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Avalon Preview Released for XP
CliffH writes "For those that want to play with a preview release of Avalon (the November Community Technology Preview) and the SDK, head on over to this page and download to your heart's delight. It is 261MB+ and is already going slow so be warned."
..download through Dijjer?
Too Late... http://www.winexpose.com
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Theres a video demo here:
:
l 9.Avalon
Daniel Lehenbauer - Demo of Avalon 3D #
and here
Avalon Layout Basics
and info here:
http://channel9.msdn.com/wiki/default.aspx/Channe
Do a google search on Entbloess, TopDesk, or WinPlosion. All supposed XP clones of Expose.
Why in hell does every Linux fanboy assume that all Windows processes run in kernel mode? Even Windows Explorer on NT4/Win2k/XP/2003 runs in user space, buddy.
All of this UI stuff wil run in user space, with the exception of the actual video device driver code (which is done for performance). Windows video device drivers that are WHQL certified are typically rock solid and stable for general non-gaming use.
Anyway, you can run GUI-less windows servers on 2003 today. And even if you do choose to use the GUI shell for administering a Windows server, when you log out, the processes for explorer.exe and pretty much everything else GUI are completely stopped (only GINA, the graphical login prompt, remains). You can verify this with any number of Windows remote administration tools.
Finally, you can bet that the "eye candy" will be turned off by default on the server versions of longhorn, just as it is on Windows Server 2003 (which uses the same Luna GUI as XP, with almost all the animation/transparency/etc. options turned off).
Here is a not bad demo video of avalon running on XP. http://channel9.msdn.com/ShowPost.aspx?PostID=3452 8
The newer versions of VMWare Workstation is supposed to support pass through OpenGL and DirectX, and Avalon runs on DirectX if I'm not mistaken.
When you say that OS X doesn't do this, are you taking into consideration Core Image that's coming in Tiger this year?
Actually the 3 Pillars of Longhorn were Presentation (Avalon), Data (WinFS) and Communication (Indigo).
It's not WinExpose anymore. It's called WinPlosion now. http://www.winplosion.com/
Avalon is much more advanced than Quartz is currently. Avalon is a vector-based drawing API. Quartz, although it looks smooth, is really bitmapped, although not for long. Quartz will gain true vector capabilities very soon I'm sure, probably before longhorn ships.
not as far as i know, no, but i might not have found that feature yet (i used to program in VB5 and have that functionality before i switched to linux completely and ive just started to try to get to grips with _basic_ c++).
If your programming in C++/delphi, kylix (made by borland but its open source, not sure of the license) has that functionality iirc.
have a look at this website (its for gentoo, but there will be packages available for other distro's if you google)
http://www.gentoo-portage.com/dev-util
Some of the packages above provide an IDE.
Of course, I still think Apple will just come out with something even better
Where? How? There is nothing on Apple's roadmap. Objective-C is neither garbage collected nor type-safe, yet it is still what Apple is pushing. And while Apple kind of inherited a scalable graphics engine and toolkit with NeXTStep, that is technology from the 1980's; their competitors are designing with the benefit of hindsight and with knowledge of today's needs and requirements.
The people most likely to come out with something "even better" are the open source community: between the X11 enhancements and Mono and Mozilla as application development platforms, they are on track to ship something better than Longhorn before Longhorn even ships.
Actually, quartz is much more than just bitmapped operations. It handles all of the drawing primitives and such and is PDF based (similar to the way that NeXT's windowing system was based on Postscript). Thus, Quartz is already vector based. Perhaps you are thinking of Quartz Extreme? This uses the graphics card to do compositing of windows for display (each window is flattened to a texture map essentially). For more, see: Apple's developer site
relevant quote:
Yes the API is path-based, but once the paths are rendered to a bitmap and then composited on the screen it is finished. Any scaling at that point is done on a bitmap level (for example the zoomable icons). Avalon preserves the paths and vectors all the way into the composite layer so things can be warped and scaled without having to have the program do a redraw. Currently Quartz forces the app to create the paths all over again every time the window is redrawn or if the display was to be suddenly scaled to a new DPI. So while quartz has a vector-based API, the actual rendering engine is not vector-based.
See my other comment for a better explaination. Of course the person I quote could just be making up sh** too.
Note that WinFS isn't actually a filesystem per se, it's an indexing database that sits on top of the filesystem (NTFS in this case).