test suites?
Other caveats:
A) I'm still asked to do software projects in addition to managing our IT dept (a unix engineer, desktop support guy, and related office and production equipment)
B) My unix admin has a really hard time getting production systems up running the full code base, and we aren't getting good help from the software team. He can't run any kind of diagnostic to see where the web app is failing on the new installs. The VP of the company keeps telling me to go in and do print_r's in the code to see what is happening. This sucks!!!
First, you need to investigate Test Driven Development so that you are comfortable explaining it in terms that your developers will understand, as well as your management. Since you seem to be developing web applications, and you have technical skills, I suggest that you take the plunge and choose an open source tool for testing web applications, get it installed, and start building tests for anything that you develop yourself.
Twill is an example of the kind of testing tool that you would need.
Then, as manager, you need to entice developers to follow your example, and reward them for doing so. And punish them, when they don't use the testing framework and it leads to preventable problems. As soon as you get one such incident, you should be able to get your boss on board, and pick up some momentum.
Overall, remember that the objective is to do less work to get a good result. Cutting corners is a way of doing less work, but leads to the risk of bad, or spectacularly bad results. Keep management informed of the risk levels and potential costs at risk.
Don't just force people to do testing for testing's sake. It has to help them be more productive so choose the first projects for it carefully.
That's a good question. And if there was one correct answer to it, much more software projects would be successful and deliver high quality.
I don't think, that it is a good idea to make such a change top-down. It has to be driven from the developers themselves. So trainings in TDD direction would be good, but that is a long time invest, which takes time.
If you want a faster solution you should consider functional-, acceptance-, and systemtests. With these test you test pretty much the whole application through all layers. If you are developing web applications you should consinder using Selenium to automate your test. It is easy to create test with it (Selenium IDE).
But using only such tests (not Unit-tests) don't give you the advantages coming from TDD.
Automating your tests is crucial.
Do you have a Test or QA team?
I would first start to see if they have Test Cases that they use to qualify the build. If not you will have to develop these test cases to test the core functionality of your product.
The next step would be automating the test cases.
If the application is poorly developed without any troubleshooting tools or debugging features it would be tough until these are added as requirements for next release.
My 2 cents.
I'll have to disagree with michaelkebe- these changes need support from the executive level, in addition to a few key developers, in order to fully succeed.
Without that support, you'll just be some developers who look like they are 'wasting time on writing tests for stuff that already works.'
There needs to be a clear vision, and it needs to be repeated loudly and often.
I'm not necessarily advocating for Agile here, but often times it clicks for business owners.
If you can sell them on that, the things that you're excited about (delivering software fast, easy maintenance, automated testing, etc.) will fall into place.
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One thing that I keep hearing in reference to ASP.NET and MSFT technologies is that they cost money to use. Often when they are being compared to open source languages someone will mention that one factor in favor of open source is that it's free (to an extent). My question is, when does ASP.NET actually cost money to use in terms of using the proprietary technology?
Understandably there are the hosting fees, but I'm curious about the fees outside of these hosting fees. I'm especially curious about this as it relates one-person smaller-site development (non-team/large enterprise). Any help is appreciated.
(edits)
Some excellent answers. Much appreciated
The projects that I'm looking to use the technologies for would be personal sites and very small business sites (1 or 2). The intent would of course be that these projects get much bigger. It seems that for commercial production, fees will apply. What about just basic dynamic "shared hosting" sites that provide information?
You have to measure many things when you determine cost. We recently went through an evaluation of platform choice by an outside vendor, and the recommendation is that we stay with a Microsoft.NET platform. Why? For us, the reason is that once you get to an enterprise-level product suite, the difference is not as big as people would like you to believe.
Purchasing Microsoft products is a sound choice. The initial cost might seem high, but keep in mind if you get Software Assurance on your purchase (Visual Studio, for example) you are entitled to free upgrades as long as you keep you SA current - and it is at a fraction of the cost of a repurchase. Many people think you need to buy the full retail version every time, and that is just not true. Work with a larger vendor, like CDW, to help with licensing questions. They got someone from Microsoft's Licensing Division on the phone with us and helped us choose what was right. Not high-pressured at all. They actually talked us down on some of the things we thought we needed.
MSDN subscriptions are great. I have one through my employer, but also used to maintain one personally. If you are a contractor/self-employed, it is an operational expense. Like buying full products, renewing a MSDN subscription is very inexpensive compared to a purchase, and especially considering what you get. The licensing within MSDN is rather generous, and since you are a one-person shop, if I read that correctly, one MSDN is more than enough for your non-production needs. Plus, the bundled Support Incidents are a nice plus, as well.
There are many versions of Visual Studio, from the Express Editions all the way up to the Team Editions. For example, we are rolling out Team Foundation Server right now, so our costs are obviously higher. For a startup or small shop, there are TFS hosting partners and you can get Team Explorer for free. Or you can mix and match, using Visual Studio for development and something like VSS, SVN, or countless other version control products out there.
Just because someone "goes open source", that does not mean that it is free. Yes, the platform choice might be free, and the tools might be free, but there is a definite chance that you will need a commercial library or component some day. Plus, nothing prevents you from going with Open Source products with Microsoft, either. There are many open source projects written in .NET that can be leveraged with your solutions, and Microsoft is becoming a lot more transparent. We are working on a very large, enterprise solution right now and we are using only one "commercial" product, outside of our development tooling. There is a lot of Open Source usage, and a lot of implementations cobbled from community musings and examples.
The one thing that often goes unmentioned is the human cost that goes into these decisions. Microsoft is hated by many and their solutions might not be the fastest or most robust (although I will take IIS7 on W2K8 over any other web server configuration any day) they are focusing on making people more productive at what they can do. You aren't just buying products with them, you are actually buying productivity. As someone who has worked in a few Open Source shops, I am very appreciative of all the things that they have gotten right and understand that free does not always mean better.
I have a "one-person" side business and I really recommend looking into an MSDN subscription. It will give you access to tools and technologies that you would not otherwise be able to get your hands on without going a la carte in a retail route. Talk with someone, like a CDW, to help you figure out your licensing needs. If it works out, definitely try that route. You can cover all your in-house needs in a one person shop with an MSDN subscription, most likely (for example, a lot of the products are available to install to you (as a user) up to ten times as long as the machines that they are installed on are "yours" and non-production. There are exceptions to that, but not many.)
If that does not work, try the free route. You can definitely use Mono for .NET Development, as well as the Express Editions. I know a few C# developers who swear by Mono and could not be happier.
Best of luck to you!
Often when they are being compared to open source languages someone will mention that one factor in favor of open source is that it's free (to an extent). My question is, when does ASP.NET actually cost money to use in terms of using the proprietary technology?
Usually when people refer to "cost" in the way you described, they're implicitly referring to TCO, or total cost of ownership. The cost is not an explicit cost in that you've paid for something directly, but rather the long-term price of using something over its lifetime.
For example, even if a particular proprietary technology is free, it may be more difficult to hire and find people who know about it to work on your project. Consequently, if it is less popular than some open-source equivalent, you may wind up paying more for the same amount of labor because appropriately talented staff will be harder to find and in higher demand.
Conversely, if an open-source product is free but has low mindshare or performs poorly, it may well be worth it to pay for an expensive, closed-source proprietary solution rather than having to learn the idiosyncracies of the open-source version.
Naturally, there is some controversy surrounding just how to measure TCO, with both camps having some valid points.
.NET is free
C# compilers are free
Certain versions of Visual Studio are free, and you don't actually need it to write for .NET anyway (though it really, really helps!)
There are many free online resources for learning .NET, such as http://asp.net
In short, there's no real cost to using ASP.NET other than the hosting fee of the website or options you might buy to make things easier (better versions of Visual Studio.)
There's more of an ideological divide, with open source guys on one side being pretty anti-microsoft and so claiming it's high cost to use. I wouldn't worry about them. ;)
There are a couple of good answers already, but I'd like to add "it depends".
joseph.ferris obviously works in a large organization, where the cost of switching platforms is going to be very, very expensive, so the cost of paying the licensing costs is much less that the cost of switching. Take a look at Jonathan Schwartz's blog entry for Mar. 11, especially the section titled "When Free is too Expensive" for another reason to go with fully-supported infrastructure.
But consider a couple of other scenarios.
First, there's the hobbyist, which is what you seem to be addressing - you want to play around with the technology, and maybe put up a website or three. There aren't any issues with privacy or scalability, so you can deploy your application on an inexpensive shared hosting solution. In this case, costs are pretty much irrelevant - whatever platform you pick, you can get free tools to get you started. Remember kids, the first hit is always free.
For a startup, things are a bit different. If the goal is to build a large website, the potential licensing costs can be daunting - it's probably going to a lot cheaper to go with open source. In addition to the production environment, you need to pay for development environments, testing, etc. Even for a small company, licenses may be more than they have in the budget - a single Windows 2003 server Enterprise license lists for $4k. If you're trying to break into a competitive environment and compete on price, this alone may make you uncompetitive. I have seen situations where a Windows-based solution (server, database, and custom development coupled with a content management system) is two or three times the price of an open source solution.
I know that it has been answered, but I will put my 2 cents. Why are you wondering about the cost of ASP.net? In my opinion, the choice of technology in your case (1-2 ppl development freelancer team) should be governed by technology familiarity. If you are an ASP.net expert, the expense of buying the products and MSDN subscription is well-worth it, because it's your primary language of choice that you know well, hence the projects that you implement, will be done better and faster, so it makes sense to stay with it.
However, if you happen to know another technology just as well and you are comfortable that you can deliver a robust product on-time with it, it may be worth it to go low cost. As a contractor, the main objective is to not lose time/money hence you pick a technology that balances your expenses and time spent learning it. In other words, if you are a Java expert, there is no point of paying for asp.net. If you know asp,net well already, then sure, stay with it.
The clients rarely care whether you used Ruby, PHP, Python, Java or ASP.net. They care about time lines, their cost and quality.
I find that it does not cost much money to use. It does infact cost a pretty penny to get windows based hosting. Visual studio is also expensive. After those, though, not many expenses are encountered.
If you want to use the more professional versions of Visual Studio to develop your applications: you will need to pay for that.
Also, there are a lot of commercial components available on the market. These will save you time or improve your product, but at a cost.
For open source, there are also a lot of components, but in this scene most is free/open.
Silverlight v2.0 is getting closer and closer to RTM but I have yet to hear any stats as to how many browsers are running Silverlight. If I ask Adobe (by googling "Flash install base") they're only too happy to tell me that 97.7% of browsers are running Flash player 9 or better.
Not that I believe everything I read, but where are these statistics from Microsoft or some other vendor about Silverlight? I'm going to be making a technology choice soon and a little bit of empirical evidence would be an asset at this point...
All you Silverlight developers out there, show me your stats!
Quick Answer: www.riastats.com
This site compares the different RIA plugins using graphical charts and graphs.
It gets its data from small snippets of javascripts running on sites accross the web (approx 400,000 last time I looked)
At the time of this post, Silverlight 2 was sitting at close to 11%.
I would not take this as the end-all, be-all in RIA stats, but it's the best site I've found so far.
If you are developing something for a general audience, I would highly recommend against Silverlight as you immediately cut out Linux users.
I went to watch videos for the Olympics (and I run exclusively Linux), and I couldn't watch the video on their site because they were in Silverlight. On top of that, they actively removed all videos from YouTube, so I had no alternative but to try and scrounge up a Windows boot. This only served to give me a very negative opinion of NBC, and consider them quite amateurish to pick such a restricting technology for something that should be available for everyone.
While Flash has it's problems, it works fine in Linux, so I would say (at this point), it is a much superior technology choice.
If you KNOW your audience is entirely on Windows (maybe Mac).... then you can consider Silverlight with knowing you won't be cutting out part of your audience.
if you're that concerned about locking out potential users, you should be building a low-bandwidth HTML only version of your site anyways...regardless of whether you use Flash or Silverlight.
I struggled with this for a while. Ultimately, I chose to develop my site using Silverlight for the major components. I did a good bit of research, and I reached the following bottom-line conclusion:
If Silverlight fails, it will not
be for lack of installed base. There
are simply too many levers for MS to
pull (windows update, embedding it in
IE8, or even paying highly trafficed
sites to use it.
I will add this from Alexa - microsoft.com has pretty impressive daily reach and it uses SL on the main page. I would also not be surprised at all if Outlook Web Access is moved to Silverlight - thereby turning every single office outlook user who wants to access email from home/other into a roaming SL installer.
Alexa Link comparing microsoft.com/ebay.com/amazon.com
I will add this from ScottGu's blog entry:
In addition to powering the Olympics
experience in the US, Silverlight was
also used in France (by FranceTV), the
Netherlands (by NOS), Russia (by
Sportbox.ru) and Italy (by RAI). In
addition to video quality, a big
reason behind these broadcasters
decision to use Silverlight was the
TCO and streaming cost difference
Silverlight provided. In the August
2008 edition of Web Designer Magazine
(a Dutch publication) a NOS
representative reported that they were
able to serve 100,000 concurrent users
using Silverlight and 40 Windows Media
Servers, whereas it would have
required 270 servers if they had used
Flash Media Servers.
Over the last month we've seen several
major new deployments of Silverlight
for media scenarios. For example: CBS
College Sports is now using
Silverlight to stream NCAA events from
its 170 partner colleges and
university. Blockbuster is replacing
Flash with Silverlight for its
MovieLink application. And Netflix two
weeks ago rolled out its new Instant
Watch service using Silverlight.
At the 2009 Microsoft Professional Developers Conference, Scott Guthrie said that Silverlight was installed on "45% of the world's Internet-connected devices"
http://www.betanews.com/article/PDC-2009-Live-from-the-Day-2-keynote/1258561992 (quote taken from "9:28am PT") entry
This was the weekly poll over on CP a few weeks back. Out of the 1463 developers responding, aprox. 62% had Silverlight installed on at least one system.
So... if you're making a site targeted at Windows developers... and don't mind locking out a third of your potential market...
I haven't been able to get stats. I'd assume they might release some at PDC in late October. If you're building a site which needs to target a non-developer audience who won't want to install another plugin, you might want to wait for Silverlight.
I have done a good amount of testing with Moonlight on Linux, and it works well for sites which use either use Silverlight 1.0 functionality (pretty much 100% supported) or which happen to use the Silverlight 2.0 bits which Moonlight currently supports. The caveat is that some websites explicitly check the user agent and won't offer content if you're not on a "supported" platform. That's poor website coding, not a fault of the Silverlight plugin.
During the keynote # ReMIX UK when ScottGu gave the figure of 1.5 million installs/day I was sat next to Andrew Shorten, one of the Adobe platform evangelists (and also a good chum). He was telling me Adobe have independant evidence of an AVERAGE of 12 million installs a day, with over 40 million downloads.
It would appear 1.5 million is a tiny amount of what it could be.
Well 6 million watched the Olympics on NBC, which used a silverlight player. So at least 6 million. I've never seen exact stats, but you can be pretty certain that it is pretty small still.
Also, there is an implementation of silverlight for linux called moonlight.
I think an interesting stat comes from this site itself. Have a look at how many silverlight questions there are! And how many responses - it's not the most active topic!
I think you'll see a dramatic increase in the Silverlight install base after Silverlight 2.0 officially comes out. Right now it's still in beta. Silverlight 1.0 is out and runs quite well from what I've seen in Moonlight on Linux, but it's much harder to create full-scale applications for than version 2.0. According to Microsoft, Moonlight will be "100% compatible" at release time. See Scott Guthrie's blog (note: 2.0 was called 1.1 at the time).
Nick R, as for the fact that there isn't much Silverlight activity on these forums, I think the biggest reason for that is the very active community on the silverlight.net forums.
Scott Guthrie said (at Remix UK Sept 18 2008) that Silverlight is currently downloaded 1.5 million times per day. Over 115 million downloads since the version 1 release.
The Version 1 installed base will automatically update to version 2 when it is out of beta.
Wow! Scott said the same thing at Mix in February 08 about run rate - 1.5m. So it seems that a daily run rate of 1.5m per day for 6 months would add 270m installs to the installed base. So their numbers are not exactly clear in their meaning.
If one assumes the 115m installed base is correct, then it implies a run rate around 700k per day in the six months since SL2. Of course, many users are upgrading versions B1 to B2 as an example.
Either way, it is gaining some steady installs. It would be nice to see the run rate improve. By 2nd quarter of next year, it should be dramatically higher due to v2 shipment, application/web site adoption, pre-installation on various computers (like HP) and any unannounced distribution mechanisms.
While in general I support the idea of developing a site using silverlight and feel that that, depending on your audience, you should not have too much trouble getting users to download the plug in I would caution you against assuming that Microsoft will release the plugin built into IE or as a part of windows update.
I have had two separate Microsoft Technology Evangelists tell me that the company is reluctant to do that due to Anti-Trust reasons.
This was over a year ago and their strategy has probably evolved since then, but it enough to make me not count on that as an option for greater market penetration.
Don't forget that the Silverlight 2 install base will never include PPC Mac users. It doesn't look like the Moonlight people are targetting them at all, despite the heroic effort to add PIC streaming for Silverlight 1.0 users for the Obama inauguration.
The larger question is how many users will your site lose if implemented in Silverlight. And, it very much depends on your audience.
If you're running a site about the joys of Linux kernel hacking or the virtues of Internet security, you'll probably lose a significant chunk of your audience. If you're running a more mainstream site, my experience is that, sadly, people will download anything they're told to most of the time. That's why spyware and malware work. And, as the NBC/Olympics deal shows, Microsoft will aggressively push its partners to use Silverlight until it's fairly ubiquitous.
I won't be using Silverlight until it's more mature because I do cater to a fair number of Linux users, but I might for a less technically-oriented site.