ArsTechnica reviews OS X 10.4

[Xon]

What about CoreImage? (note, asking a question, not arguing- I knew Quartz Extreme wasn't as good as Avalon, but that was obvious since QE was released oh three years ago...)

Havent got a clue.

But by googling arstechnica, CoreImage looks very similar to DirectShow filters except they either get offloaded to the GPU or converted into vectorized code chucks for cards without a good enough GPU.

DirectShow has support for similar stuff, not it really isnt well known at all.

But I couldnt find much more infor beyond that. It doesnt looke like it address the problem of Apple's approch handles a window as a textureed flat polygon, and Avalon's scene graph style.

But without doing a ton more reading I could be sprouting shit for all I know. And that extra reading I'm not going todo at 11:30pm

[Durandal]

There is the biggest difference between Quartz 2D Extreme & Avalon. As it stands, the with Quartz, the composing engine treats each window as a flat, textured polygon.

With Avalon the each window is a scene graph. Avalon can rescale/skin/move elements on a window on the fly without any required help from the application.

A trivial example would be some managed code which you inject into an Avalon markup file which causes the GUI elements to run away from the cursor or something stupid like that.

How exactly does this change my point that Microsoft would love for Quartz to be as widely-adopted as Avalon?

What about CoreImage? (note, asking a question, not arguing- I knew Quartz Extreme wasn't as good as Avalon, but that was obvious since QE was released oh three years ago...)

<sigh>

CoreImage has nothing to do with drawing the user interface. It will not speed up any UI tasks except tasks which programmers specifically use for it.

But by googling arstechnica, CoreImage looks very similar to DirectShow filters except they either get offloaded to the GPU or converted into vectorized code chucks for cards without a good enough GPU.

CoreImage is essentially a high-level abstraction of ARB_fragment_program. You specify what you want done with the pixels and CoreImage finds the fastest way to make it happen. You basically use the CIKernel language, a subset of GLSL, for per-pixel processing.

[Praxis]

Alright, sorry. From what I saw in Steve Job's keynote he was implying that CoreImage did have to do with drawing the user interface. Guess that was hype.

CoreImage IS responsible for those effects like the ripples in Dashboard and stuff, though, right?

[Xon]

How exactly does this change my point that Microsoft would love for Quartz to be as widely-adopted as Avalon?

It doesnt. I was just highlighting some differences between them.

Microsoft would probably give anything to have adoption of Avalon on the similar scale to Quartz.