New Silverlight Top Sites
A lot of live websites have moved to Silverlight 2 beta 2, and there are some great new sites that have shown up over the last few weeks since the new version has been released.
Ryanair Destinations: I love Ryanair for many reasons, but mostly because they allow me to go to a wide variety of interesting destinations for a very low price. I have spent a lot of time using their Destinations map page to find out where places like Lamezia, Graz and Nador are. Now I get to do that in Silverlight, and not only that – they have added great new features like panning and zooming. Check it out and go book that trip to Constanta you’ve been meaning to take while you’re at it.
Line Rider: For those of you that love fun, time-killing applications online, this is a winner. Line Rider gives you a set of tool icons and lets you draw a huge landscape with all kinds of hills, ramps, jumps and whatever else you can think of. When you finish drawing, click play to send the sledder down your course until he wipes out. It’s actually really fun, and it integrates Windows Live Messenger as well which is nifty.
Carbon Grove: Interested in reducing your carbon footprint? How about planting a virtual tree as well as a real tree? This website can show you how. Carbon Grove is a slick site that has you answer ten questions and lets you choose ways to reduce your carbon contributions. One of the coolest pieces of it is how six weeks after you visit the site & answer the questions, the Internet Explorer team will plant a real tree for you – neat!
Deep Zoom Obama: Now regardless of whether you’d vote Democrat, Republican, Libertarian, Green Party or whoever else, everyone can agree that this is a neat display for Barack Obama. The site shows a gigapixel mosaic image of Barack, and it was built using more than 12,000 individual images of folks voting for him along with Deep Zoom and Silverlight technology. I liked this quote from someone who dug it at digg.com: “I never thought Silverlight would impress me. This is pretty cool.”
Developer Express Tools: I have met a few folks who work at Developer Express and have been really impressed by their technical depth and expertise. So it’s not surprising that I’m also impressed that DevExpress was the first group to come out with a layout management tool for Silverlight. It’s called AgLayoutControl, and it consists of a collection of layout management tools in one package. Their demo page is a nice Silverlight page and has some cool interactive demos showing how the controls work and look. Looks like a great set of really useful controls – nice job DevExpress!
Cross posted from Martha's Blog