Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

Avalon Preview Released for XP

Posted by michael on from the promised-land dept.

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."

5 of 341 comments (clear)

  1. The nice thing about APIs is there's so many of em by poot_rootbeer · · Score: 3, Insightful

    "The goal is give developers a consistent set of APIs," or application programming interfaces, Montgomery said.

    And they're doing this by adding ANOTHER set of graphics APIs to Windows, to complement the ones we have now, and the ones we had five years ago, and the ones we had five years before that, and the ones we had five years before THAT?

    I don't get it.

  2. Here comes the bashing... by bonch · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Instead of discussing the technology (which is actually pretty cool...they do have smart engineers at Microsoft), I have a feeling this will be a bunch of +5 Funny Microsoft-bash posts.

    One third referencing some obscure GUI from the past where something almost like this has been done already, another third referencing some future project not released yet doing the same, and the rest a bunch of +5 Funny "jokes" rehashing old Microsoft jokes from the last eight years. Okay, I'm generalizing, but that's also what people will be doing about this. :)

    Seriously, it looks like interesting stuff, and I can't wait to not only develop with it, but develop with the competing technologies that will also spring up as a result.

    Oh, and for the record, before people say it--OS X does use the 3D card, but only for fast blitting. It is still 2D. Not actual 3D acceleration using hardware triangles like this, where you're dealing with a camera viewport and using meshes.

    1. Re:Here comes the bashing... by ZiZ · · Score: 3, Insightful
      Oh, and for the record, before people say it--OS X does use the 3D card, but only for fast blitting. It is still 2D. Not actual 3D acceleration using hardware triangles like this, where you're dealing with a camera viewport and using meshes.

      Speaking of this, I'd love to see a super-bloody-fast hardware accelerated 2D video card, with code and drivers optimized for doing 2D operations - skip the 3D stuff, but give me 2D layers, in-card pixel-perfect collision detection, et cetera, et cetera. You could expect it to be at a reasonable price, it would be /very/ useful for desktop, presentation, and even 2D gaming...and it would be far simpler to program efficiently.

      But regardless of that, parent has a solid point.

      Imagine if your windowing system dealt with windows-in-the-front merely by telling your graphics card 'this goes to the front'. Think how nice it would be to never have to manually rotate and scale images for display, but know that your desktop would know how to deal with it if you asked it to nicely. Picture hardware-accelerated mouse cursors that can be as dynamic and beautiful as software-rendered mouse cursors. If you like that sort of thing, anyway.

      --
      This flies in the face of science.
  3. Screenshots by Szentigrade · · Score: 4, Insightful

    I don't know about the rest of you but i would rather bypass downloading a 250MB file and would just like to see some interesting screenshots.

    --
    When I read about the evils of drinking, I gave up... reading.-Henny Youngman
  4. Re:Graphics and Avalon... by poot_rootbeer · · Score: 3, Insightful

    you can and should provide multiple icon sizes

    Why? You should only need one icon size.

    (You are storing the icon as vector graphics and not a bitmap, right...?)