Longhorn is officially named “Windows Vista”

News as of this morning: Longhorn is now offically called “Windows Vista.” Here’s a video of the announcement.

For those reading the “launch time” tea leaves, this is one more sign that Longhorn…ugh I mean Windows Vista is becoming real.

I haven’t checked around yet to see what others think of the name, but I like it. In the article linked to above Greg Sullivan from Microsoft says that the name refers to the ways in which Windows Vista can bring “clarity to the world.”

To me, the first thing I think of is the updated rendering capabilities in Windows that exploit today’s graphics hardware.

Windows Vista includes the “Desktop Composition Engine” which flips the window paint problem on it’s head–shifting the burden of painting (or should I say repainting) windows from the software to the hardware which will make for much improved user experiences and enable software developers to do more. Another “view” change is focused around moving from a bitmap-centric world to a vector one. This change is also big since vectors can be scaled, rotated, munged, or whatever on the fly with amazing quality courtesy of today’s graphics hardware. The bitmap model got us to here, but a vector-based model is much needed in order to keep pushing what the user can experience.

To me, I’d single these out as the number one changes–in terms of the big-picture Windows that I’m looking forward to. In fact, if “Longhorn” had to be split into two products in order to get it out within my lifetime, I’d be quite happy with these rendering changes as the primary focus for a new version of Windows.

Now this doesn’t mean that I’m not looking forward to new UI enhancements, better indexing of files, and other user experience enhancements. I am. But these are features that can more readily evolve over time–and I expect them too–whereas structural changes to enable new performance possibilities with Windows are downright exciting and are features I’m focusing on.

And, of course, as a Tablet enthusiast I’m looking forward to other Windows Vista features that’ll make my world even better, such as faster boot times and I hope even more ink integration in Windows itself. We’ll have to see.

Anyway, I’m ready already.