Possibilities for full blown silverlight applications

Question

Since the launch of Silverlight 2 I was expecting a lot of full blown Silverlight applications popping up but still there seem to be little evidence of this. Does anybody know of such applications out there in the wild. And also what would be the obvious applications you would develop in Silverlight. I would say mail clients are bad examples as they just as well could be written as a web/ajax app. As Silverlight is far more powerful than web+ajax possible candidates should be impossible/akward implementing as a web/ajax app.

The ones that comes to my mind is

• Photo and imaging editing apps
• Reporting applications
• Office applications, Word/Excel...

Edit: Added from posts

• Games

The point isn't that the app need to fill the whole screen just that it isn't just a small part of a webpage, or you could call it a full blown application running inside the webbrowser, only using the webbrowser as a host.

Answer 1

I don't know one so far, but I could imagine that it could be used in a kind like the fullscreen video playback on youtube.

Answer 2

How many fullscreen desktop apps are there? Most application don't need the entire screen. If you don't want to be distracted by menus and taskbars and so you go fullscreen. Another type of applications that can use fullscreen are games.

Answer 3

You are limited in fullscreen to certain key presses such as arrow keys, tab, enter, and space so this rules out some of those types of apps. They have done this for security reasons so an app can't hijack the screen and record the keypresses, but I wish they could come up with a scheme to sufficiently warn the user then allow it if they consent.

Answer 4

I think the Medical app that Microsoft itself developed shows pretty well what could be achieved with silverlight http://www.mscui.net/PatientJourneyDemonstrator/

As for image editing then as I understand its a bit difficult as Silverlight lacks a Bitmap API to be able to do per pixel image editing...

Edit:

I noticed you added Word/Excel to your question and there comes the problem that Silverlight doesn't have a rich text editor built in and there hasn't been real good examples of custom implementations. There is one http://www.codeplex.com/richtextedit but I haven't seen any applications that actually use it.

Answer 5

An application Microsoft seem to like to show case is the AOL mail client written entirely in silverlight.

Personally I follow the rule is if you would not write it in flash you would not write it in silverlight preferring AJAX in most cases. In the past most large flash application have failed such as the flash word processor (cant remember the name) while AJAX enabled applications such as google documents have taken off.

Finally I believe until moonlight (linux and mac support) has been released and more general users have silverlight downloaded developers will be reluctant to use it widely even for smaller apps and gadgets.

Answer 6

I'm working on one in the medical domain.

This started as an update of a Mac classic application but due to the amount of work involved, broadened to considering other toolkits. I convinced them to go for an initial WPF desktop port to be followed by a Silverlight version.