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!