Vista and Vectors


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I remember reading how Vista is going to use vectors so that all the GUI is scalable. This will mean that very high resolution displays (which are not possible now as icons are minute etc.) will be used.

However, I don't see much evidence of this in Beta 1 (apart from the scalable image previews?)

I know Aero is going to be in beta two, but, is it still planned that this vector based, scalable GUI will be in the final version?

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Avalon, which runs the vectoredness is one of the major pillars of Vista itself. Microsoft already took away WinFS, which was a major pillar, but the bad PR would prevent it from doing it again. Anyway, from the previews of Avalon that have been released, it is coming along quite nicely. The reason so many people are being negative towards it is because there are no real applications for it right now to demonstrate it. When there are some true-blue WinVi or 3rd party products using it, you'll hear a lot more about how good it works.

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I thought the vector-based interface would be supported only by high-DPI monitors, whatever that means.

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Well I'm opening myself up for correction here, but vector-based simply means it's defined in terms of vectors and is therefore scalable to any size. It'll look great on higher resolution monitors, and scale down to lower resolution monitors. That's the beauty. I hope this happens.

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Windows would finally look right. The fonts would be clear, the windows would be detailed and precise, and ...

*slaps himself*

Not gonna happen.

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I hope the vectors has proper aliasing though, I dont see why not, seeing that all the graphics cards use AA on a core level, and that AERO already uses the pixel shaders on DX9 graphics cards, I dont see why the other graphical frameworks in vista wont use the graphics card to more advantage also.

Some people dont seem to understand the concept of vectors though, so I'll elaborate about it.

Currently icons are stored as .ico bitmaps, which is a pixel per pixel sample of the file, including an 8 bit alpha channel, allowing 256 diffrent levels of transparency.

Vectors work on a diffrent technology, remember back to highschool maths, how you drew lines with maths, Vectors is much like that, using clever maths to store the file as a series of points, and connectors for controls on the points, it can create an image, and because the image is not rendered at this stage, you can make it as large as you want before rendering it to a bitmap that the graphics card can display.

See:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bitmap

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vector_graphics

On the downside though, Vectors all have to have the information for it, so the best you can get out of an icon would be limited to the detail you put in compared to a bitmap, but because icons are rather vector like, it shoudlnt pose a problem, and overall, provide a new level of sexyness.

I'm curious though, for applications to use Avalon, would they need a bitmap icon as a standard, and then an additional Vector icon for Avalon to use, to provide backwards compatibility with previous versions of windows?

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I'm curious though, for applications to use Avalon, would they need a bitmap icon as a standard, and then an additional Vector icon for Avalon to use, to provide backwards compatibility with previous versions of windows?

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That's my guess. Right now in Vista, there's the tradition 16x16, 24x24, 32x32 and 48x48 images along with a 256x256 PNG. I would assume the PNG will eventually be replaced with a vector graphic.

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i'm really excited about this.... this vector info will seriously change the way we look at out GUI ... everything from icon .. to skinning.... makes me wonder on how impressive the skinning tools would have to be. ... ..

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A partial failure anyway, Personally I think the applications that will use it will be awesome, plus they will have standardised icons and skins, because wouldnt any application coded in .net be able to use the advanced features, and I'm sure someone will write an application to vectorise an icon.

Otherwise, the programs to skin vector programs will be something like Illustrator or flash, they'd have to be.

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