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.
Posted by rosyna at 05:24 AM
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Rosyna,
Good read. The link to the "Introducing Longhorn" jpeg has an extra "%22" in the link which causes it to fail to load. When this is removed, the link works. Thought you'd like to know.
Posted by: MaestroJAL on January 20, 2005 1:27 PMYou are right to be skeptical about feature set and ship dates for a project as ambitious as Longhorn (or Copeland, or OS X, etc, etc). But, in defense of my enthusiastic defense of WinFS in April -- that was the most accurate info I had at the time. I just posted more thoughts on this, http://blogs.msdn.com/jmazner/archive/2005/02/01/365189.aspx
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