Avalon briefly summarized:
"IS THIS OUR AVALON??????"
- Avalon is an entirely new rendering model baked deep into the OS. It's Flash killer, HTML disintermediator. It takes ALL of a videogame platform, baked in video and 3D and everything you'd expect in a smart, modern UI tookit system. Every trick I can think of - they have as well.
- they?ve got (what I call) multimedia personalization built-in. This means that the OS assumes that there are many kinds of end-users, each requiring their own unique layout, set of controls and capabilities. Their demo looked just like the demos we were doing for Kalieda back in 1993. But now it?s being deployed in a mainstream OS ? it only took 10 years to get here and another 2-3 to go!
- the whole dam thing is based upon Direct3D and DirectX ? so it?s rendering full res, scalable graphics and multi-plane video. This is the Nirvana of user interface systems, providing what we?ve always dreamed of!
- flow rendering is not just provided for documents (think Pagemarker or Quark) but also flow UI, docking support, sidebars, etc. Smart obejcts that do what they're supposed to do, all baked into their attributes and behaviors. They've stolen every Mac OS X trick there is - and then some.
- it all uses this language called XAML, which I'll leave to geeks like John Udell to explain - but it's got everything you wanna have. There's also an oo-file system, gobs of web services stuff, digital ID, security, the list goes on and on. There are 7,000 developers here - each session is mobbed and so are the hallways. What a scene. Symbolic that LA is burning while this is all going on.
- they've future proofed the thing, preparing for future higher res systems, Tablet PCs, Media Center scenarios, cell phones, PDAs - you name it, they support it.
- it'a all working, they're showing demos, Visual Studio tools supporting it, building apps in front of our eyes. Of course - all you need is a Longhorn SDK and.....2 years.
