mess with the bull and you get the horns

The next version of Windows, codenamed “Longhorn”, will hence-forth be known as Windows Vista. Some folks on the Internet have speculated that “Vista” is an acronym for Virii-Infections-Spyware-Trojans-Adware. We’ll have to see about that. Remember when software used decimal numbers to denote versions? Apple uses jungle cats and now Microsoft favours descriptive nouns.

I am intersted in what will be available via WinFX; specifically the “Avalon” API. Vista will feature some fancy UI accoutrements. Computers with weak video cards incapable of hardware acceleration won’t be able to run Vista. I see this as a good thing as it will move Windows into the same league as OS X. Apple has done this for a while and it definitely alleviated many headaches that far-reaching backwards compatibility can create. Ubiquity is the price you pay, I guess, and Microsoft has definitely benefitted. Maybe the PITA factor finally got to them. Either way, I’m wondering if the GDI is dead a new hardware-accelerated model will be used to draw everything; windows (everything is a window, really), taskbars, buttons…everything. It’ll probably use DirectX components like DirectDraw and maybe even Direct3D. So does that mean that “Avalon” is some kind of wrapper for UI programming that will mandatorily be using DirectX? This may be wild 🙂