The endless battle between Flash and Silverlight

For a while now, there’s been and endless fight between Adobe and Microsoft over the ultimate animation tool. Which one’s best? Which should you use well let’s see…

Firstly, flash is doing better in the market as it is the well known and more original program but Silverlight presents to us a program which brings all the stuff we wanted from flash.

Animation

Flash is based on frame animation, meaning that it works a bit like movie maker, where you place things in frames or slides and add more and more slides until an animation is created. On the contrary Silverlight is time based, you indicate a time for an image to be shown etc. Also Microsoft has made this program easier to use than flash in this sense since one is not required to calculate the positions of objects in the frames and it is more user friendly

File Size

Flash projects are compressed, using minimal space.

Silverlight uses a complex XAML description language and is not compressed so files are usually larger.

Scripting

In Flash, a scripting language called Action Script is used. It comes with a huge library of different applications for use.

In Silverlight there are many different scripts you can choose from.

Sound Processing

ActionScript offers a set of sound classes that can be used to generate and control sound in a movie. You can add sounds from the library while the movie clip is playing and control those sounds. If you do not specify a target when you create a new sound object, there are methods to control sound for the whole movie.

Silverlight doesn’t have the low-level audio APIs you would need to write an audio application in the browser. It doesn’t even support playback of WAV files because .NET programming language has very little audio playback support.

Ease of Use

Both programs have many options and tools that can be used for people who are deaf etc. However Flash has much, much more and definitely beats Silverlight this round.

For more info check this out: http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2009/05/09/flash-vs-silverlight-what-suits-your-needs-best/

However overall, there is clearly a reason why flash is still selling more, because even according to this websites statistics, Flash is still the program you could trust more to get things right. But Microsoft is getting there and eventually enough improvements will be made.