Microsoft Worked With Apple And Is Bringing Us Silverlight To The iPhone, Instead Of Flash By Adobe

Microsoft demonstrated the first developer beta of Silverlight 4 at the Professional Developer’s Conference this week, nothing very exciting if it’s not that they actually demoed it running on an iPhone.

For those who don’t know about Silverlight, Wikipedia is your friend:

Microsoft Silverlight is a web application framework that provides functionalities similar to those in Adobe Flash, integrating multimedia, graphics, animations and interactivity into a single runtime environment.

What’s great about it is that thanks to Silverlight, web developers will soon be able to make their content available to iPhone owners without hassles. It’s actually pretty amazing since we’ve been awaiting this from Adobe for a while now and it seemed like Apple was just not ready to let them do it. So how did it happen ? The guys over at betanews found out:

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.”

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

Rogers/Fido Release “My Account” iPhone App

A few months ago, Rogers/Fido updated their websites to provide customers with the ability to view their wireless usage in almost real-time. The information was updated every four hours and gave users a great tool to track wireless usage.

To expand on that functionality and to set themselves apart from the other two Canadian iPhone carriers, Rogers and Fido have released new apps called “My Account”. The apps require no inputting of account credentials and simply pull everything from your iPhone network connection and SIM card.

Both Rogers and Fido each have their own version of the app and both apps provide customers with their wireless usage. Like the website, users can see minutes, messages and data usage right from their iPhone, which updates every 20 minutes instead of four hours as on the Rogers/Fido websites. The apps also allow customers to view their current balance and make a payment via credit card.

A few things to note:

1.) The apps do not support Corporate Accounts.

2.) The apps do not support Prepaid accounts.

3.) You must have a data plan with Rogers/Fido, whether contracted or not.

4.) You must be on 3G or EDGE for the apps to retrieve your account information. If you are on WiFi, you will have to turn WiFi off and connect to 3G or EDGE. (This is annoying)

5.) The app icons are really weird.

Both of the Rogers My Account and Fido My Account apps are available on the iTunes App Store for free.