It’s been a double-edged sword, this no-Flash-on-the-iPhone business. On the one hand, we don’t get the complete Internet. On the other hand, the web pages we do get are less likely to crash or drag-along at a snail’s pace. And really, who wants to see yet another “Smack the monkey” banner ad?

Just as we bemoaned the lack of MMS functionality, some of us complain endlessly about the absence of Flash support on the iPhone. But following a demonstration at Microsoft’s Professional Developers Conference, it looks like we may see that software giant’s Flash competitor, Silverlight, appearing on the iPhone in the not too distant future.

Reporting for Betanews.com, Scott Fulton writes:

It was an impressive demonstration, once they got it working: H.264 video streaming wirelessly (and slowly, at least during the caching sequence) using Microsoft’s Silverlight video streaming, to an Apple iPhone… You’d think Apple would have stood firm against Microsoft at least as aggressively as it has against Adobe, if not more so. How did this happen? We asked Microsoft User Experience Platform Manager Brian Goldfarb last week at PDC 2009, and the answer was a huge surprise…followed by some caveats. But it contained these four amazing words: “We worked with Apple.”

OK, quick recap for those of you who don’t know what Silverlight is all about. Silverlight was launched by Microsoft in 2007, and provides a toolset developers can leverage to build rich multimedia and interactivity into websites. In this sense, it’s like Adobe’s venerable Flash. But unlike Flash, Silverlight content is based on a flavor of XML which means…well, it all gets very nerdy from here on in, so I’ll stop there. The take-home message is that, for the most part, Silverlight is a more modern, powerful and less crash-tastic alternative to Flash. It’s also more standards-compliant than Flash, depending on who you get to build your Silverlight web apps, and that matters a lot in an age when more and more of what we do happens in the browser. (Before I get flamed in the comments, please note — I didn’t say Silverlight is standards compliant — it’s just less horrible than Flash. And yes, I do realize that’s hardly a ringing endorsement.)

It’s precisely the browser technology in the iPhone that helped make Silverlight video streaming a possibility. Brian Goldfarb told Betanews:

“The promise of Silverlight is that it’s a cross-device, cross-browser, cross-platform solution, and it works the same on Macs as it does on Windows. The iPhone is a unique scenario. We talked to our customers…and they said, ‘Look, we just need to get our content there, and it’s mainly in the media space like broadcasting, and we want to put it on the iPhone.’ They have a great solution for that; if you’re surfing the Web, and hit YouTube and hit ‘Play,’ it’ll play your video because [Apple] created an environment where they can safely play media, and they’re comfortable with that.

Goldfarb is talking about the native YouTube app found on every iPhone. The YouTube app sorta helps, but usually only for YouTube-hosted video. Want to play videos hosted elsewhere? Good luck. Some H.264 QuickTime-encoded videos will play, but as you likely already know, it’s all a bit hit-and-miss.

“So we’ve worked with Apple to create a server-side based solution […] and what we’re doing is taking content that’s encoded for smooth streaming and enabling the content owner to say, ‘I want to enable the iPhone.’ The server will dynamically make the content work – same content, same point of origin – on the iPhone. We do this with the HTML 5 tag, in many ways.”

And there’s the magic bullet right there. Silverlight works because (in conjunction with Microsoft’s Internet Information Services technology found on Windows Servers) it exploits HTML 5’s native video support — and Mobile Safari is a decent HTML 5-compatible browser. All the video encoding trickery is taking place on the remote server; it identifies when an iPhone is requesting a video stream and bundles it into a format the device can handle.

Silverlight-powered streaming video on an iPhone – image from Betanews.com

Although Goldfarb says Microsoft “worked with Apple,” he elaborated on the degree of that collaboration. Turns out, it wasn’t a lot; ”We did all the work. We just made sure Apple was comfortable with it.”

Could this represent a potential lesson to learn for Adobe? Despite the enormous market penetration of the Flash player technology (Adobe claims 99.7 percent of browsers are capable of displaying Flash content) it’s widely criticised for being an antiquated, less-than-optimal platform for delivering multimedia. (Except, it seems, in L.A. Have you noticed how many Hollywood Studios doggedly insist on building their movie websites entirely in Flash?)

Who would have thought that the best solution, and lead runner in the race to provide non-YouTube video streaming for the iPhone, would be Microsoft? There’s something about that which is almost… poetic.

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It’s the weekend, people, so prime your downloading finger and get ready to make good use of it as I guide you through the latest picks from the App Store.

Thanks to the release of OS 3.0 and the iPhone 3GS, there’s been a constant stream of Apple happenings. Before we get to the apps, let’s take a glance at the week’s news.

First up, good news and bad for the iPhone 3GS’s new video functionality. The bad news is that keen eared early adopting customers have discovered a high-pitched whining noise on their iPhone 3GS video footage.

However, the incessant whining (of the 3GS, as opposed to disgruntled amateur video makers) hasn’t stopped video uploads to YouTube, direct from the iPhone. Just six days into the device’s release and YouTube has seen a surge of 400 percent in daily mobile uploads, attributed directly to the iPhone 3GS.

With the official release of OS 3.0 also came an updated jailbreaking tool, enabling upgraded users to install non-Apple certified software on their device. I tested the jailbreak software earlier this week and, although it was surprisingly user-friendly, I couldn’t find a good reason to keep it: My iPhone now has copy/paste, tethering and more, straight out the box.

Speaking of tethering, Bryan Schuetz, one of our new arrivals at TheAppleBlog, posted a link to an excellent guide on how to activate tethering on your iPhone. I managed to test out tethering yesterday and had mixed results; it worked perfectly initially, until an hour in when I lost my data connection entirely. It makes me wonder if some carriers will be on the lookout for illegitimate tethering and throttle bandwidth accordingly.

Our own Sultan of Statistics and Maestro of Economic Mathematics, Darrell Etherington, posted news featuring a rather large and impressive number this week. Indeed, Etherington revealed that an utterly unprecedented 1 million 3GS iPhones were purchased during the first week of the device’s release.

And finally, Apple hasn’t been the only ones launching awesome, new products into the consumer nether. British dev studio UsTwo has updated MouthOff, a sound-reactive mouth toy, for iPhone. The MouthOff Signature series includes a selection of 37 weird mouths, including 12 specially commissioned mouths by artists including Jon Burgerman, Pete Fowler and, my fave, Mikko Walamies, the artist behind Rolando’s gorgeous graphics.

Check out the vid I tweeted of the app in action and, if you decide you want to get a new mouth on with MouthOff, then you can win a free promo code for the app. Simply leave a comment at the end of this post telling me why you should get your MouthOff to be in with a chance of winning.

Moving onto the picks, this week I’ve been looking at Jukebox, App Gmail, Star Defense and Taxiball.

Jukebox (99 cents)
My favorite feature back on those early iPods was the music quiz. With an ever-expanding collection of digital music, I loved to test my muso abilities with the Name That Tune-style game bundled with the iPod, courtesy of Apple. Come the release of the iPod touch and iPhone, the game was curiously absent from the new devices — despite the potential for an even-more muso-centric gaming experience. That is until now, thanks to the iPhone’s new 3.0 update, giving developers access to the music library. Jukebox is a gorgeous implementation of this old game, incorporating album artwork and custom gaming modes.

App Gmail (Free)
Apple’s own Mail for iPhone might do the job, but in the meantime, Google has been squeezing a raft of new features and improvements into its Gmail web app for iPhone. Navigational elements have been tweaked, making it easier to skim and sort messages, but the real head-turning feature is offline Gmail, via the web app. All well and good, but there’s still no dedicated app for Gmail, making accessing the web app via Safari feel a tad sloppy. App Gmail meets us halfway to solve the issue — embedding the Gmail web app within the app itself — ridding us of the Safari interface elements. It’s still not an official, dedicated app, but it’ll do the job for now and it’s free.

Star Defense ($5.99)
It may have come out earlier this month, but Star Defense is only just coming into it’s own, thanks to the iPhone OS 3.0 update. The game itself is traditional tower defense given a graphical overhaul — the game features all the usual staples of the genre — multiple towers, waves of baddies — but the 3D graphics and Mario Galaxy-esque palm-size planets make it a thrilling experience. The 3.0 update integrates ngmoco’s Plus+ network. Think of it like the iPhone’s version of Xbox Live, which means multiplayer mode, challenging your friends and gamer points. What’s more, if a friend issues you a challenge, the game sends you a push notification.

Taxiball ($2.99)
As a student, sharing a house with a bunch of messy guys, we’d settle cleaning disputes with a game of Virtua Tennis on Sega’s Dreamcast. The console, sadly, died a premature death, criminally under-appreciated for what it was and the games it offered. Aside from Virtua Tennis, one of my other favorite Dreamcast games was Crazy Taxi. For those who aren’t familiar, driving your cab against the clock, you had to race across town delivering folk where they needed to go. It was massive, thrilling, looked gorgeous, and played like GTA without the constant death or Good Fellas voiceovers. With that in mind, Taxiball replaces the taxi with a big, yellow ball and brings the game to the iPhone. It’s frantic and moreish, well worth checking out.

That’s all the picks for this week. I’ll be back in seven days with more news from the week and picks from the App Store.

In the meantime, what apps have you been using this week?

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Existing customers can simply visit www.netflix.com/silverlightoptin to opt in to the new player. After a one-button click and a quick download of Silverlight, you’re all set to go. However, there are a few things to be aware of before you make the jump.

1. The player is still in beta, so there may be bugs.
2. Not all movies are available to watch in Silverlight. There’s no mention as to how many movies are ready to view, but after opting in I didn’t notice a radical reduction in the number of titles available. I’m assuming they covered the most popular titles and are leaving “High School Musical 3 1/2″ until later.
3. The new player only works on Intel-based Macs.
4. Once you opt in, you must use Silverlight on all your machines to access the “watch instantly” feature. There will no longer be a difference between watching it on your Mac and watching it on your PC.

Having spent a few hours with the new player last night and this morning I am very impressed. Playback has been flawless, video quality is about the same, and the Silverlight interface is impressive and smooth. I haven’t encountered any bugs yet when fast forwarding or switching to full screen mode. I just hope that this jump to a single platform will mean Netflix can now concentrate on improving the selection of “watch instantly” titles.

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It is expected that Netflix members who watch movies and TV episodes instantly on their computers will enjoy a faster, easier connection and a more robust viewing experience with Silverlight, due to the quality built directly into the player. Among the viewing enhancements with the new player is a breakthrough in timeline navigation that vastly improves the use of fast-forwarding and rewinding. The new Netflix player takes advantage of Play Ready DRM, which is built into Silverlight, for the playback of protected content on both Windows-based PCs and on Macs. That had not been possible with previous generation technologies.

As someone that has been holding off joining Netflix solely because of the lack of “Watch Instantly,” this all comes as good news. It also stands to say that there’s a bit of irony in there that it would take Microsoft technology to bring something like this to a Mac (DRM included).

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