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.)
When certain fonts are displayed in Windows, certain characters are cut off on the left. It seems when the bounding box of text is calculated, it is incorrect, allowing some text to be cut off when displayed. I've noticed this is IE and Word especially.
Hopefuly they can fix this in the new fonts.
http://github.com/gbook/nidb
Joe Beda had said that Avalon is going to be more of an advanced UI/Visualization toolkit, while Dx will continue to contain all the other serious stuff.
Now, it looks like Avalon can do 3d on it's own and maybe more too -- what's the idea behind this anyway?
Are they trying to get a fresh new API or something? It seems unlikely, since I remember Joe and Scobles saying that they will probably be using Dx for serious graphics and game development. The redundancy seems strange.
From the presentation --
Avalon 3-D are not a replacement for Direct3D
You will find Avalon 3-D useful if:
- You want to integrate 3-D seamlessly into an Avalon app that also contains 2-D content, controls, etc.
- Platform features like Remote Desktop and multimon are high priorities for you
- You want to easily add 3-D functionality without quickly without needing to learn how the graphics hardware works
You will find DirectX useful if:
- You want access to all of the features provided by the graphics hardware
- You want to have full control over how your scene is stored and managed in memory
- Plan for interop between Direct3D and Avalon
Render Direct3D in a HWND and host within Avalon
So basically it seems to help ease the creation of bells and whistles, more than anything. Weird.
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?
Apparently an Aero testing suite will be released at least 18 months before Longhorn's release. Is this demo yet available? It's interesting to note that if this message is right, Longhorn will not be available until 2006.
Will MS publicly announce this Aero test, so that we can anticipate a real release date for Longhorn?
This has been going on for at least wo weeks. You can get to the download.microsoft.com by appending "c.footprint.net" on the end of the server address. So, the link becomes:
n load/1/8/f/18f8 cee2-0b64-41f2-893d-a6f2295b40c8/TW04006_WINHEC200 4.ppt
http://download.microsoft.com.c.footprint.net/dow
Go figure. I have no idea excatly why this is happening. I'll leave that to people who care.
Even if Microsoft does a good job with Aero/Aero Glass, let's not forget that it's nothing but a ripoff of Mac OS X's Quartz/Quartz Extreme-- which by the time Longhorn comes out will be even more advanced.
I think the reason that MS is showing so little of Aero is that its design will be the last thing they do before kicking Longhorn out the door. They'll need to wait to see what they'll want to copy from whatever the latest version of OS X is at the time.
In what way, if any, is this different from Apple's Quartz techniques?
Windows seems to be going down the road of "show fewer things but with bigger pictures", which may be great for regular folkum. Advanced users will just scrap the bells and whistles anyway for a basic, functional setup. "Dumbing down" through simplification isn't always a bad thing though. I actually like the new WinXP start menu a lot better than the classic one, albeit with small icons instead of the huge default setting. Silver Luna isn't too bad either, as long as I reduce the size of the titlebars and buttons to classic size. Again, what's the deal with Microsoft and huge buttons and icons? Are they trying to cater to the bad eyesight but too cool to wear glasses crowd?
I noted with quite a bit of interest that near the end of the Longhorn Text presentation, they claim that 1,000,000 sub-pixel antialiased (cleartype) characters can be rendered per second (8 to 11 point type, on a 96dpi LCD).
:(
Does anyone have any similar performance figures for sub-pixel AA font performance on Linux? I have a sinking feeling it might be closer to 10,000/second
I'm using gentoo primarily, and I have a box running Fedora Core 2. Bluecurve is nice, but it still can't hold a candle to Mac OS X or Longhorn (from the screenshots I've seen). With SVG now implemented in GNOME, it would be my guess that there will eventually be a big wave of pretty vector-based icon sets and themes. I sure hope we will be able to compete against the big guys (Microsoft) though.
Life is offtopic.
I disagree completely, sir! Eye-candy is EXTREMELY important! Computers should be works of art as much as possible -- this should not necessarily mean at the expense of functionality of course.
Look at the world of cars. Look at BMW, for example.
--
om Shanti
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.
Well that certainly sounds hotter than say, SAMUI, but what does it do? What is "deep" text support?
I suppose a web search would help, or at least installing something that can read ppt, but much too lazy.
I think the features they are talking about are nice.. But personally I still think their sub-pixel font anti-aliasing looks bad. http://bluehalo.homeunix.org/text/ Shows the line from the PPT and the same thing typed in OS X.
Talent hits a target no one else can hit; Genius hits a target no one else can see.
while somewhat offtopic this has to do with longhorn. i have a friend who has friends on the longhorn development team. I hear they are having to re-write some of it because they invested to much in inter-threading processes. It appears that a Windows XP 2 will come out becaues longhorn is taking so long.
leprkan...
If Apple continues to patent its UI elements Microsoft is going to be in a lot of trouble and will be doing a lot of redesign or groveling at Apple.
Much of what I have seen in the way of screen shots and videos, makes Avalon and Aero look as they are "borrowing" an awful lot of MacOS X's look and feel as well as many UI elements. Even the window widgets are gaining Mac like colors!
This makes Longhorn look very nice but if Apple continues to patent their "look and feel", and they should, it would provided them with a nice bit of leverage with MS. Microsoft might even have to stop "borrowing" features and stop calling them "New and Ground breaking Microsoft developments".
This could become very interesting!