Why Panther May Tear Up Longhorn

Sophrosyne writes "Microsoft Watch has presented an article on Longhorn, which is due not before 2005, and compares it with Mac OS X 10.3 (Panther), which may be released this September. The article touches on some of the areas where Windows is ahead in operating system design and technologies, as well as how Panther plans to compete. Included in Microsoft Watch's article were links to a Extreme-Tech article on Desktop compositing, and 3D User Interfaces. It also contains videos of Longhorn's 3D Quartz-like user interface in action." If processor power is so important, why are we so willing to waste it on making windows do funny things when we move them around? Just wondering.

Comments

Re:Fantastic, except

[dhovis]

It is 3d in the resect that the content of the windows are treated as textures which are mapped onto planes. That allows the compositing to be handled by the video chip instead of the CPU.

Apple introduced this in Jaguar as "Quartz Extreme". Basically some of the CPU intensive stuff in the interface is offloaded into the 3D functions of the video chip. It requires a fairly hefty video chip (Radeon, or GeForce2+), but those are common now. The upside to it is that Quartz Extreme makes some of the flashier features (e.g. transparancy) available with no additional CPU cycles. It uses the video chip (which is largely untaxed anyway unless you are playing a game). In fact, on a Mac with QE, you can play a quicktime movie under a transparant terminal window with no slowdown and no increase in CPU use. You can use an OpenGL screensaver as your background with no significant CPU use.

Apple doesn't tell you anything...

[Steveftoth]

The 970 if not used by Apple has had some very strange design decisions. This is the first chip that IBM has made that has the Altivec/VMX implemented. Maybe they want it for linux. But common sense tells us that it's more likely that Apple has indeed requested that feature be implemented because they rely heavily on it in their OS. Having encouraged everyone to use the instructions has kinda locked them into useing them.

Also, as everyone knows, Apple is famous for not saying anything until the product is in trucks, and heading to stores. So while it is not a guarentee that they will be using it, I would put money on the fact that the next step in the evolution of Apple computers will be twords the PPC 970.

I do agree that 980/990 prediction is a little early at this stage in the game though.

Extra millseconds

[spooje]

With OSX you don't lose CPU cycles for all the extra animation. Quartz off loads the Open GL and most vector processes to your video card. This frees up your CPU for real tasks.

Brushed metal...

[SvnLyrBrto]

> that frickin' metallic theme that Apple puts on everything
> now (despite their design guidelines) - yuck! Brushed
> metal looks good on hardware, not on software.

Brushed metal is indeed annoying. Fortunately, it's simplicity itself to be rid of. Wether an application used Aqua or brushed metal widgets is defined by a single variable in an xml file inside the application bundle. Change that variable, restart the application, and the accursed brushed metal is gone!

There are free programs that'll demetallify all your apps in one step; or do so on an app by app basis, and keep track of the altered ones in a central location.

If you're some kind of freak, you can even ADD the brushed metal skin to applications that didn't use it in the first place!

cya,
john