| Citrix Follows Microsoft In Using Silverlight In Web Interface |
| Saturday, 01 March 2008 by Michel Roth | |
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In a nutshell, Silverlight is Microsoft's answer to the huge success of Flash for rich Internet content. Since the early days of Silverlight, Citrix has been working with Microsoft on creating usage scenarios for Silverlight. One of these ideas is to use Silverlight to power future version of the Citrix Web Interface. Like Andrew Innes mentions in his post , it is not just bling-bling that Silverlight offers but apparently also makes it easier to maintain a Silverlight-powered Web Interface.
So, like I mentioned earlier , Microsoft also has a TS Web Access powered by Silverlight. Even though Silverlight allows for more creative and beautiful designs of "a" web platform both Citrix and Microsoft have ended up with quite a similar design. See for yourself. This is the Microsoft TS Web Access powered by Silverlight : And this is the prototype of the Citrix Web Interface powered by Silverlight: The Citrix Web Interface powered by Silverlight is however more than just pretty icons and slick animations. If you take a look at the demo video that Citrix has put up, you can see that this Citrix Web Interface powered by Silverlight also incorporates popular Web Interface "features" such as the search function for applications and the favorite applications.
I for one have to say that I am very excited about seeing initiatives like this. I've always been amazed at the lack of feeling for design in products of major ISVs. It looks like the importance of an aesthetically appealing design has been grossly underestimated. In my opinion, an appealing design also plays a very big role in the success of a product just as the core functionality of that product does. This very low priority certain ISVs have given to design and layout of their products has been changing the last 3 years or so. I would hope that this is the result of self-reflection and not the obvious success of companies such as Macintosh. Either way, it's good to see this moving forward.
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Hi Michel,
I must blog soon about the discussions and work going on within Citrix around end-user experience - one way or another, I've ended up involved with many of them, since I now look after PNAgent (our desktop integration client) as well as Web Interface. That kinda puts me on the firing, I mean front line of the debate, in which _everyone_ has opinions about what is important and what should happen.
You will likely have heard or seen Mark Templeton talking about the importance of these matters for a while now too, and that is certainly percolating through the organization. It has been an interesting time trying to figure out what really is important (and why) versus what may be nifty on first glance but not ultimately a valuable improvement.
For me, it is partly recognition that there is no single UI (or even a single conceptual approach) that will satisfy everyone, that makes it so important to architect for UI diversity. There are some very interesting challenges in doing that when you come to look at the security considerations though; I'll have to start blogging about those too.
Cheers,
AndrewI
Hi Andrew,
Thanks for your response. It's good to see that Citrix is monitoring the community blogs.
I am in no way envious of your position. You have the hard job of dividing development resources among functionality and design. The point that I made (from an outstander perspective) is that design seems to always has lost that battle the last 10 years or so in the major ISVs (this is just not Citrix I am talking about).