Digital Home Thoughts: Microsoft Shows Off "Avalon" To Developers

"Although the next version of Windows is still about two years from release, Microsoft on Friday offered developers an early look at the new graphics engine that will accompany it. The Redmond, Wash.-based software powerhouse released what it calls a "community technology preview" of the Avalon presentation engine for Windows. It's not a full beta, or test, version, but rather an incomplete set of code that lets developers test certain features and pass along their thoughts to Microsoft. "It's basically a build that has a couple new features that we want to test out with customers," said John Montgomery, a director in Microsoft's developer division. "This is just our way of getting feedback."

Longhorn is still a long way off, but much excitement has been generated around its GUI, Avalon, which will dramatically transform today's Windows desktop into a whole new genre. People immediately rant that Microsoft is copying OSX's (Panther) Quartz rendering engine which is completely untrue. Where Quartz is based on Adobe's PDF standard, Avalon will be based on Direct X, and go far beyond what we see in Panther now.

It will be interesting to see what the final Longhorn graphical interface will look like. We didn't get the see Windows XP's true GUI (Luna) until the final release candidate stage. Previous beta builds of the OS included a temporary interface called "Watercolor", that was later abandoned.