Brad has been kind enough to from time to time give us a peek at what WB5 will be like running on Windows Vista, and there have been some allusions to things like "better skinning than ever before" and such, but now that a pre-release of WB5 is about to be made available and Stardock has Vista, there were a couple of things I was wondering about. My intent is to shine some light on how things will be when running Vista WITH WB5, not just Vista alone.
First, will more interface elements be fully skinnable than before? One big limitation with current skinning is that many interface elements cannot accept a texture (targa/png/bmp) and can only take a colour. A notable example of this would be the "places" buttons on the left side of "Save as" dialog boxes. WB on XP will let you apply an texture to the background of the dialog, but that texture is not painted around those sidebar buttons, only a flat colour. This is a major impediment to producing a "fully-textured" skin. Say you wanted to produce a wood skin, that showed wood everywhere. Currently, you basically have to leave some areas just a plain brown, so as not to have gaps in the texture around elements that can't take a texture. What will this situation be like under Vista+WB5?
One of the early aspirations for Avalon was that the user interface would depend less on fixed-size raster images and more on scaleable vector-based elements. Buttons, window-frames, toolbars, and fonts that wouldn't change their visual size based on what resolution the monitor was running. To what extent, if any, has this been achieved? And if Vista can support vector-based objects, how will tools like Skinstudio and Windowblinds change to accomodate this?
The vector based rendering was one of the things that really excited me early on about Avalon, but lately I have not heard much about it, which gives me a sense of foreboding...
Can someone shed some light on these issues, or anything notable that I've left out?
Cheers...