MS Vista Look and Feel To Go Cross-Platform 365
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."
Will Vista just be a UI improvement over XP? (Score:3, Interesting)
Why have Vista?
cross platform for 1.5 years, then out (Score:5, Interesting)
What are they going to do, other than try to bring their DRM to Apple?
I don't get it (Score:3, Interesting)
"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?
Google (Score:3, Interesting)
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.
Other interfaces? (Score:2, Interesting)
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
Why PDAs? (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
Vista improvements (Score:3, Interesting)
The use of the word 'rich' bothers me (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Will Vista just be a UI improvement over XP? (Score:4, Interesting)
I can't wait till Visa comes out.
I deal in free computers, and even wrote a book [paladin-press.com] on the subject, and let me tell you, once Vista hits the streets, the whole world is going to be awash with perfectly good machines that I can load Linux on and then give away.
The part that's really making my mouth water is the fact that your present monitor will NOT work with Vista. This is too good to be true. At present, Big Bomb CRT monitors are just laying around like shells on the beach, free for the picking. Vista will then cause the exact same thing to happen with flat panels.
Machines with 60 gig hard drives, 2 gig CPU's, and half a gig of memory are going to become free for the taking. Load Linux on one and you've got yourself a damn fine machine, no matter how many bells, whistles, foxtails, and reflectors your next door neighbor might have on his machine.
I can't wait!!!
Re:Will Vista just be a UI improvement over XP? (Score:3, Interesting)
XP's had some updates to make it go faster, and a few other things.
The differences are pretty marginal though — if you're happy to stay with 2k, there's probably little reason to upgrade. There's one or two compatibility issues (very few) and 2k goes out of "official support" earlier than XP, but other than that, nothing serious springs to mind. I personally upgraded my last computer for ClearType, since I got a TFT monitor — however, was I in a situation where I would have to pay for the software, I'm not sure if that'd have been ample reason.
Hullo! Flash, html killer anyone? (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Re:Nonsense.... (Score:3, Interesting)
The problem is the idea that you ever wanted to install them automatically over the net. Ever. The idea was that you would trust some signed things, but it made it all too easy to fool the users or the framework into getting code that wasn't properly signed or signed by another entity than you first expected.
Firefox extensions, Netscape plugins and normal binary executables share the same problems, IF they are allowed in an unauthorized manner. The difference might seem fine, but it is quite important.
Show me how you install, for example, a Flash player in an existing system in a manner that doesn't share the same basic problems, i.e, you gotta trust the code. Java or some other system (.NET) based on code permissions solve it, but implementing Avalon on Java to achieve cross-platformness would be too much of a surprise, don't you think?
Re:Google (Score:2, Interesting)
Not being a MS fanboy or anything... I just find it funny when people make it out like MS is late in the game in terms of the new web-based app craze. MS practically invented most of the technology google use on the client side.
Re:Why contaminate? (Score:2, Interesting)
Does it have a grid layout system?
Re:No market there (Score:3, Interesting)
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.
No mouse needed (Score:4, Interesting)
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]
Re:No market there (Score:3, Interesting)
http://www.freedesktop.org/ [freedesktop.org]
http://xorg.freedesktop.org/wiki/ [freedesktop.org]
http://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Software_2fXserve
http://cairographics.org/introduction [cairographics.org]
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.
Quartz. (Score:3, Interesting)
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.