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MS Vista Look and Feel To Go Cross-Platform
Robert writes "As part of the announcement of the next generation look and feel for Windows Vista,
Microsoft said that it will make a subset of the new presentation layer available for
other platforms. 'Windows Presentation Foundation', the look and feel which provides the rich front end for
Vista, will also eventually be available in compact form for other platforms such as the
Apple Macintosh, older
versions of Windows, and smart devices such as phones or PDAs."
It is not about Avalon being the prettiest thing out there. It is the ability to make graphical interfaces very quickly. Since the interface can be designed in XML it allows for rapid development. And to entice developers further they are adding extra platform support. It seems to be a pretty good system.
Yeah, because we all know how well Apple stuck to Windows look and feel when they ported Quicktime ov... oh yeah. Well, um, at least iTunes is... notwait, scratch that...
But at least they're consistent on their OWN platform! It's not like they would ever make an app that doesn't fit with all the others!
Granted, Microsoft wouldn't know good UI design if it came along and beat them over the head with a stick, but Apple are just as guilty of "screw you, we'll make our apps look however we want--to hell with native widgets!" syndrome as MS.
We're geeks... We're the sorcerers of the modern-day world. --
To reuse MSOffice look and feel under OSX. Look at the potential savings:
1. Full-time MacOS geeks on payroll eventually reduced by 90%.
2. No more OSX-specific marketing or tech support materials required -- all W32 Office materials will be perfectly suited to the Apple community (Just add "OSX" to the list of system req's, et voila).
3. Will greatly simplify porting of other strategic apps to the Mac (and eventually linux) platform. In order to properly compete with Firefox, IE must go cross-platform, period.
Microsoft has apparently learned nothing from the last time they tried to foist the Windows look and feel upon Mac users, Word 6.
It was a piece of shit that barely resembled a Mac application, and it was bloated and slow too, due to Microsoft being cheap and lazy and reusing too much code from the Windows version. It was a half-assed port, and it showed. It was overwhelmingly rejected by Macintosh users, to the point that Microsoft opted to resume selling the previous Mac version, Word 5.1, right alongside it. I worked at a university bookstore's computer department at the time, and I can attest to the fact that once the news got out about how bad Word 6 really was, it gathered dust on the shelves while we could barely keep 5.1 in stock.
It was this debacle that led directly to the creation of the Microsoft Mac Business Unit, which beginning with Office 98 started producing Mac software that Mac users deemed worthy of the Mac. They've pulled a boner or two here or there, IMHO their worst gaffe being the terrible Exchange server support in Entourage 2004 (support MAPI, dammit!), but by and large they do their job well-- there are plenty of Mac Office reviews that declare it to be superior to its Windows counterpart.
IMHO it would be a terrible mistake on Microsoft's part to try this miserable cross-platform look and feel experiment again. Especially now that there are viable alternatives to Mac Office, which there weren't the last time.
~Philly
KDE users already have translucent menus, translucent xterms, multiple-desktop pagers, completely configurable widgets, etc.
... older versions of Windows
Porting the Vista gui to linux would be a step backwards for us.
Also, from the article:
eventually ported to
ah, another reason NOT to upgrade. So why are they doing this? Perhaps its to try to keep people from defecting to linux, or to OSX or another of the BSDs.
Their market share has nowhere to go but down, and they know it. It's just a question of how far, how fast. With this anouncement we can say:
Wow, when did KDE get a 3D XML based programming and presentation layer, that uses hardware acceleration without letting the OS have OpenGL take over?
And when did KDE get an XML based screen to printer rich document subsystem - that is encapsulates color matching and media that Adobe has even yet to offer or make for the OSX for Apple to use?
Oh, that right, it neither freaking exist..
Reading these posts, especially after the bombshells that were dropped at the PDC, and the developers that GET what Microsoft is pulling off, just amaze me.
Even looking at the new presentation system in Windows, it replaces GDI, has abilities accessible via XAML and C++ programming that even many illustration programs don't support - multi-layer texturing, muli-level/layer transparency, mixed raster and vector composition, etc. - a document format based around it, and printer output that is an exact correlation. (A system years ahead of what even OSX and Abode.) (And don't even try to compare PDF/Postscript or tell me that Apple had color matching years ago. - PDF/Postscript doesn't compare to what these technologies are doing, as they are not just in a document structure, it is how the whole OS's UI works and support so many more advanced vector concepts than PDF, and as for color matching - even Windows 95 had native Screen and Printer color management profiles - this is something different.)
And then add on that the new LDDM driver model Microsoft has come up with. (It is something that is so over looked.) The LDDM model lets applications actually share and use GPU devices on the system at the same time, even if the GPU doesn't have the memory support for the applications.
In other words, 3D acceleration is being brought to applications and will co-exists with other applications and games seamlessly. It is like when Windows98 allowed multiple audio streams to be processed and play simultaneously. Not a single review even noticed this, but yet it was a big step ahead in consumer OSes. LDDM is basically doing this with GPUs and video - and on a much grander scale.
And don't tell me you can do this with OpenGL, or that some of the new 'pretty' project of KDE are doing these things, they simply are not. It would require abandoning the complete XWindows underlying structure of KDE to bring forth these features, unless KDE abandons XWindows and renders the whole OS and applications in OpenGL - and allows GPU and GPU memory sharing for OpenGL applications seamlessly.
At least if you are going to make smart comments, have half a mind about what you are talking about.