Celebrating Silverlight 2 while following the World Chess Championship

6 Comments

• Of course I am aware of the Foidos, Chessbase and other offers. Most of these offers require a dedicated page and/or take up a lot of screen real estate.
  
  The idea of the Silverlight chess board is to provide a chess board with a very small footprint. You can add it to your page or blog with one object tag. It is only 45 kb in size. In that sense I don't think it is overkill.
  
  Mark Crowther, who runs The Week In Chess, has been using it since Silverlight beta 1 for live transmission of many chess events. This live transmission is free, while the Foidos one is pay-only.
  
  In the release version you can also generate notation. The notation isn't part of the Silverlight view port though, it is part of the HTML DOM. In that way you can layout and style the notation any way you want. The idea again is to have very small footprint, not taking over the layout of your site but integrating into it.
  
  I am not saying that the other offers are worse, and I don't really see them as a competition. I am just explaining that the idea is a bit different here.
  

• 'Of course I am aware of Foidos, Chessbase and other offers'
  
  What are you saying? You are aware of everything?
  
  And I'm not sure why you would be so 'aware' of Foidos. It is relatively obscure as far as I know and only popped up for the championship.
  
  My original point was that as a Silverlight developer, the TWIC offering wasn't doing anything that hasn't been done before in other 'languages' whereas the Foidos demo shows something that is somewhat ground breaking.
  
  I don't have anything against TWIC. I am a keen chess player, and have been following it since about 1996.
  
  

• @Ross: wow! why all the aggressivity? Martin didn't say "all other offers", he said "other offers", which means that he knows of other offers, nothing more, nothing less. I don't see how you could have extrapolated that to him saying he is "aware of everything". Martin follows closely what happens in the world of Chess, so it's really not surprising that he would know about Foidos.
  Anyway, nobody said there was anything groundbreaking in this app, but it's a fine example of what you can do with Silverlight in relatively little time. As a matter of facts, most good applications are not groundbreaking in any way but just get things done.
  

• @Ross: sorry for sounding pedantic. It seems only natural that Martin would step in to defend his work.
  

• Don't worry about it. Do be honest, I am a bit naive about the whole blog scene. If I had known the author would be reading your blog I probably would have been more polite.
  
  Also, there wouldn't have been so much confusion if your link was to his article rather than to his atom.xml. In that way I would have read what he had to say before commenting. The only thing I could see was the TWIC article.
  
  
  
  

• @Ross: yes, well, Martin wrote his article 5 days after I wrote this post. All I had at the time was the TWIC article. I'm adding the link to his post. You should always write as if it was going to be there forever and accessible to anyone ;)