Topic: Chumby switching to Microsoft Silverlight!

Several developers have expressed discomfort with the use of Adobe Flash in the chumby device, primarily citing its overall obscurity in the marketplace, the unavailability of documentation, lack of professional development tools, etc.

As a result, starting with the next firmware update, we'll be replacing Adobe Flash Lite player with Microsoft's Silverlight technology.

As many of you know, Silverlight has had unprecedented acceptance by the market, with a world-wide penetration of well over 100% of all desktop and embedded computing devices, is completely patent and license free, and boasts a suite of mature development tools and tens of billions of active developers.

In order to do this, of course, we'll also be abandoning the use of Linux as our base platform, and replacing with with Windows CE Home Basic SP3, deprecating the use of MP3, Ogg Vorbis, AAC, and FLAC in favor of a WMA-only solution.  Users will be limited to five widgets and a single channel but can choose to upgrade to Windows CE Home Premium to have up to eight widgets.

The website will be modified to require IE 8 in order to simplify the configuration of the device using ActiveX controls.

We invite the community of chumby users that are using Macintosh and Linux computers to switch to Windows Vista in order to continue to use the chumby service.

Thanks for your comments and continued support as we transition the chumby ecosystem into the 20th century!

Re: Chumby switching to Microsoft Silverlight!

:^)

I'm sure Duane's joking -- what he's not telling you is that chumby is *really* moving to BeOS.

Re: Chumby switching to Microsoft Silverlight!

Yeah right :-)

Re: Chumby switching to Microsoft Silverlight!

Ha ha hah!  That was great!

Re: Chumby switching to Microsoft Silverlight!

My heart momentarily stopped...

Re: Chumby switching to Microsoft Silverlight!

Maybe I should return my newly purchased unit for a REFUND.

Better yet, I'll contact my chargecard company and dispute the recently posted Chumby charge for selling an obsolete  item.

Re: Chumby switching to Microsoft Silverlight!

in_wg_pa wrote:

Maybe I should return my newly purchased unit for a REFUND.

Better yet, I'll contact my chargecard company and dispute the recently posted Chumby charge for selling an obsolete  item.

You apparently didn't notice the date of the original post . . .

Re: Chumby switching to Microsoft Silverlight!

4/1/2009

Re: Chumby switching to Microsoft Silverlight!

in_wg_pa wrote:

4/1/2009

Is there anything special about that day?

Re: Chumby switching to Microsoft Silverlight!

Everytime this thread re-activates, and I glance at it in the topic summary, my heart skips a few beats (lousy short term memory).

Re: Chumby switching to Microsoft Silverlight!

Duane wrote:
in_wg_pa wrote:

4/1/2009

Is there anything special about that day?

For those of us (almost) everywhere else in the world.

Re: Chumby switching to Microsoft Silverlight!

Am I the only one who just got the update notification? I can't wait to be browsing websites with Internet Explorer 6 on my Chumby! I've been wanting to listen to some WMA streams, so now I can with Windows Media Player. It's great to have your little internet appliance be able to browse websites that use ActiveX controls. And check out that new website! It's just a shame that the BeOS deal fell through (I heard they were asking for too much money to get a BeOS license).

Re: Chumby switching to Microsoft Silverlight!

I thought I heard that Chumby was porting to the Arduino plaform?

Re: Chumby switching to Microsoft Silverlight!

Thats good, the Windows phone is switching to 'MSDOS Mobile' April 1st also.

Funny thing, MSDOS is now in the Windows Phone store under productivity

http://www.microsoft.com/en/mobile/ms-dos/#