Re: XAML is good, but the threat is Avalon

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Re: XAML is good, but the threat is Avalon
by Benjamin. on Friday 26/Mar/2004, @16:36

Bahh. Eye candy??

I need scaling and rotation on every-day widgets for my real-world safety-related and well-established work-related problem area. If you can't scale interactive diagrams that describe the state of your power station you don't get out of the starting blocks. Don't try and tell me that it's just eye-candy.

Then go and look at Max OSX. A few minutes of using that and you'll be saying "I wish my user interface was as engaging as this for average users". While low-eyecandy GUIs are good and important in many areas, you can't say that having a toolkit that simply can't do it is a competitive advantage.

Unix used to look crappy? Yes. Five years ago you always knew whether you were running a UNIX app. If we're still where we are now in five years (assuming the longhorn ship date slips a few...) you'll again know you're running a UNIX app. There are places where the toolkits just have to be able to keep up.

Take a look at this video: http://msdn.microsoft.com/msdntv/episode.aspx?xml=episodes/en/20031028LHORNDB/manifest.xml
When QT/Kde can do that in about as many lines of code we'll be back on track.

For those without broadband, the video shows Avalon with a video playing in the background with transparent buttons and text boxes sitting on-top, rotated, and scaled to a size appropriate for the monitor. This is done by embedding the widgets (and some in-line text) in a text-flow layout, which in turn sits within a transform layout, which sits alongside the video playing in the same position within a canvas.

QT needs to adapt to be able to put everything in a canvas. There can't be any concept of a canvas item that is different from a regular widget. That, at least, needs to be done before Longhorn's release. If we ignore what is possible on other platforms we limit ourselves in where we can go with what we have.

Benjamin.

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Re: XAML is good, but the threat is Avalon
by Paul Eggleton on Friday 26/Mar/2004, @21:30

Eh? Being able to scale an interactive diagram has nothing to do with the widget set used for standard applications. I would be very surprised if you could build such an interface with real widgets and have it practically usable - you'd be much better off writing a custom widget, just like you would now. These kind of special purpose diagramming applications have been built for years, without any of the things that Microsoft is proposing.

I'm not suggesting that some of these things aren't nice, but if you think they are absolutely necessary right now (and for mission-critical applications no less!) then I think you've been letting Microsoft whisper into your ear too long.

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Re: XAML is good, but the threat is Avalon
by anonymous anonymous on Saturday 27/Mar/2004, @23:22

> When QT/Kde can do that in about as many lines of code we'll be back on track.

Hmm.. He is obviously trying to turn some peoples' anger up.
Its Qt/KDE not QT/Kde.

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