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Notes from PDC 2003 | |
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||
| Time: 00:00 EST/05:00 GMT | News Source: ActiveWin.com | Posted By: Robert Stein | ||
There seems to be a bit of confusion about some of the new technology related to Longhorn, so here are a few comments on the various technologies being shown here at PDC 2003: Avalon/Aero - Avalon is the new technology to render the ui in Longhorn and Aero is the use of Avalon to create the current interface of Windows Longhorn. There is no more separation of 2D and 3D - its now all the same. For the first time, what has traditionally been exposed to gaming developers in the form of DirectX API are exposed through .net classes to gui designers. Windows are drawn top down - information of translucent parts of windows are passed down to the windows below it and rendered together. All of the drawing and alpha blending is handed off to the GPU, so you have an interface as smooth and as fast as what you see today on macs. Longhorn is also going to vector graphics or the ui. This has obvious benefits such as scaling and rendering complexity. One of the demos was a windows form with a movie in the background, slanted text and text boxes, all of it translucent with moving parts in the background. When moving windows around the machine didn't choke at all, in fact it was extremely smooth with only 1% of the processor being used. WinFX - There is not much talk about "WinFX" and from what I can tell it is simply the name for the Longhorn API. It is broken down in to interface/data/communication layers which are Avalon/WinFS/Indigo respectively. Of course the major feature of the new Longhorn programming architecture is the first deep commitment to a service oriented architecture. I have been to several talks on "Indigo" and the support in WinFX for services (not just "web" services) is awesome. Services from an API point of view are very similar to sockets. You listen on one end, connect to a specific end point, and accept incoming connections. From there "messages" are sent via "channels" to "ports." Messages are SOAP messages but can be transported by any variety of means, which is transparent to the classes that utilize the service. If anyone has questions on a particular topic, post it in the comments and I'll be happy to get an answer for you and post it in an article here. | ||
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| #1 By 20 (67.9.179.51) at 10/28/2003 11:55:20 PM |
| WinFX, filled with wholesome .NET goodness and less of the Win32 unmanaged nastiness |
| #2 By 2459 (24.175.137.164) at 10/28/2003 11:58:26 PM |
|
All of the drawing and alpha blending is handed off to the GPU, so you have an interface as smooth and as fast as what you see today on macs.
There's a slight (or big, depending on the situation) difference here. Macs still handle drawing in software. Only the compositing is handled by the GPU. Longhorn would offer better performance in this area because it's all handled on the GPU, both composition and drawing. This is the major reason why there's so little CPU usage when performing complex windowing, animation, and shading routines, and you also get the benefit of the UI being aable to scale directly with the GPU's capability. The more powerful the GPU, the more that can be done without affecting performance. If done in software, you'd get a bigger hit. If anyone hasn't seen it yet, check out MSDNTV's "Lap Around Longhorn" for a small taste of Avalon. |
| #3 By 442 (65.33.160.37) at 10/29/2003 12:05:38 AM |
| Wow! Avalon and Aero sound just like what Apple developed and implemented over a yar ago for Mac OS X Jaguar. I'm using an even better version of it now in Panther. Fortunatley, I don't need to wait until 2006 to get those kind of features. |
| #4 By 20 (67.9.179.51) at 10/29/2003 12:08:31 AM |
| #3: From what I hear, Apple cheated. They can't do the morphing while also updating the window because they just take a snapshot of the window and morph the graphic, not the actual, live, rendering of the surface like Longhorn does. |
| #5 By 135 (208.186.90.91) at 10/29/2003 12:26:35 AM |
|
Please don't feed the trolls.
"Windows are drawn top down - information of translucent parts of windows are passed down to the windows below it and rendered together." When you say top down... I assume you're talking in z-order terms? That is layers drawn upon layers? "Longhorn is also going to vector graphics or the ui. This has obvious benefits such as scaling and rendering complexity." The benefit I see here is that as we go to higher and higher resolution displays, graphics that would have in the past been defined as 12 pixels high could now be defined as 1/100th screen height high, or some such. This would mean that graphics items would not get smaller as you used higher resolutions, but rather finer detailed, smoother, etc. Well depending on how you scaled things. :) Interesting... |
| #6 By 3 (62.253.128.7) at 10/29/2003 12:31:52 AM |
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#3 - No agreement here, you definatly don't have anything better than Longhorn will have in 2006, you have no reason to even think it. Wait til 2006 when there will be Longhorn and a different OS X version to compare fairly.
#4 - no really cheating, just a different way of doing something no other company had done 2 1/2 years ago, but yep that is what the MacOS does - although there are more advances coming there. #5: It all depends on what you class as usable surely, you have no say on whether it will be fully usable within a year or not as you have no idea how things will span out with Beta 1/2. |
| #7 By 3 (62.253.128.7) at 10/29/2003 4:40:08 AM |
| Another troll. I don't think judging peoples spelling in a "forum" like this one is fair, I see spelling mistakes galore from all range of users on here Windows, Mac, Linux, it makes no difference. If I was using my Mac to post here now though, the difference would be that it even now spell checks in forms like this. |
| #8 By 2332 (216.41.45.78) at 10/29/2003 12:50:07 PM |
|
I don't think anybody can deny that Mac OS X is pretty. It's easily the prettiest OS to date. I would say OS X is even pretty than what I've seen of Longhorn so far.
But people... Longhorn is an alpha! It's already technically more capable than OS X, so there is no reason to believe that the direction will be anything but towards "prettier". I'm sure during that same time, Mac OS X will improve as well. But the pretty-factor is just one part of how cool Longhorn is. XAML is huge. Indigo is huge. The people who are really excited right now aren't users - they're developers. How many of you have written applications for OS X that look as pretty as OS X? I haven't really seen any. Why? Because it's really hard. Mac OS X's APIs are not easy by any standard... objective C is for the birds, thank you very much. The big difference I'll expect to see between OS X and Longhorn isn't so much how pretty the OS is, but how easy it is to develop applications that are just as pretty. It's clear that it will be almost trivial on Windows. Nobody can currently say that for the Mac, and I've seen no plans to revamp the Mac programming model to make development easier. In summary, the real reason Longhorn looks like it will be better is WinFX+Indigo... not cool graphics in the OS. This post was edited by RMD on Wednesday, October 29, 2003 at 12:52. |
| #9 By 3 (62.253.128.7) at 10/29/2003 1:01:56 PM |
|
Same here #11 - seems ridiculous to compare Longhorn to Panther and vice versa considering Panther will likely be two versions out of date by the time Longhorn comes around.
#12 - judging your friends view on every mac user is a bit narrowminded - anyone who judges an OS on just visuals is pretty dumb, the funny part though is all of the people in comments across the net over the last few days who are Windows users - doing exactly that for Aero. On either side of the fence it's pretty stupid. This post was edited by Byron_Hinson[AW] on Wednesday, October 29, 2003 at 13:04. |
| #10 By 3339 (64.160.58.135) at 10/29/2003 1:15:09 PM |
|
"How many of you have written applications for OS X that look as pretty as OS X?"
Pretty stupid question to be asking here, RMD. I can give you many references... hell, just start by reading the review of NetNewsWire. Simple, elegant, advanced -- easily considered one of the best RSS readers on any platform. Built quickly and easily with Cocoa by a small developer. And I could name many, many more. Just because you don't want to learn a new model doesn't make Cocoa (or Carbon programming for that matter) difficult. By most objective standards, it is one of the more rapid and simple programming models to use. This post was edited by sodajerk on Wednesday, October 29, 2003 at 13:18. |
| #11 By 2332 (216.41.45.78) at 10/29/2003 4:25:27 PM |
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#15 - Pretty stupid question to be asking here, RMD. I can give you many references... hell, just start by reading the review of NetNewsWire
You've got to be kidding. NetNewsWire looks as pretty as the rest of OS X? How so? It looks like a very standard Mac application. What, exactly, do you think is pretty about it? There is a big difference between designing an application well (which has little to do with the underlying OS), and making it pretty (which has a lot to do with the underlying OS). How much OS X code have you written? Are you saying you find their APIs easy to use? How much manual compositioning have you done? How about doing straight postscript kinda stuff in your GUI? Try doing dock-style affects in your own application. It's a huge pain in the ass. If you think it's easy, then you're a lot better programmer than I am. (Which is entirely possible, but I can do a LOT of cool stuff just with the day of Longhorn exposure I've had - that says a lot.) The fact of the matter is that writing applications for the Mac has never been as easy as it has on Windows. Both platforms have their quirks, but Apple simply isn't nearly as developer friendly as Microsoft. I doubt that will change anytime soon. |
| #12 By 3339 (64.160.58.135) at 10/29/2003 4:35:34 PM |
|
Jesus, RMD, you need to explain what "making things pretty" means then. NWW has a dockling which utilizes live updates, it has an excellent toolbar implementation, it uses drawers as well as multiple panes.... So what the FCK do you mean by "it looks like a very standard Mac application"? Yes, it does. It uses every standard Mac UI widget imaginable. Didn't you ask everyone if they had ever seen a single Mac app that looks as pretty as the OS? Making it any "prettier" would require using non-Mac programming APIsand would make it look UNlike Mac OS. So, please, explain what you mean by "making it pretty" and please explain what widgets, components, etc... you think are in the underlying OS which have not been implemented by an application. What in the OS is "prettier" than what's available to apps? This post was edited by sodajerk on Wednesday, October 29, 2003 at 19:28. |
| #13 By 135 (208.186.90.91) at 10/29/2003 9:10:02 PM |
| Guys... I'm really getting bloody tired of the Mac trolls. |
| #14 By 1845 (12.209.152.69) at 10/29/2003 9:38:01 PM |
|
blue...
Keep in mind that in the last six days we've seen more innovation from Microsoft than we've seen from Apple in the last six years. This is an act of desperation. I am so looking forward to Revolutions next week. |
| #15 By 1845 (12.209.152.69) at 10/29/2003 9:42:10 PM |
|
"How many of you have written applications for OS X that look as pretty as OS X?"
Pretty stupid question to be asking here, RMD. Considering this is a Windows news site, I don't see why such a quesiton is so foolish. I've been doing Windows dev for a number of years now, but I've done no mac dev. I imagine most developers on this site fall into a similar category. Since developers aren't the only folks visiting the site, the number of folks who have dev'ed OS X apps as a percentage of the whole is even smaller. I suppose we also must then consider the number of devs who have dev'ed OS X apps as pretty as OS X itself. Seems like a perfectly good question to me. |
| #16 By 2332 (65.221.182.2) at 10/29/2003 10:33:30 PM |
|
#19 - you need to explain what "making things pretty" means then
The most impressive graphics in Mac OS X are the compositioning it does for animated affects. The dock is a good example, as is the "genie" effect when you minimize an application into the dock. To implement these affects in your applications, you need to code directly against the compositioning APIs in Mac OS X. Specifically, you need to use the Quartz library. If you've ever used Quartz, you'll know it's a lot like a 2D version of DirectX. If you've ever coded with DirectX, you'll know it's a pain in the ass. In fact, for the majority of developers, it's well over their heads. (DirectX is WAY over my head, for instance.) Of course, it doesn't help all this stuff is in objective C, which while is admireable from a pure computer science perspective (it's far more "object oriented" than C++, for instance), it sucks from a productivity point of view. What I'm saying is that Longhorn looks like it will make extremely complex graphics affects available to anybody and everybody to use in their WinFX applications. WinFX is the real story here, not Aero. |
| #17 By 3465 (65.222.179.211) at 10/30/2003 9:05:56 AM |
| Longhorn's gui looks a bad submission from themexp.org! lol. |
| #18 By 1845 (12.209.152.69) at 10/30/2003 3:45:09 PM |
| You sure it's FUD? The folks at @stake and CNet don't think so. Now, if Russ Cooper had said it, then I'd probably agree with you. |
| #19 By 135 (209.180.28.6) at 10/30/2003 3:54:17 PM |
|
zelet - "Stop spreading FUD "
Your accusation would have more credibility if you weren't guilty of it yourself. |
| #20 By 3 (62.253.128.7) at 10/30/2003 5:17:03 PM |
| For once I'll backup the moaners and ones who usually talk rubbish about other OS's - the security problems that Apple haven't currently fixed for older OS X systems was already fixed in Panther's original release...i.e - it wasn't the security patch that came out for panther the other day people are complaining about which WAS for 10.3 only and didn't affect other systems. |
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