Around April 12th, 2004, I made the following prediction in a forum post:

Here is a fun game to play (one people used to play when Copland was going to be released and tried to play when OS X was first released):

What features do you think will be seriously altered, removed, extended, or otherwise changed from the original "promise" for longhorn's release?

Personally I think Avalon or Indigo will be scaled back a little and pushed into Windows XP Reloaded.

I was wrong about the time since SP2 was part of the "XP Reloaded" marketing campaign and it didn't include Avalon. However, there is a "Community Preview" of Avalon available right now. It was released on January 14th, 2005 to the public and available to MSDN subscribers since November of 2004. Oh yeah, Avalon is the set of Graphics/Text APIs that are to be included in Longhorn. They basically give Windows the ability to do drawing like Quartz (with some features removed, such as 4x4 transforms on windows, and some added, like Animation support) and give developers very fine text control like ATSUI. The latter part scares me. ATSUI has been around since Mac OS 8.5 and Windows still has no released method for doing fine text control it seems. Two of the text features being billed as new to Avalon are kerning control and ligatures. Sigh. There are some slides available that detail what I am referring to (first link below the labeled text Introducing the Next Generation of Windows Presentation Services). What exactly is "The Microsoft 2003" anyways?

And as for Indigo (the networking part of Longhorn), it is supposed to be released for Windows XP and Win2k3 sometime after Whidbey (Visual Studio .NET 2005) which appears to be shaping up nicely. Although I still don't know if it has any kind of UI designer/layout app like Interface Builder. But Indigo should be released sometime near the middle to endish of this year.

As for WinFS (which in Copland like glory, I knew would be cut) will not appear in the first release of Longhorn and may not appear until the next major update after Longhorn. And for what it's worth, WinFS is Microsoft's name for a technology that groups many similar technologies from Apple into one foundation. Apple names each part like CoreData, "Spotlight", SearchKit, and the ilk. The name "WinFS" describes the features of all those as one. As I was (correctly) predicting doom for WinFS, I had all these huge Microsoft supporters telling me what an idiot idea it would be for MS to do these things. Yet it has been done. Someone even pointed me to a blog post by a Microsoft employee (Jeremy Mazner, Longhorn Technical Evangelist) that flat out says "WinFS hasn’t been cut.  WinFS hasn’t even really been scoped back." I can't help but chortle demonically as I read this. It kind of makes Apple's "Introducing Longhorn" banner at WWDC an insult to Tiger now as it will be shipping with features that were cut from Longhorn.

And for those that ask but never will, there is a huge difference between predicting whether or not something will or won't happen and determining when it will happen. I still suck at the latter.

Ah. I am blogging this from the exit gate at the SFO while waiting for boarding. Gotta love these hotspots -- otherwise I have no idea what would i do for all this hour. Thirty minutes later, I'll be on the plane, enjoying surviving my 11 hour trip to Frankfurt, then 3 hours to St. Petersburg.

MacWorld SF was very exciting. I won't go in depth with all the new things announced, as this have been covered extensively lately. I'll say just that I was dying to get an iPod shuffle, but being busy at the booth, I didn't managed to get one on the show floor on the first day, and so when I came to an Apple store on the next day, they were all sold out. Bummer. I did managed to snag a one-gigger yesterday (and it was the last last one on the store -- you should've heard some people back in line cursing at me). Will give it to the wifey!

Anyway, the show have been pretty packed/exciting for the whole time I was there. Been very busy at the booth, and had tons of interesting people to stop by and say hi (hi back at ya for all the blog readers that saw me!). Got lots of feedback, and got myself esxcited into doing more stuff. Thanks to everybody who came by and grabbed our CD too.

Anyway, probably the best show moment for me was when I finally got to wear that straightjacket and wandered around the floor being walked by Jason. The thing is pretty heavy but strangely comfy and I feel myself protected in it. =) Got really hot in it fast though, so had to take it off and rush back to the booth as we were pretty much packed for the whole time the show was running.

Anyway, off to the plane soon, so I better wrap up. I'll write more as I come home. Bye bye San Francisco!

Our predictions for MWSF: mostly cloudy with a 100% chance of rain. HAHAHA!!! :)

Anyway, step in out of the rain and come say hi to us at our booth. (#2248) And try to cut us some slack as we try to look like Real Live Software Developers at our first ever MacWorld exhibit!

We'd love to talk to our existing users and meet new people! So come talk to your favorite Unsanity geek (edited by Jason - that better be me!!!) and try to pry details of future stuff out of us. Or, if you haven't heard of us, come check out what we do - you'll like it, we promise.

Also, be sure to pick up a demo CD while you're at the booth!

See you on the show floor!

And in case you can't make it, here's a very scary picture of me (me=Jason) applying Slava's straightjacket. Click for poster-sized version.