Thursday, May 22, 2008 Microsoft Sees Adoption for Silverlight Trending Big in China I caught up with veteran Microsoft engineer Charles Finkelstein earlier this week at Streaming Media East. Charles shares a few updates on Silverlight, the new rich media web plug-in, and how the new version will be implemented for the Summer Olympics. Charles runs the Expression team, the encoding system for Silverlight. Way back, 10 years ago, Charles was an integral part of Microsoft Movie Maker, the video editing program shipped with virtually all versions of Windows. Charles says the latest version in Vista can handle HD and as much as 80 percent of professional editing tasks. Clarification: Charles ask that I note that in the interview, he meant to say "XAML is based on XML” rather that HTML. -- Andy Plesser Times Provides Silverlight Plug-in for NYT Reader for Macs Update: 5/23 The New York Times has the Silverlight plug-in for the new Times Reader for Macs. Here's the reason it is being used, according to Rob Larson, VP of Digital Production at The Times. Beet.TV received this statement this afternoon: "We are using Microsoft’s Silverlight technology to render the pages on the Mac version. Silverlight includes a subset of the Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) tools we use on the PC version. This allows us to keep the look and feel of the Mac version very close to the PC version and also allows us to reuse code across platforms."