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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."
What features are in Vista that would inspire me to upgrade besides the UI? Frankly the UI looks big and clunky like XP and flat out ugly... but what is the benefit of Vista?
Why have Vista?
Just like Windows NT. You could run it on PPC/Alpha (with no available programs) for a little-while. Then there was one.
What are they going to do, other than try to bring their DRM to Apple?
iirc Vista is said to take quite a chunk of hardware to run. from the article:
"However, 3D and hardware accelerators will probably not be part of the package."
how, then, will it be possible to put this stuff on even older comps? is this really thought through, or am i missing some obvious point?
Three rings for the Elven-kings in the sky
Come on, my PDA is already a pain to use because it's the OS is trying to be desktop Windows on a tiny machine with a bad screen and no keyboard.
:)
Hey MS, If you're gonna make the PDA entirely unusable, why not go all-out and make it run DOS or *shudder* CP/M or something even more arcane and unsuited for a PDA touch screen. Gary Killdall, where are you!?!?! There is work left to do!
Yes, I know there are DOS prompt apps for PocketPC. No, I don't want to carefully peck in letters with a stylus. Thanks anyway.
My PDA currently has a flaky touch screen that has already been replaced once. When it finally dies, I'm going to get an iPod and get smug. I hear that comes packed in those Apple factory boxes.
Sig for hire.
I took a look at the channel9 video of the Sparkle demo and was quite bowled over. The technology allows designers and developers to draw working interfaces using 2D, 3D and video as easily as one would draw some graphic objects in Illustrator or Flash today, except that the UI elements you draw are the immediately live interface elements. Not even Flash can really compare with this and OSX Cocoa's InterfaceBuilder is not anywhere near as flexible when it comes to custom elements.
.Net frameworks, thereby crippling any other implementation of .Net (Yes, Mono, I'm referring to you) and thereby getting technology chiefs to rather go with a Microsoft platform where the technology is complete and more or less guaranteed to work.
Once an element is drawn, it immediately exists as XML (XAML) and can be modified by a coder with C# data bindings. It's like InterfaceBuilder combined with Illustrator.
These animations/UI control sets can then easily either be combined with a real client application or be part of Explorer. It's very radical, with one big Caveat:
Microsoft, for all their failures learned a big lesson with ActiveX and propierty technologies: If they don't run on other platforms, as do Flash and Javascript, almost no web developers will use them as they have to cater to more than just Microsoft's platform. This is the very reason Microsoft made C# and the CLR an ECMA standard. It was an attempt to get their technology accepted as a standard that would be implemented on other platforms.
Of course Microsoft wouldn't be Microsoft if they didn't try and poison the pill by not opening their
And XAML and this WPF/E is exactly the same thing. Note that only a SUBSET of WPF will be ported to Mac and Linux. The Sparkle/Expresion/XAML technology has the ability to absolutely kill Flash as it is easier to develop for, much more extensible, and includes 3D, which doesn't exist on Flash. But Microsoft, being Microsoft, wants you to use their OS and their browser (and preferably all of their technology if they can get away with it.) The subset of WPF will only be bait to get people to move to Vista and IE where the implementation is complete.
What is even worse is that Microsoft wants XAML to kill html, since a XAML document will run as is in IE. Cringely was right when he said Microsoft wants to kill the web. Microsoft does not give a damn about html standards and XAML is the reason. They want EVERYBODY to use ONLY XAML. That way they would theoretically have absolute control over the internet and the web.
It would scare me silly, but I'm pretty sure that it will only be a partial success, as web developers will carry on using technologies that are cross platform (surprise, that is what the web is for!) such as Flash and html, and client developers are hardly going to use a technology that is only a subset of what is available on Windows.
You press return to select the default (Save).
Command-D selects Don't Save.
Command-. (period) selects cancel. (The origins for which are shrouded in antiquity.)
Compared with Windows, where (depending on the whims of the developer) you might get either
Do you want to save this document before closing?
[YES] [NO] [CANCEL]
or
Are you sure you want to close this document without saving?
[YES] [NO] [CANCEL]