Slashdot Mirror
More Insight On Longhorn's Avalon And Aero Design
Lispy writes "While monitoring the Xorg mailinglist I came across this set of WinHEC PPT-presentations (work fine in OOorg) that cover some interesting details on the underlying architecture of Aero, Aero Glass and future font rendering in Microsoft's upcoming Longhorn OS. What does the Slashdot crowd think about the overall design and its downsides, such as power consumption on notebooks?" (KPresenter works fine, too, btw.)
Meanwhile, in the real world outside slashdot, patenting everything has been _everyone's_ tactic for at least ten years.
I remember one place I worked, every engineer _had_ to file at least one patent a year, even if all they did was write device drivers... had to do it, though, in case someone else ever sued.
Whence? Hence. Whither? Thither.
Trademark issues, I believe. The software package is technically called "OpenOffice.org", because something else was already named OpenOffice.
LOAD "SIG",8,1
And oh, completely offtopic -- what's the deal with saying, work fine in OOorg -- shouldn't that be works fine with OO? Why the org/.org thingy?
"The name is "OpenOffice.org" and not "OpenOffice", because someone else already had the trademark. The name should be used as an adjective: "OpenOffice.org Application", "OpenOffice.org Community" and so on..." Link
Uttering logically derived and empirically supported truths to the disciples of the orthodox establishment.
No, not hot.
But reading Avalon's text support it seems that Longhorn will FINALLY be able to have the same deep text support that OS X has had since at least 10.0. Yes, all the APIs are marked AVAILABLE_MAC_OS_X_VERSION_10_0_AND_LATER with most of them having support in CarbonLib 1.0, ATSUnicodeLib 8.5 (Mac OS 8.5). Nice to see longhorn might finally be catching up.
The only thing that longhorn claims it will have that ATSUI doesn't have yet is the graphics card rendering support. Ever wonder why resizing a window is so slow on OS X? ATSUI is the reason.
Take a look at this cam of Jim Allchin's Keynote showing off Longhorn's directx capabilities.
e c/ WinHEC2004-JimAllchinKeynote.zip>
This makes it pretty clear why Apple is trying to patent transparent windows and some other elements of their UI.
<http://www.neowin.net/staff/creamhackered/winh
http://nyamenation.org/
From Logos, Trademark, and OpenOffice.org in a Nutshell:
- Sw Usr
With the specs to run Longhorn What kind a laptop. From the previous slashdot story. 'Microsoft is expected to recommend that the 'average' Longhorn PC feature a dual-core CPU running at 4 to 6GHz; a minimum of 2 gigs of RAM; up to a terabyte of storage; a 1 Gbit, built-in, Ethernet-wired port and an 802.11g wireless link; and a graphics processor that runs three times faster than those on the market today.'"
I expect big honking batteries and lots of heat.
We've known that Longhorn won't be available until (at least) 2006 for a while now.
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
If you are interested in learning more about Avalon, consider reading this article and especially the comments at the end. The author discusses Avalon vs. Quartz in the comments.
Graphical Composition in Avalon
These are some really nasty slides for a talk - basic presentation design says you shouldn't blast your audience with endless text in little fonts. The slide design leaves a lot to be desired - by the time they're done reading the slide they will have missed what the presenter is saying.
what's the purpose of this style applied to the timestamp:
left -30px? anyone remember that "msn purposely breaks opera" deal when they did the same thing?pr0n - keeping monitor glass spotless since 1981.
If you don't believe that text rendering speed is important, try the following simple benchmark: get a stopwatch, download mozilla, configure and build it, and see how long it takes (in your terminal program of choice)
next, kill X and repeat the test.
(this benchmark really only "works" if you have a single CPU system)
Surprisingly, building mozilla in 80x25 VGA text mode is about 3 minutes quicker than building it in X with the NV binary driver (I'm the guy who posted earlier with 110,000 chars/sec)
Combine this with the fact that UNIX users are far more likely to have terminals "spewing stuff out" than their Windows counterparts, and I hope you can see that text rendering performance on Linux could use a *bit* of attention.
All you need to do is figure out the A width of the leftmost character and adjust accordingly. The question is whether or not it is correct to do so. For some characters, probably not.
This is why things like Adobe PageMill now do optical kerning; it's not a simple matter of just "fixing it in the new fonts" - and it's not something you can easily automate.
Coming soon - pyrogyra
This parent is spot-on. I run 3 WindowsXP machines and a linux PDC and fileserver in my house. I would switch to Linux for the other computers, too - but there just isn't the support for applications and hardware. I would have to spend thousands to "upgrade" to a free os that supports my hardware.
.confs.
Linux asks you to learn a tremendous amount in order to use it. Fine - but you can't expect to sell a product with such a steep learning curve to people who barely made it out of High School.
Oh, and a reality check: millions of people in America alone are functionally illiterate. They are NOT going to rewrite their
Microsoft, at this point, is damn near unstoppable because it plays to the crowd - the REAL crowd. The Slashdot Community is a tiny niche in a tiny minority. Let's all work together to write linux apps that are actually easier to use than their microsoft equivalents?
The real meat of the whole thing starts here.
A really, really long chain of postings between the guy who wrote the article and a guy who seems to know OSX rendering pretty well.
My take on this is that OSX has tacked a lot of issues with making vector display practical, and trying to maintain a good balance between "everything is a vector and you all need new computers to run the OS" and "everything is a bitmap and you can run this on a 286". Personally I think a lot of graphic designers will be aghast at the limitations an all-vector approach will impose for things like icons - you can see guys spending days tweaking pixels. You may think you've done them a favor by taking that options away, but these are the guys that make your interfaces look good! Treat them nice, I say.
I would also say each is holding his own pretty well in this argument, it did not get too far into name calling and the like (gets more technical as you progress - my link takes you pretty much to the point wher ethey drop the childish bits). I do think the Avalon guy is a little more ignorant of what is going on in OS X rendering-wise than the OS X is of Avalon - the OS X guy for a while was unwilling to believe that anyone would actually take an approach with only vectors, but understood fully that aspect later on.
The Avalon guy has a good point that it's cheaper to send a lot of vectors to the GPU than to calculate very high DPI images for display... but I think the OS X guy has a good point that you can't have the GPU do everything.
Here's a simply summary from my read (not comprehensive):
Article guy: Maintains the vector retained model is the only scalable UI solution. UI's should only be collections of vectors (including all icons and the like) with everything, even text, being rendered by a GPU on your video card.
Also maintains that parts of OSX are not really PDF/DPS based, and therefore will not scale.
Has not yet answered if he thinks it's a good idea for the GPU to be doing typography (like kerning).
Longhorn will require new GPU's for sure, from everyone.
Avalon target is display showing about 10,000 primitives.
Avalon targeting high (300dpi+) displays, only path to good performance is feeding vectors to a video card.
OSX Guy: OSX does use PDF/DPS model correctly, elements will scale - renderer can be set to any DPI. To use the GPU for all drawing operations is madness - OS X has quick operations for things like video, and slower but much more exact operations for things like 2D operations. To use GPU for all operations is going to be a disaster as they cannot handle quality 2D operations (like exact text rendering) all that well.
Showed how saving a window as PDF yields scalable elements (not just a raw bitmap).
Maintains that OS X can support high DPI displays, you just change the rendering target.
Can rotate window contents in real time.
Expose is not supposed to be an exact vector resizing as such an operation should be very fast, not exact.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
If these people are functionally illiterate, then I'm not going to waste my time pandering to them when they can't read a message that says "I can't talk to your printer, are you sure that it's plugged in?" because they got stuck at the word 'printer'.
I agree that Linux needs a lot of work in making the sys-admin side easy for the non-techy crowd, but the desktop side is very solid. My distinctly non-tech parents have been using Linux for a year now, (I'm 400 km away and do all their sys-admin via ssh), with far less problems than when they had Windows 95/98/2000.