(Oops, forgot to post this one a while back, it’s been sitting in my Drafts for ages)

Whilst I was in Sydney last weekend a month or so ago, I went to see Sunshine (Official Site, IMDB, Trailer), with Mitch (my uncle). Unfortunately for us, about 20 minutes before the end of the film the projector broke down so I didn’t get to see the end (until the next night, anyway).

Sunshine has got a few fairly well known actors - Michelle Yeoh (Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon), and Chris Evans (One of the Fantastic Four), plus local Rose Byrne. Who do a good job, despite the flaws written into the script (more on that later).

“The premise of SUNSHINE,” explains producer Andrew Macdonald, “is that in 50 years from now the Sun is dying. It is no longer providing the energy and the light that mankind needs to survive on Earth. The entire global community pools its resources to send a mission into space to deliver a bomb to reignite the part of the Sun that is failing.  Our story concerns the eight astronauts and scientists who lead this mission.  On their journey towards the Sun the crew stumble upon the ship that was sent on the same mission seven years previously, the Icarus I, drifting in space.  From this point on things start to go very wrong and it’s about how the crew react under the enormous pressure of their endeavor to save mankind.”

The movie is pretty good as far as SciFi goes. It took a turn, which I wasn’t expecting (but I won’t give it away) and turns into more of a thriller, set in space. 

When ABC’s At The Movies reviewed the movie, Margaret Pomeranz had a discussion with the director Danny Boyle, who said words to the effect that Sci-Fi Fans are very demanding, and expect a lot from movies & TV Shows.  

So, I thought it was pretty ironic that they screwed up a few of the more major things:

1. They had gravity throughout the ship, perpendicular to that of the direction of the sun (despite their proximity to the Sun)
2. There was no apparent gravity whilst in vacuum, but the moment air is returned (even when there’s no power to the ship) - so did the gravity.
3. Apparently people freeze solid within moments of being placed in vacuum, in the shadow of the sun.

Those three completely broke my suspension of disbelief. I can believe they had gravity generators of some sort - but they wouldn’t operate without power.  There’s another thing about gravity that struck me as kinda strange at the very end of the movie too - but I won’t reveal that, either.

All in all - it’s a decent flick, if you’re either not conscious of the physics involved (even on a basic level), or just don’t care that much about the (lack of) reality behind it.  Go check it out.

Silverlight really needs to get with the pre-loading and obvious controls thing.

Edit: Correction - okay, so like Paul says - it’s not Silverlight itself, it’s the templates that people are using. Still, they’re templates that come with the various Silverlight capable applications (Blend, Expression, and Media Encoder) - so they’re going to be used fairly frequently.

Here’s a Youtube video:

How do you play/pause, or skip to a certain portion? How do you know how much of the video is loaded? 

They’re fairly obvious after about 5 seconds of watching the player run. The little red bar runs to the right as it loads, and the dot follows along as it plays. Drag the dot - you start playing at that point.  

What about a QuickTime video?  (I’m not exactly a fan of QuickTime either)

  

Yep, that’s reasonably obvious too. There’s the play, skip/etc controls - and a similar style of displaying the amount of video loaded.

Now let’s take a look at this Silverlight video:

Well, we’ve got skip back, play and skip forward.. err.. how do I tell how much has preloaded?  Oh - that’s right - with this helpful little glyph:

What does the 36 signify though? It’s not until you actually watch what it does for a while, that you realise it’s not some sort of countdown timer until you can start the movie  - it’s a percentage counter of how much it’s loaded. (Silverlight will start playing the moment it has some video loaded - regardless of whether the connection between you and the server is fast enough to keep it up).

Okay, so, how do you skip forward in the video… err.. .wait… can you? Well, assuming it’s been pre-loaded - yes, there’s a little blue bar with a white gradient — that’s the play position indicator. You can drag the white bit around to set the current play position.

The only issue is - it breaks the common UI visual cues’, so it took me about 30 seconds to find the control (it’s really not obvious). What’s the likelihood that my Grandmother is going to know how to use it?