And I also produced a widow image (with no code) with an image well. SmileyWindow.pdf. I made the smiley image with Sketch then chose Save a Copy as From the file menu. Format was PDF. Made a new application nib in Interface Builder, added an image well (NSImageView) to the nib, dragged the PDF into the well, pressed command R (to run the nib) and printed the window. I'm not sure how you exported OmniGraffle's image though. Sketch is in /Developer/Examples/AppKit/Sketch/.

" Quartz 2D still rasterizes to the native display resolution, leaving the compositor to do bitmap scaling. This is evident in Expose - this is just scaling bitmaps."

Exposé is *only* doing scaling and repositioning, nothing else. It is not possible to do DPI-level scaling because applications that use QuickDraw would look hideous (they don't support DPI independence) and text may look really messed up as well (when using ATSUI, Text using QD will look screwed up.

However, it is true there is a bug in OS X that causes the window server to not properly interpolate the scaled window image even if it is requested, works fine for subviews though. Also Exposé does it the way it does it because it is faster. OS X doesn't have to redraw a thing neither does the GPU (except it resizes a texture to a smaller size). If it was all vector (and retained), something would have to redraw everything.

"That is indeed the plan. (Or at least it's what Microsoft is currently telling everyone is their plan. If you don't like that, tell them - the whole reason for the Longhorn preview was so people could see where Microsoft were going early enough to offer feedback before everything is set in stone.)"

Then it will fail miserably unless common GPUs get massive 2d acceleration abilities by the time longhorn is released. And with it getting pushed back as much as it is, that might be possible.

"That flies in the face of experience with 3D software. Modern 3D games have far more than 400 vector objects on screen at any given time, and they routinely achieve frame rates of 60Hz."

We aren't talking about 3D operations but 2D operations. Even on the best video card, 2D objects in 3D games look like crap. You can clearly see it in FFXI (a game I sadly cannot put down). 2D and 3D operations are a different beast both logically and by implementation. Because of these differences, I've never gotten into OpenGL. However, I would gladly eat crow if you could show me a 2D OpenGL/Direct3D application that is both pretty, scalable, and fast.

It's a photograph, so you wouldn't expect it to be. That's a piece of UI designed for showing photographs...

And anything that uses bitmap images will look horrible when the DPI of the display goes above the DPI of the image. Especially if that app uses vector art everywhere else.

No, that's why I said "it's pretty unlikely that Avalon will hardware accelerate layout." You pretty much reversed what I actually said there.

I was referring to the comment "You don't consider typography a graphics operation?"

Which I don't... cause it isn't. It requires a lot of math and a lot of cached file access. And I don't think it is wise to make the GPU the main processor of an OS which seems to be what people are ultimately suggesting as of late.

As for the QuickTime conundrum, Quartz does create surfaces for different QT formats, OpenGL, and other things that can be accelerated if it can just composite them together. You can easily notice this if you rotate a window, the surface rotates out of sync with the window and due to a bug in Panther if you take a windowed screenshot of such a window it does not compile the surfaces so they all disappear.

Yes, it is possible to rotate a bunch of windows in OS X at the same time with little to no CPU usage (if you don't code the rotate in a tight loop like I did, that is) if QE is enable. Turn it off and the computer becomes unusable.

And can you make a screenshot of longhorn (any part) that is scalable?