New Vista GUI Stuff For Devs | Rory

DigitalDud

The problem I see with this compositing technology is it creates a large problem in order to solve a very small problem. You now need entirely new display drivers throwing out the old ones that have had years to stabalize, application compatibility takes a hit especially screen readers, and you need a complex and potentially unstable system to actually do the compositing. All of these problems just to fix the issue of rare drawing artifacts and add a bit of eye candy. It doesn't seem worth it.

Hopefully Microsoft has bigger plans for DWM 2.0 and something more intuitive than the infamous Flip 3D.

kettch

DigitalDud wrote:
You now need entirely new display drivers throwing out the old ones that have had years to stabalize

The video card industry produces new cards so quickly that I don't think you can say that their drivers need time to stabilize. In 6 months there will be a whole new wave of cards, and the current "stable" drivers will be useless for them.

On the other hand, most video card manufacturers now have a unified driver architecture. It's not uncommon for the release notes of new drivers to say something like "x% increase in performance for games a, b, and c on the following cards...". So, in theory, the older cards will benefit from added stability as time goes by because there is continuous active development and refinement on that codebase as the devs squeeze out every bit of speed and efficiency they can out of the cards.

DCMonkey
Monkey see, monkey do, monkey will destroy you!

The DWM makes window dragging look great, and the Glass and Flip3D are neat looking, but I'm really dissapointed with the quality of window redrawing while resizing a window, especially for windows with client area glass like Windows Media Player. Resizing WMP on my system leaves behind an ugly black ghost of the glass area at the bottom of the window trailing behind as it attempts to keep up with the window redraw. Frankly it looks much better with the old non-composited redraw behavior..
Is this going to get fixed anytime soon or in the next version of Windows?

Jhaks

DigitalDud wrote:
The problem I see with this compositing technology is it creates a large problem in order to solve a very small problem. You now need entirely new display drivers throwing out the old ones that have had years to stabilize, application compatibility takes a hit especially screen readers, and you need a complex and potentially unstable system to actually do the compositing. All of these problems just to fix the issue of rare drawing artifacts and add a bit of eye candy. It doesn't seem worth it.

Hopefully Microsoft has bigger plans for DWM 2.0 and something more intuitive than the infamous Flip 3D.

It doesn't seem like WDM should be much more complex than the old method. In fact it should provide a more stable and robust system. I wasn't sure what you meant by screen readers but I'm guessing you mean screen capturing software. The current screen capturing software (especially video) won't work fantastically b/c it wasn't designed for WDM (athough... they never worked that well in the first place). However capturing screens of the desktop shouldn't be too hard in Vista since it's all rendered in 3D.

Using hardware accelerated graphics opens up many possibilities that are otherwise very slow or impossible to implement. Occlusion, transparency and animations are all easily done very quickly through hardware. The point is that, many computers now have decent graphics cards that are severely under utilized. With WDM and WPF the entire computer is utilized providing performance increases, and of course it provides a lot of graphical freedom for applications.

Compatibility is always an issue transitioning between technologies but it shouldn't stop new innovations from being developed. Plus these transition problems are very short lived.

PerfectPhase
"This is not war, this is pest control!" - Dalek to Cyberman

Jhaks wrote:

I wasn't sure what you meant by screen readers but I'm guessing you mean screen capturing software. The current screen capturing

He means something like 'Narrator' on XP (Accessories->Accessibility). Try using windows with your eyes closed.

dentaku

I don't know if this interview was done before or after CES but when Kam and Rory where talking about how if you're designing an control panel extension you might want to make it look exactly like the rest of the OS (something I completely agree with) but otherwise most people want to design something that looks slightly different as a form of branding or maybe they just think they can a better job themselves.

Of course you can go overboard with this but the newest Yahoo Messenger is the best example of using the new tools to make something completely unique but still functional and not too flashy.

If you haven't already, watch Jeff and Karsten's video over at on10.net
http://on10.net/Blogs/larry/yahoo-messenger-on-wpf/

Nitz Walsh

DCMonkey wrote:
The DWM makes window dragging look great, and the Glass and Flip3D are neat looking, but I'm really dissapointed with the quality of window redrawing while resizing a window, especially for windows with client area glass like Windows Media Player. Resizing WMP on my system leaves behind an ugly black ghost of the glass area at the bottom of the window trailing behind as it attempts to keep up with the window redraw. Frankly it looks much better with the old non-composited redraw behavior..
Is this going to get fixed anytime soon or in the next version of Windows?

Completely agree. I was dissapointed that the contents weren't double-buffered as they are in OSX to avoid any kind of flickering, but it's really surprising how bad it looks - WMP11 is the biggest offender.

I would hope that this is a driver issue, but MS hasn't exactly paid that much attention to the niggling details like this in the past.

MarkPerris

Nitz Walsh wrote:

DCMonkey wrote: The DWM makes window dragging look great, and the Glass and Flip3D are neat looking, but I'm really dissapointed with the quality of window redrawing while resizing a window, especially for windows with client area glass like Windows Media Player. Resizing WMP on my system leaves behind an ugly black ghost of the glass area at the bottom of the window trailing behind as it attempts to keep up with the window redraw. Frankly it looks much better with the old non-composited redraw behavior..
Is this going to get fixed anytime soon or in the next version of Windows?

Completely agree. I was dissapointed that the contents weren't double-buffered as they are in OSX to avoid any kind of flickering, but it's really surprising how bad it looks - WMP11 is the biggest offender.

I would hope that this is a driver issue, but MS hasn't exactly paid that much attention to the niggling details like this in the past.

Well, this isn't really the fault of the DWM system in Vista. Admittedly, its marginally better when running in classic mode (no black section, but still slow to resize), but the root cause seems to be the fact that if you resize WMP quickly on a fairly slow machine, it becomes apparent that the black section you're talking about is in fact the 'classic' black non-glass WMP controls, buttons and all, still being rendered in the background!

This is more a case of poor software development than anything else.

If you try resizing with a proper WPF app, such as the New York Times reader, you'll find it a much better experience, because remember that although you are running a composited desktop, inside the composited window, unless the application is WPF, it's all still GDI based rendering.

I dont think Vista ships with any WPF applications off the top of my head. In fact, for that matter, i don't think it ships with any .NET 2.0 executables either.

I think we all often forget that what we currently know as 'Vista' isn't the full picture by any means. WPF is a key part of it, an amazingly powerful platform, and is currently 99% unused, even in Vista itself. A few months down the line, we'll have DX10 graphics cards, designed with WPF in mind, accellerating even more of the WPF framework than we do now with DX9. It's going to be big, and what we've seen so far is nothing.

bluvg

Hmmm... I'll stop blaming my graphics card drivers, then! Wink Here I thought maybe I was the only one. But I do have a pretty fast machine overall, and even still, I agree--WMP looks quite bad when resizing. I've been telling people that Aero would get rid of window-tearing... guess not! Maybe it is a problem with WMP itself, but I don't think anyone cares about whose "fault" it is--they just want to see the graphics drawn properly. The resizing in WMP is definitely not a good experience.

As for WPF apps in Vista, I thought Photo Gallery is one, but I'm not sure. I agree about Yahoo's new Vista-specific Messenger, though--that looks slick! And not just in an eye-candy sense--it really does add to the experience. It's a perfect WPF showcase app... and it's rather sad that it didn't come from Microsoft. In fact, I think Nitz Walsh and I had this discussion about a year ago on Channel9--that Microsoft really needs to be the one driving the graphics ability present in the system, partly to set the standard for others, partly to show faith in their own new technology, and partly to show what the system can do. Not to slag against Microsoft, but it is a bit disappointing to watch, in this example, Yahoo do what the Windows Live Messenger team should have done first.