Why Vectors?

Barry Gervin writes:

Another cool thing about longhorn is that the UI is all vector based. So you can do things like rotate your buttons and text boxes etc. Pretty cool, not very useful. Being able to zoom in on a part of your text though and still have a pretty (not aliased) image is wonderful.

Vector graphics do look quite good (and often take up less disk space than pixel-based graphics), but they’re definitely useful for other reasons.

If you’re at the PDC, stop by the Avalon booth and check out the 200 dpi monitor we have on display. Have the person working the booth fire up a few applications for you; notice how the bitmapped graphics are either:

1. (more likely) Tiny. It turns out that 100 pixels aren’t that large on a 200dpi monitor.
2. (less likely) Jaggy. Bitmaps don’t scale well.

With vectors you don’t have this problem. Scaling doesn’t only happen for high DPI monitors. Vision-impaired users need to be able to scale UI as well.

Also, using vectors from markup enables programmatic access to your graphics. With vector graphics in Avalon, changing the fill or stroke for a rectangle is trivial. Try doing that with a bitmap.