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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."
No linux?
D'oh! I'm on Linux... *snaps* dang.
When you're afraid to download music illegally in your own home, then the terrorists have won!
When WPF/E becomes available, it will be in the form of an Active X control that can be embedded in applications or as browser plug-in.
Yep. Because we all know and love the concept of ActiveX.
Honesty may be the best policy, but by process of elimination, dishonesty is the second best policy.
I have a XP machine, a Windows Server & a Mac Mini on my desk - I don't see how exactly the Mac interface is better.
I find the Windows Interface better because I am more used to it. I am sure someone who is more used to the Mac will find that interface better.
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?
Don't they have anything better to do, like finishing (Hasta La) Vista? ActiveX is the biggest problem on windows. And now they think they can make it cross plattform by using an ActiveX component for a browser plugin?
If it was the first of April it would be interesting...
ActiveX on Mac IE? Has never worked. How about on Linux? Nobody wants that. Why are people using Firefox, well for one it doesn't have ActiveX support! (Okay there is an addon, but almost nobody is using it...)
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
blakespot
-- Heisenberg may have slept here.
iPod Hacks.com
I saw the announcement and a demo on the PDC (well, live through the internet that is). Anyway, the idea of WPF/E (Windows Presentation Foundation/Everywhere) is to be able to deliver apps using the WPF (codenamed "Avalon") API using JavaScript. So any OS capable running JS will be able to run those apps... whether it's a smartphone, MAC OS X or Linux...
Google's most exciting technologies are built on AJAX, for cross-platform, web-based, highly responsive user interfaces. This sounds like a bid to beat them at their own game, or force them into irrelivence by making their own technology dominant.
Of course, I wouldn't really believe that they were willing to deliver cross-platform apps. Steve Ballmer just wants to murder Google, and once that's done, they'll abandon the technology.
What I want to know is when they'll separate the virus, bug and backdoor bits of windows into layers, so I can use them on other platforms.
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.
The question, for me anyway, would be whether or not this will allow users to use a different interface than the Microsoft-standard one.
The main reason I don't use Windows is that the GUI for it is incredibly annoying and unintuitive to me. If I could run something like Windowmaker on top of the Vista kernel, that would get me to buy my first Windows machine in years.
(Not that anyone gives a shit what I think, but hell, I just woke up and I'm feeling chatty.)
--saint
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.
So now Mac users can look forward to combo boxes, tab sets that flip around as you click them, and a start menu that eats half the screen just to choose a program...
"Win treats sysadmins better than users. Mac treats users better than sysadmins. Linux treats everyone like sysadmins."
The article makes clear that this is vaporware. Microsoft haven't got further than "scoping this out" and in any case it won't be part of the first Vista release. Besides, it could be a few years before someone works out how to stuff a 6800GT into a Nokia cellphone.
... the borg is stirring ... the mere threat of Vistarizing your watch, phone, toaster, camera, alarm clock, yay, the great globe itself, with dinky beeping sounds, natty symbols and rich interactive content from doubleclick.net ... I surrender, master.
Unless
Las qué passoun
tournoun pas maï
The problem is, is that microsoft still doesn't look like they've added any real functionality. Why can't I add anotherpanel, along the left side of my screen. With the number of quicklaunch and tray Icon's it would be nice to have those easily accesible, without being crowded and small at the bottom, half of them hidden becuase they don't have the room. Still just one start menu, with all your programs stuck under 1 menu. Where you either have everything in 1 folder, and it's impossible to find anything, or you have organzied everything, and have to click through 4 levels just to get to the program you want. Also, when are they going to have multiple desktops. Like they've had in linux/unix forever. The most powerful interface is one that can be highly customized, so it can work the way I want it to. Windows just doesn't seem to realize this at all.
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
Microsoft doesn't know shyte about UI design.
I hope they stay the fuck away from the Mac, and if they still want to do stuff on the platform, they'd better comply 100% to the native UI, using native widgets and native APIs (Cocoa, or go to hell).
Contrary to popular belief, there is not one single MS app that is crucial for the Mac.
Reading the posts in this article make me realize that the community of Slashdot is very rapidly deteriorating. I've been reading and posting to Slashdot for many years (under another much older ID).
It seems that very recently, a lot of the good, throughtful regular posters are gone, and now we're left with nothing but "M$ sucks, so I don't care." trolls and Linux fanboys.
Now I know that Slashdot has always been a haven for Linux zealots and anti-MS zealots, but that's always been tempered with thoughtful posts, too, that weren't so A. Rabid and B. Clueless.
What I'm wondering is if anybody else has noticed, or if I'm just imagining things. Now, I know a lot of people were talking about giving up on Slashdot in the past few months because the editors have been doing such a terrible job (really bad articles, multiple, multiple dupes, not even correct spelling)... so I'm wondering if a lot of those people really *have* given up and left Slashdot. I'm starting to realize that I'm less inclined to hang out here now, and I've been coming here since... oh, about 1998. If so, where's the next real place for geeks to hang out, as opposed to *just* the anti-MS kids, although I know there will be *some* of that in any geek community?
Or is this all just in my head?
I don't respond to AC's.
Believe it or not, my guess is that ms is getting the grip of multiplatform computing being the future. Their vision is growing beyond multiple versions of windows for different hardware platforms. The os market is getting more diverse every day, and ms will focus application development in the future.
Let a few years go by and you will see ms targeting all major os platforms with most of their product line, which will include linux next to apple...
By the way, most ActiveX comments are superfluos, as any foreign implementation of the technology is bound to be a nearly full reimplementation.
Microsoft has developed some software for other os in the past and those products have been little surprisingly way better than their windows equivalents... (think internet explorer or the unix frontpage extensions)
This is the kind of garbage which the $100 million in marketing is going to buy. It's amazing that ringtones, skins and wallpapers can be a successful part of a marketing strategy which will further entrench monopoly and strip computer owners of autonomy with their own data and hardware.
[
MS tried this before on the mac.
It was a dismal failure
MS Word 6.x on the Macintosh worked, but was heavily bloated, slow, and did not at all fit in with the way the mac worked.
Why? It used a subset of the Windows GUI. It didn't use Macintosh gui calls and was not only weighed down by using an untested (compared to windows gui elements on windows, which has the benefit of being used by hundreds of apps and debugged over time) gui, but worked opposite to how good macintosh apps should work.
It was regarded as a failure even at the time and many people stuck with Word 5.1
I really hate the use of the word 'rich' in "...which provides the rich front end for Vista." Completely meaningless term that is the kind of 'ad-speak' used by marketing people. The only thing rich about Vista are its creators.
Also, having and operating system that uses shorter names for standard system directories. In linux I can go to ~, or the more verbose, /home/username. In windows, it's c:\Documents and settings\username\My Documents, where they seem to want to store just about everything, including non-documents. in Linux, my settings are at /etc, and other useful directories include /var, /usr, /root, /boot, and others. In windows it's always /windows/system32 (where's my system64), /program files, and lots of other really long names. All this, and they don't have tab completion by default, and it sucks even if you do enable it.
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
I think a lot of it is the Mac felt like a lot more effort was put into the usability of the GUI. Dialog boxes are a prime example, instead of something like "Save document? OK, No, Cancel" you'd get "Save document? Save, Don't Save, Cancel". So just looking at the button you were clicking would tell you exactly what was going to happen, even if you didn't read the text of the dialog box. It also used to have a very consitent look throughout, unfortunately that's not the case any more, but a lot of us have our fingers crossed for 10.5.
Also, as weird as it sounds, I feel a lot of the eye candy on the Mac serves a purpose. Windows on the Mac have little to no border around them, so the drop shadow on the active window really makes it stand out. Transparency in Terminal can let you read what's behind it and is really helpful for following instructions off of web pages. In Vista it looks like the transparency also comes with a bluring effect which reduces it to nothing but eye candy, and pretty dirty looking eye candy in my opinion (especially when you start piling windows on top of each other).
In the end I think it mostly comes down to personal preference. I had been mainly a Windows user for years after giving up on Linux on my desktop. After I got my Powerbook I can't stand using Windows machines at work anymore, they just feel clunky.
-matt
Porting the Vista gui to linux would be a step backwards for us.
Also, from the article:
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:
Its nice to have Microsoft as such a deep well for comic material.Microsoft stand to loose less business even if some of its customers migrate to Mac OS X, because the vast majority of Mac users have bought and use Microsoft Office:mac or even Microsoft Virtual PC. Targeting Mac OS X may therefore be a smart move on Microsoft.
As a matter of fact, the Microsoft Mac Business Unit is highly profitable and will bring in even more revenue as the Macintosh again is gaining market share. Because MBU has done a good job with Office on the Mac often introducing new functionality in this version, Mac users are less likely to jump ship and pick up the free OpenOffice which has a user-interface that would alienate many Mac users. Microsoft therefore has a vested interest in making sure that if a user migrates, the migration is to a platform where it is more likely the user retains a customer relationship with Microsoft.
This in stark contrast to rival open source alternative Linux, where Microsoft would loose both the operating system and potentially an Office license if a customer were to switch. It is therefore less likely that Microsoft will target Linux with their development tools.
Another thing is of course that by supporting OS X, Microsoft can claim multi-OS support, something that makes it easier to keep the US DoJ or European authorities at bay.
I blogged a longer comment on this yesterday for those interested in reading it here.
The future is in beta
>> Something in the lines of quicktime or iTunes for
>> windows, start that shit up and you basically
>> lose multitasking.
You may want to add some more RAM and move up to 8 MB..... 4 MB just doesn't cut it for a lot of applications.
Yes, I'm talking about the interface stuff from Mozilla. XUL.
If you want to write an application that runs on Windows, Linux, *BSD and Mac OS X, that utilises a common interface across all these platforms, and if you want to write it today, then use XUL.
We should all bow down to Microsoft's reinvention of the wheel.
To make the transition away from Windows easier, of course.
Man is a slave because freedom is difficult, whereas slavery is easy.
Spot on. Rich is a Marketingese word that covers a number of concepts which, in English, can variously be expressed using words like shiny, gaudy, flashy, non-standard, confusing, and, depressingly often, unreliable.
If your comment title says 'Re: Foo', I'm not likely to read it.
Microsoft "targeted" Mac OS before. Sometime in the mid-90's you could use Microsoft's development tools to build cross-platform (Win/MacOS) applications. In theory.
The reality was that the barrier to entry was very high (IIRC, you needed a specially-configured version of NT to host the tools), and you could use only a subset of the Windows APIs (sound familiar?). AFAIK, Microsoft didn't even use them to build anything significant; my recollection is that the then-current version of Office was not built with them.
So what was the point? To the extent that anybody thought about doing cross-platform development, they could be answered with the line that "if we use Microsoft's tools, we'll be able to cross-develop if and when we want to." One more reason to consider using not getting locked into Microsoft's tooling was apparently answered.
Also, the "subset" qualification meant that you could make a choice: be cross-platform, or exploit every platform feature to build the best possible application. As soon as you were sucked into the latter alternative, you were locked out of the other platform(s). (This is the approach Microsoft took with their flavor of Java.)
Finally, the non-Windows implementations of these cross-platform application were marginal at best in terms of platform guidelines on the Mac. So, if you were to go ahead and deliver on the cross-platform tools, you were guaranteed a luke-warm reception at best from the Mac community, which in turn would probably make you think twice about developing for the platform again.
That attempt to go "cross-platform" by Microsoft was so choked with booby traps that it never got off the ground. I expect the same result here, even allowing for adaptations to lessons learned.
Digital rights management.
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
Windows XP supports multiple desktops, all you need is the powertoys collection (which is free).
NT4 and 2000 also supported multiple desktops through the resource kit.
Of course, I use Ubuntu now and my roommate has a PlayStation2, so these have become irrelevant to me.
Software piracy is victimless theft.
Yeah but... does it run on linux?
My last sig was ridiculed
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.
From the screen shots that I've seen, I think windows is taking a step backwards in it's UI design. I mean, I want a toolbar that takes up less space, not more. I really can't see anyone wanting to emulate this on any platform. I know I for one wouldn't "upgrade" my version of windows 2000 to this look and feel.
2. Vista is just throwing up one Win32 window and then renders everything inside on its own. If ported to another platform, it would just render the whole thing in the native environment of that platform instead, kind of like Swing in Java.
3. If you don't know the difference between Win32 USER/GDI and MFC, I can understand what a pain it must have been to use it without seeing what was going on.
This isn't about porting the Windows look and feel to other platforms at all. It's about Microsoft trying to replace HTML for the UI of Web-based apps with something they can control.
Those of you who grew up taking the web for granted may not realize this, but HTML and the Web were designed to create hyper-text documents, not apps. Thus, the "HT" beginning to HTML. Making applications in pure HTML was a lot like those old Create Your Own Adventure books where you choose your way through the adventure by turning to page X to do one thing and page Y to do another.
Since the whole web architecture was designed for reading linked documents, it has had to be mutilated with all sorts of add-on technologies (many of them proprietary) in order to make web applications feasible. And still, the UI and the method for creating that UI are inferior to native apps. But, since the benefits of web app deployment are just too appealing to give up, we just keep mutating and evolving a web document system.
And that's where XAML and this announcement come in. Microsoft knows there is a huge demand for a richer web application UI (Flash, I'm looking at you!) and has decided that now is it's opportunity to take over from HTML.
However, the only way it can take over the API for the web is to make sure it is cross-platform enough for web app developers to adopt it. In other words, this is about getting web developers to choose their API (and therefore often their tools) for web development.
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.
3D-rendered desktops are a gimmick to get everyone to buy brand-new hardware to run Microsoft's new toy. Meanwhile, I'll save a ton of money by having a functional GUI that I can do things with on old hardware.
Sorry, my karma just ran over your dogma.
You can already have the Windows Vista interface on OS X. It's called Aqua.
All this, and they don't have tab completion by default, and it sucks even if you do enable it.
XP has tab completion enabled by default and works fairly well. It is not as good as *nix, but it gets the job done. 2000 does NOT have it enabled by default and once enabled completely sucks.
I'm a virgo and on Slashdot. Coincidence? Yes.
Can XUL map a video onto a 3d surface and play it in real-time while rotating that 3d surface? Can it do that with 10 videos/3d surface all at the same time, rotating around each other? Can it do that with maybe 50 lines of code or less?
Does it have a grid layout system?
As I said, KDE has had translucent menus, menu shadows, and translucent windows for years, something you STILL don't have, and won't have with Vista unless you get a top-of-the-line machine. Otherwise, you still end up with "Vista Craptic", oh, sorry, "Vista Classic".
And you are going to pay HOW MUCH for this "privilege" of being the last kid on the block to be able to do this stuff?
Your knee-jerk reaction about what Windows will have in the future compared to what we've had for years shows just how far Redmond has to go to play catch-up. And even when they include their own subscription anti-virus "solution" in Vista, it'll still be encumbered by all sorts of licensing issues. Like if your mb goes, you won't be able to recover all your data on your main partition if you were suckered into "trusted computing". And you'll have to buy another copy of the OS, since it was keyed to the hardware. Windows User == Sucker. That hasn't changed in a decade.
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.
Win98 didn't support multiple sound streams simultaneously. If you had that functionality, it's because you had a sound card such as the SoundBlaster Live that had hardware support for it.
Win2k, otoh, could do it in software.
[ 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.]
... 1987? almost 20 years ago. It bombed, but not for technical reasons (other than the performance of hardware at the time). It is nice to see the idea is coming back, but it is hardly an innovation. And Sun's version ran over the network too.
I won't tell you that Adobe and Apple did it years ago, but Sun did with their NeWS window system back in, lets see,
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]
afaik, the X Windows System is not frozen in time as you seem to think. Far from it, cool and exciting modular technologies either building up on it or adding value are coming. Check it out:
r
http://www.freedesktop.org/
http://xorg.freedesktop.org/wiki/
http://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Software_2fXserve
http://cairographics.org/introduction
Cairo, a 2D vector-based GUI backend. GTK2.8 is already built on cairo. BTW, GTK ( along with Mozilla's XUL ) also pionneered the on-the-fly translation of an xml-based document describing a GUI into a running GUI, via libglade.
I don't think the next generation of either KDE or GNOME will be taking a beating from either M$ or Apple.
As for graphics acceleration, that's outside the reach of most open-source projects, since the main hardware manufacturers do not undisclose the specifications and only provide proprietary closed-source drivers... the usual solution is to use OpenGL.
I don't feel like it...
(I know this whole thread is kinda trollish, so don't take this comment too personally.)
:-)
.qtz. Yay.
... you guessed it ... cross-platform. Just like Avalon will be marginally cross-platform or cross-platform in name only.
You could do this with Quartz Composer writing no lines of code.
Create the eyecandy swirling cubes with whatever resources you want (let's say quicktime movies mapped to the surfaces of the buttons). We'll add in keyboard and mouse hooks. We'll save the composition, launch Interface Builder. Put the composition on a window and save the nib. We'll open Xcode, start a new project, load up the resources. Save it. and then build it. We've written no code. To further the exercise -- we'll start writing code on the mouse and keyboard events from the
QC doesn't use a grid, it uses a coordinate space. Interface Builder can (of course) use a grid.
I don't know if I want spinning-movie-buttons, but if you did, you could have had them the day Tiger came out.
Finally, I know you were talking about (trashing) XUL, so this is mostly off-topic. I think it concievable to bind Quartz with XUL/chrome, but no one is doing it because it won't be
Full disclosure: I am largely platform agnostic. I use Windows and Debian frequently and OS X regularly. I don't like a lot of things Microsoft do. I have never bought a Wintel from a single source vendor. I donate to the EFF. You may see contradictions here. Cheers.
Read Heinlein's 1953 Revolt in 2100, now more than ever.
Sigh. You once again prove you know nothing. .NET is an intermediate bytecode language, virtual machine, and library of functionality. It's not being scrapped, and in fact is at the core of Microsoft's strategy going forward (the upcoming .NET 2.0 version is at the core of products like SQL Server 2005 and Vista). What you meant to say is that Microsoft plans to eventually scrap GDI (the native drawing library used by win32 conotrols) and Winforms (the .NET library that wraps win32) in favor of WPF (the device-independent vector-based drawing framework this article is about). WPF is a portion of WinFX (which also includes the Windows Communication Foundation, formerly known as Indigo, among other new bits), and it's all predicated upon .NET. So Microsoft is scrapping .NET? I don't think so!
If you think WPF is only about eye candy, you obviously haven't done your homework. As far as "fixing the suckage", the NT kernel that all Windows versions have been based on since 2000 is a very robust system. "Suckage" comes in several forms, but none of it falls to the kernel level:
Then again, it's okay for OS X to be all about the eye candy, but not Windows? Hypocrisy at its finest, I guess.
"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?"
Dude. Until you get a 3D XML based programming and presentation layer that used hardware acceleration without openGL you SUCK!. Anybody who does not have a 3D XML based programming and presentation layer is going to DIE.
evil is as evil does