 Thursday, July 1, 2004
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Sounds like the name of a bar, no? But in fact creating an azure-hued rose has been a passion of horticulturists for centuries; now, with the aid of biotechnology, Suntory Limited has done it:
Unlike roses created by using conventional breeding technologies, the roses developed in the Suntory project have almost 100% Delphinidin in their petals, which has made new and very different blue roses possible.
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Phil Wainewright, whose blog I respect greatly, unfortunately gets it completely wrong in this post comparing Microsoft's new display technology codenamed Avalon and the long-dead IBM Microchannel bus:
It's not Office and its XML schema but Avalon, the new graphics system at the heart of the next version of Windows that directly parallels IBM's forlorn microchannel experiment... similar to the sea change that didn't occur when microchannel failed to displace the original PC architecture.
First of all, I think the analogy is really stretched -- an operating system display architecture and a hardware bus technology? I suppose Phil's point is that the microchannel was an attempt to forcibly evolve the market and at the same time lock it in -- when the venerable, and open, ISA bus was sufficient for the requirements of the time.
But Avalon's a very different animal. Avalon is a component of next-generation Windows (codenamed "Longhorn") and backward compatibility stands as one of Longhorn's primary goals. At the PDC last year Bill Gates demonstrated Visicalc -- an ancient (in fact the first) DOS-based spreadsheet -- running on a pre-alpha version of Longhorn. Now that's backward compatibility!
Enabling declarative user interfaces, Avalon does represent innovation in display technology; I find Phil's subtext that HTML is the end-all of UI patently absurd. Phil quotes Joel Spolsky:
So the Web user interface is about 80% there, and even without new web browsers we can probably get 95% there.
I respect Joel as well, but I think that's one of the most naive statements I've ever read. Can you do rich word processing on a web page? Spreadsheet? Photo retouching? Numerical analysis? Outlook Web Access does a pretty good job of emulating the desktop experience but after a while you long for the rich client.
Here's the point: We (the computer industry) are not done with UI. Full stop. That current interfaces are still clunky, difficult and unintuitive means that we still have lots of work to do -- that means we have to innovate. Apple knows that, and that's why they've done some great things with OS X.
Not only that, graphics code is cumbersome to write: every UI programmer knows about OnDraw() and its equivalents in other operating systems -- basically the idea is that to save memory you don't actually draw when you want to, but when the OS says it's time to redraw the contents of your window. This makes coding very hard -- but Avalon recognizes that computers generally have more memory than when the first windowing systems (X, Windows 3.x, Mac OS) came out a decade or more ago -- so we can now use concepts like "backing stores" to make graphics programming easier and developers more productive.
Will Avalon succeed? Of course, we'll have to let the market decide. But either way you'll still be able to run Visicalc.
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Jun Aug
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