We were rather surprised and even slightly amused by the buzz generated by our choice to base headup on Microsoft’s Silverlight.
The tipping point that lead me to write this post was a tweet from Brian Manley who said:
“Playing with @HeadUp. Pretty cool. Tho the Silverlight requirement is meh“.
A day later Brian twittered:
“Have to say, I’m starting to like @HeadUp. Better than right-clicking some text and search with google. Lets me stay where I am…”.
It seems that some members of the tech blogging community are happy enough to provide us with positive feedback, yet take our choice to go with Silverlight, and not settle for something more mainstream, as a personal affront.
Because I believe users like Brian are what we are all about, I thought I’d take a few moments and explain why we chose to go with MS Silverlight:
Why Silverlight?
When the time came for us to make the choices of which technologies to utilize in order to implement the functionality we envisioned for headup we spent a fair amount of time deliberating over the various options that were available. In most cases we prefer using open source solutions over proprietary ones but after weighing all the options available Microsoft’s Silverlight turned out to being the overall best solution for the range of issues we were facing:
- Silverlight is designer and developer friendly allowing shorter production times and enabling us to deliver our users new goodies and features at shorter intervals.
- Silverlight is great for building rich internet applications that aren’t browser specific.
- Silverlight helps headup safeguard user privacy by enabling the extension to run queries and do reasoning locally on the client’s side.
Microsoft bashing may be en-vogue and all the rage today, however as a start-up company we don’t always have the luxury of being fashionable. Our prime concern has to be on delivering the best product we can to our users. Silverlight allows us to do just that, and as far as we’re concerned that’s all that matters…
My thanks to Brian for taking the time to tweet and comment about us and a happy Hanuka everyone!
Mike Darnell
Creative Marketing – headup.com
PS
looking for a headup invite?
Follow me @headup on twitter – I’ll DM you an invite code.