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X-Server with Alpha Transparency
An anonymous reader pointed us to a Java X Server that has hacked together
alpha channel transparency. Its not XF86, but its nifty. It demos (worthless but pretty) transparent windows, bizarre but pretty transparent widgets, but also the extremely wonderful and essential anti-aliased fonts that X11 continues to lack.
I need that! Does anyone know when/where/how I can get an X-Server with anti aliased fonts? Small font sizes in netscape are almost impossible to read. :(
Whether or not Berlin ever becomes the replacement windowing system, it's pretty cool that MacOS X and now X11 are getting neat toys from them. What'll they come up with next, I wonder?
TO BUY A NEW CAR WOULD MAKE YOU SEXUALLY ATTRACTIVE.
Will xf86 have this kind of alpha transperancy. Maybe some of this kode can be used in some way.
It has been statistically shown that helmets increase the risk of head injury.
Does this mean I can do Transparent work, in a Transparent IDE?
ON the Plus side. I can surf for transparent Porn at work and the boss will never catch me.
--------========+++Dont Feed The Lab Techs+++========--------
IMO , that kind of "feature" is useless to get some work done. It should be implemanted on the application level - ie only a few apps need ta have alpha channel things like the Gimp or some games. .....
The only people really interested are Hardware vendors, one more occasion to upgrade the CPU and/or the Graphic card
none Yet.
I'm just glad there's a good X-server that runs on win32... is this prog free, or do you have to pay for it?
ReadThe ReflectionEngine, a cyberpunk style n
Does this use some sort of backing-store, or does uncovering a bunch of semi-transparent windows cause expose events for every window? If the latter, it would seem like it would be very flashy when uncovering windows.
On another note, an X server written in Java sounds really gross and slow. What next -- Perl? (although that does sound kind of cool in a hackish sort of way)
--
Sometimes it's best to just let stupid people be stupid.
Anyway, This does look pretty cool, but I think the translucent images would drive me nuts over long hours. It's bad enough having to focus on sharp images much less translucent ones. If I'm going to have to sit in front of a monitor for 18+ hours a day getting K-rays shot at my eyes, I'd at least like to see what I'm looking at from a human perspecive.
This I beleive is what my dog sees when he looks at my monitor.
I glad to see this, Finally there is a decent GPL'd X-Server becoming available that will run under Windows.
This will allow me to start serving X-Apps from my Linux servers to the Windows users on the network, and I can start getting them migrated to Linux apps without having to change there setup...
Granted, I would do this with VNC, but that would not provide me with seemless integration with the windows environment, ie, the Multi-window mode where each X-App has it's own window, just like local Window apps...
WiredX.net is an ASP which provides pure JavaTM X Window System servers. WiredX and WiredX-Lite enable access to Unix applications on your LAN from your non-Unix desktops (Windows 95/98/NT/2000) via web browsers(IE, Netscape and Mozilla). WiredX.net also provides free downloading services of restricted WiredX and WiredX-Lite to WiredX.net members.
According to the about page the service is free to all WiredX members, and membership is free... So a cool X-Server with Alpha transparency that lets you access a nix machine from the web.
The TOS (for those interested) are here.
We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars. -- Oscar Wilde
Having a bit of fun doing some comparisons between Java and C at the moment, and using my own charting program to show this, heh. (perhaps the most surprising result, to me anyway, is that GCC 2.95.2 kinda beats Microsoft's Visual C in the more complex tests, and MSVC is supposed to be really hot too...)
Since it's next to impossible to find a free (never mind open source) X-server for windows, I jumped at the chance to try WierdX! Although you can make blandishments about java being slow, it's quite comparable to Xvnc, and I find it more elegent overall. I think it's a great use of Java.
Cheers,
-OT
So... one of the problems with X is that it's slow and sluggish...so...lets write a new X server in Java...that should make it slow and sluggish squared.
Thank you.
It's a pretty cool idea to have a cross-platform X server written in Java... but last time I tried WeirdX it was unusably slow, even on a P3 500 w/ 64 MB of RAM.
Hope they worked also on that front. I know Java is not the best language when talking about GUI applications (OK, programming with Swing is cool, but it's kinda slow, even with JDK 1.3), but with jEdit at least I can get some work done.
--
Marcelo Vanzin
Marcelo Vanzin
...or did the people who wrote that page constantly switch between calling it WeirdX and WiredX?
Strange...
-- Truth goes out the door when rumor comes innuendo. -- Groucho Marx
You might try the XFree86 Font Deuglification Mini HOWTO for some help with the Netscape fonts. Although not perfect, it made quite a difference for me.
looks more like its grabbing each individual window, toning down the opacity and then displaying it. notice on the gimp screenshots how some parts of each window are a bit more opaque than others (such as the menus and labels and buttons, etc). this is because that is another window over a window and the two translucent windows over each other are causing those parts to be more opaque than each other. so, all in all, it looks like nothing more than a crazy hack. i dont think i would like having every window translucent, anyway.
--
Joshua Deere (dphase@locnet.net)
UNIX Systems Administrator, LOCNET Internet Services
jd
It seems to be the highlight feature of modern GUI's. Win2k, WinMe, X, and OS X can all do it. I wouldn't be surprised of QNX and BeOS can on the ball to implement the virtually useless "wow" feature.
-Jon
this is my sig.
You can look through a window that you are typing in and see another window. I actually find that useful. Try looking at spec file while typing the implementation! It's great! If you have to implement more than one header/package body, you can stack each implementation over it's own spec! That way, you can see each spec and implementation out at once.
NOTE: This requires a good deal of "human multitasking" capability on the part of the user, and pretty darn good eyesight.
Eh...
or use larger fonts, my friend, or use larger fonts. :)
the anti aliased fonts seem only to appear in the version that is running on the Mac, and seems to me to be a result of the system-level font smoothing in the MacOS, not the implementation of X.
correct me if i'm mistaken, but, if i'm right, the lead on this story is a little misleading.
- Entertaining Bits from the Ancient Kernel Tree
No, they don't switch between calling it WierdX and WiredX. WierdX and WiredX are two completely seperate programs. You will notice that WierdX is based on WiredX Lite, and is GPL'd. WierdX also has a multi-window mode, that WiredX apparently does not have. To get WiredX you have to sign up with the WiredX ASP service (which is currently free) while you can just download WierdX.
WierdX is a free, GPL'd, Multi-Windowed X-Server that will run on many platforms, including MicroSoft Windows. It is the only Multi-window capable X-Server that is GPL'd, or even free that I know of that runs under Windows.
was it me, or were there screenshots on wiredx.net of various window managers running inside of netscape..
sounds like what microsoft failed miserably at with ie4.
putting the entire desktop inside a web page..
---
$ su
who are you?
$ whoami
whoami: no login associated with uid 1010.
The offending pages are usually developed in Windows which assumes that screen=96dpi.
Therefore when veiwed on a Mac (OS assumes screen=72dpi) or X-windows (assumes 75dpi, usually) the text can be unreadable---and changing the "default font size" in netscape doesn't help, as the page's styles override the default.
You could set Netscape to override all pages' settings, but it messes up layout on some pages, and makes well-designed web pages go bland.
Note to Web designers: PLEASE use relative sizes ("small", "medium" etc on style sheets, or <FONT SIZE={+|-}...>) as it's the only option that works properly on all platforms. (Linux gets jaggies with percentage-specified or pixel-sized fonts, Mac and Linux get unreadable with point-sized fonts.)
You can format your pages in CSS using Ems as the unit of measurement, so that the layout remains consistent with your font size. Which is correct from the typographical point of view.
Fuck karma. I'm anonymous, fool.
I recently upgraded my system from Win/98 to Win/2000. It's a Celeron 433 with 128 meg (although, I'm not sure what the memory has to do with transparency). The system seems much snappier than it was before. As for the transparency effect, it's extremely smooth, even on a large transparency (like moving a lot of files).
Now, I'm also running a TNT graphics card. Perhaps you need a decent graphics card to get smooth performance of transparency? (that doesn't seem unreasonable...)
--
Sometimes it's best to just let stupid people be stupid.
actually, if you took the time to visit the site before posting your smut, you would see that this X server written in Java is running on both Windows 98 and Mac.
If X (do you even know what X is?), Java, and several operating systems are offtopic on slashdot, that eliminates a great deal of content.
Besides, who are you to decide what is on and off topic? You don't even post with your real name!
---
$ su
who are you?
$ whoami
whoami: no login associated with uid 1010.
Since W2K seems to support transparency, has anyone seen a transparent-window hack that makes all the windows transparent?
--
Sometimes it's best to just let stupid people be stupid.
From what it looks like, the alpha channel was controlled by an xresource or some property on an ap by app basis. But they don't tell if they actually made an extension to the X protocal to implement this or if it's just a server side thing. And if it is an actual laid out protocal extension.....who's the first to make XF86 4.0 module to implement it!?
Heck, X10 (the version before X11, not the home automation system) had transparent windows.
Mind, I think the usage of the term is somewhat different. (IIRC, you couldn't draw anything on a transparent window, it was just useful for intercepting events. Gosh it's been a long time since I did X10 programming...)
-- Alastair
Or get larger eyes.
Russian Roulette? while
WeirdX is the one with the transparency hack. WiredX does NOT have this.
---
END OF LINE
Umm, I thought this might happen...
Even though the word "weird" was mentioned God-knows how many times in the article, people will insist on spelling it "wierd". You're not the only offender, but everyone out there please GET IT RIGHT!!! Surely you're not all stupid, surely you can spell one little word. But post after post, page after page, channel after chanel no-one on the internet can spell the word "weird" correctly. Godammit!
This is not a troll really. I just get frustrated...
From the site:
This screenshot is brought to us by Tarun Reddy. Thanks!! He wrote us,
So does this mean that WiredX/WeirdX will allow me to access X apps on my Mac?
That would so totally rock; it'd be a nifty short-term solution instead of installing a PPC/based Linux on my Mac. (I'd like to not have to reboot my Mac if possible...)
Really reminds me of those holographic displayes you see in movies all the time. FUNKY is all I can say
The on going problem with window decorations has
been that if they are too small, they are
difficult to click on and when they are too large,
too much screen space is wasted.
If the the window manager used relatively large
transparent borders and title bars, the problem is
solved!
ayottesoftware.com
I almost forgot the most annoying thing about MI/X - it doesn't support cut and paste from X to Windows. Happily, WeirdX does supports this both ways!
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Ok ok, I've seen one good use up there a ways on the page, but what else? Some way to eat up all those spare clock cycles I have lying around?
Similarly the transparencies in NT5 (I refuse to call it Win2k) really annoy me. The system seems soooooooooo slooooooooooooow while I wait for them to show up.
So is this one of those 'because it's there' hacks or is there some purpose in mind?
And I looked, and behold, the pokemon all spontaneously combusted.
every flippin topic that goes through slashdot there is some retard that has to say something about beowulf clusters
And every one of those has to have a reply complaining about the fact that every article has someone talking about Beowulf clusters. Damn, it's like we have a Beowulf cluseter of you people complaining about Beowulf clusters in some kind of recursive Beowulf cluster nightmare.
My other
I've been using MI/X at work, a free X server. While it was OK to use, it's rather simple in nature, and I had to play around with font configuration a lot to get it to display complex apps with any degree of readability. It also lacked cut and paste from Windows to X, really annoying.
I just tried WeirdX, and it's pretty good! The performance is OK, at least for a few windows (I'm running the recently released JDK 1.3). It supports cut & paste between X and Windows (or the mac I believe if you run it on a mac).
It also seems to be pretty configurable as well, here are some of the more useful properties you can edit (in config/props if you don't specify them on the command line):
# for specifying the size of the screen
weirdx.display.width: numeral
weirdx.display.height: numeral
# Use this for seperate Windows type windows
weirdx.windowmode: InBrowser | MultiWindow
# check out the default - that's why some graphics look funky!
weirdx.display.visual: TrueColor16 | PseudoColor8 | StaticGray8
default: PseudoColor8
# Set to yes for a a real three button mouse, otherwise you have to chord.
weirdx.display.threebutton: yes | no
default: no
# Use this to activate the alpha hack, note that happily it's off by default so you can use it for real work.
weirdx.display.background.alpha: numeral in decimal
default: 255
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
...and there is no way to make it faster because it's in java? I mean, it may be fine for windows users who believe that Unix boxes must have user interface as slow as Microsoft telnet makes them look, but for any real use X server must be fast and be capable of using graphics card's acceleration for everything that card allows to accelerate.
Contrary to the popular belief, there indeed is no God.
"you might be able to use a window manager running on a remote box but I would imagine it would not like it much."
:o)
For a lark, I tried doing this with KDE (on a P75 with 16MB RAM, and I turned up all of the eye-candy - opaque window moves, etc..) - the results were amusing... (the word "slow" doesn't begin to describe it..)
if I get bored some day I'll try it with Enlightenment
He had the decency to create an account and log in, therefore his score started at 1.
:)
No moderation involved. No anti-Microsoft bias involved. Yes, you too can have posts with a non-zero (and positive) score if you don't hide behind the Anonymous Coward log in.
Unless/until you post something stupid that gets you moderated downward, anyways. Then you can claim that your negative karma is due to the pro-Microsoft sentiment in your posts.
Sadly, I was wrong about a few of the properties:
default display is really TrueColor16, so I'm not yet sure why the colors on some images looked odd.
threebutton only toggles between supporting chording and not - the third button on my machine seems to just bring up the menu in an Xterm, and only the b1 & b2 chord seems to paste.
The alpha, while cool, really slows down the thing quite a bit!
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
...is to make the focused window solid, while all the others are translucent. The would help make it very clear which window you are working in, and looks so damned cool.
- Josh "Yoshi" Steiner
---
Xiphoid Process Records - http://xiphoidprocess.com
San Francisco based electronic music.
got drum'n'bass?
http://mp3.com/vitriolix
And my second question: Why do they want me to log in to their service? I want to see a privacy policy, thank you very much.
www.eFax.com are spammers
VNC (Virtual Network computing) is the best solution I have found yet to display X apps on my mac...
The advantage over an X server is that if the machine displaying the apps crashes (it's not to say that macs crash a lot but, ya know, it happens...) the applications are not killed on the Linux box, so you can reboot and carry on working exactly where you were.
It's also practical because you can easily launch a full KDE or GNOME environment in it.
my 0.02 euros...
X11 still has this. They're called InputOnly windows. You cannot draw anything to them. They are only rectangular areas that are useful for capturing events.
Actually X11 has even more than that. With the Shape extension (common pretty much everywhere), individual pixels of windows can be transparent. Note that this isn't "semi-transparent". It's the same as the transparency in GIF images - all on or all off.
Uhhh...and you founded Slashdot, right?
Those you just flamed did. They are (or at least were; I dunno anymore) raving Linux advocates. The site was originally *more* Linux-oriented.
Get over it. If you're looking at Slashdot, you're going to find Linux bias. If you don't like that, do what these guys did and start your own news site.
Oh, can't do that? Before you flame me, just think to yourself, "Gee, flaming back saying 'My broke ass can't do it' or 'My dumb ass can't do it' will just make me look like an asshole, so I'll shut up." There. I took care of it for you.
Considering that it is written in Java, it handled my dtwm okay. Sure it wasn't high quality, but it is great for those of us who want a freebie X-Server for their PCs. I used Mix a while back and this is this Java X-Server is actually a better effort - it even includes the source - yay!
Jumpstart the tartan drive.
The thing about Exceed is that it seems to be quite resource intensive... though it does work very well indeed, it's really overkill for the kind of X server I need on most machines. If I want a full X environment I'll boot to Linux.
Something like WeirdX is great in that if I just seend to run a few X apps I can do so with minimal impact to my system - and if other people temporarily need to run an X server I can easily install this and remove it later.
Another gripe I have (and perhaps they've solved this since I last used Exceed a year or so ago) is that an Exceed install seemed to always have a negative impact on my system in some way every time I installed it. That's totally subjective and probably not true for everyone, but it's definatley colored my opinion about Exceed to the point that I could have it installed on my machine at work for free but instead have used MI/X (free X server, see other threads) instead for over a year now and have never regretted the choice.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
The really dumb part was that the only reason I installed MI/X was so I could use a particular program for school, and that was one of the ones that MI/X can't handle...
Ah well, I'll just wait until some enterprising soul works out how to compile XFree and run it right in OS X.
What is the robbing of a bank, compared to the founding of a bank? -- Bertolt Brecht
Ever since fiddling with E-term I started thinking how nice it would be to have transluscent windows that are truly trsnsluscent (can *really* see what's under them, not just the background window image, but other windows too.) This looks pretty neat, but I wonder if it will ever be duplicated in Xfree or something like it.
Don't label something "offtopic" unless you know the topic well enough to tell what's on topic.
I could see the benefits of adjustable transparency for heads-up displays, VR apps and simulators.
;)
It would be great for gaming as well
... and I'm sure that the CPU makers would love to find apps that required more gHz of cpu
Are you using Jedit for a GUI application?
No, I use it primarily to work with servlets (and other classes I've built around them), so, a GUI builder would have no use there. jEdit works great for it, and it also helps with all other kinds of files I have to use (JavaScript, HTML, XML and so on). And its plugins are just great.
If you wanna get some serious Java Swing/GUI work done you should be using a real IDE like Visual Age or JBuilder or even Forte.
I usually start making GUI's with a "normal" editor, not a GUI Builder (exception made here for Delphi), so that I learn more about the API I'm using. I did that with Qt, and am doing it eventually (and very slowly, as the GUI applications I make at work are still in Delphi) with Swing/AWT.
The help of a GUI Builder is really welcome sometimes, although I tend to think that it sometimes ties my hands too much, and I lose some flexibility (not necessarily in the GUI part of the application). Anyway, GUI's aren't really my area of work right now.
--
Marcelo Vanzin
Marcelo Vanzin
It may not be your favorite platform, but Win2K has support now for transparent, alpha-blended windows. MS uses it a bit in the interface already, for drag-and-drop, so that you can see what you are dropping icons on top off. It works quite well, especially with a fast video card, and the API is not a bugger to use at all.
It's a very simple concept: without seams, smooth, continuous. Has nothing to do with the word "seem" or its derivatives.
Oh, and "irregardless" really is a word, by the way.
Edith Keeler Must Die
Whatever you use remotely, if it's less than 10Mbps Ethernet, you have to use some compression -- LBX or ssh X forwarding with compression. XDMCP won't be of much use over a slow line -- use ssh X11 forwarding, and it will initialize your cookies correctly.
Contrary to the popular belief, there indeed is no God.
When you watch sporting events on television, they broadcasters show the score (and other info) on the bottom edge of the screen. If you notice, most of the time this is translucent so that you can still watch the game. If the boxes near the bottom were opaque, you would quickly notice the difference since your view would be obstructed. The "user" of the TV would hate that!
So why do we put up with dialog boxes, and help windows that pop up, obscuring that exact thing which we need help for?
Once translucency/transparency are implemented in XFree, or WIndows, or whatever, UI designers will have a chance to fix this problem which we shrug off, since we, as long time computer users are so used to dealing with this problem.
Most of people don't install scalable fonts, and keep screen resolution set to 75 dpi, so all they get is smaller fonts.
Contrary to the popular belief, there indeed is no God.
from the web site:
MI/X 2.0 for Windows is available for download. Simply unzip and run setup to install MI/X 2.0. You may use MI/X 2.0 for a trial period of 15 days to determine if it suits your needs. After the trial period you will need to purchase it for $25 US
It is still free for mac though. And perhaps there is an older version that is free, but the one from their home site is not.
--Scott
When I first saw that effect I thought I had found one of our 65k bugs. Then of course I realized it was a real feature. It is a rather neat effect, maybe one GNOME or KDE can impliment sometime.
I'm a loner Dottie, a Rebel.
Perl Window Manager
OKay, so I know it's mostly dead, but there is one.
Does anyboyd have information on configuring X, to allow remote access with XDMCP?
Well, as a random data point, I typically use it to watch TV while I code.
I've done database work where I would have loved to have the relevant portions of the schema diagram show up behind my code. (Alas, I was forced into Win95 at that job. Don't ask what the joke of a database was.)
Network diagrams behind the firewall logfiles you're analyzing, perhaps? Never tried that one, but I could see it happen.
Etc, etc. I can't generally read text behind text, but using a graphic behind a text has many practical uses.
Hi,
I've recently had very good success with Xmanager (http://www.xmanager.com) as a stable/fast X-Server under Win 32 (98/NT). Yes, it's commercial ($62 single user, quickly going down with volume) but if you're forced to use Windows as your desktop it makes life more bearable.
regards,
Heiko
When I started at the university we had 21 inch B&W (grayscale) monitors. It were sufficient for browsing with Netscape 1.0 and Mosaic, reading mail and get a lot of real work done. Why would anyone want colour monitors? Our B&W's were excellent quality. The point being,- never restrict oneself because of the inability to see the usage. Somebody WILL eventually usually find good use to things that we didn't think of, so let's encourage things (such as transparency) instead of questioning the relevance of it. I know you weren't exactly DIScouraging, only asking, but a lot of posts on this site ask the same question.
I made some remarks, stating that the original
poster didn't have a clue, concerning OO-programming.
OO is _not_ directly connected to not being compiled. (Although java sortof is).
I also made a comment about java being an interpreted language, and that this was a problem.
Is this _really_ worth a minus one, redundant?
I'm disappointed by this. As a former javaprogrammer, still enjoying the language, I feel it is fair to state that having it as a
compiled language would make it much more usable
as a generic programming language.
The native-compilers that exist for Linux seem
promising, but not at all finished yet.
One use of transparency is in the Air Traffic control industry. A military flight will be detailed as transparent as the Civilian controller wants to know it is there _all_ of the time, but also wants to be able see the civilian aircraft he is meant to be directing.
An Eye for an Eye will make the whole world blind - Gandhi
So it might be interesting to have a look at their developers mailing lists.
I am developing JSP's, and I have to have a browser window, telnet session with JSP source, and telnet session for a 'tail -f' on the JSP engine's logfile open at all times...sometimes another for a sqlplus session, as well. I already stretch the logfile window and make it borderless, but I'd like to make it behave as a background, more or less...one that I could see "beneath" the other windows.
One of the reasons that I became a lawyer was to avoid ever having to hire one. -SPYvSPY
This may be a naive question, but I'm wondering if it is valid to license a java application under the GPL if it uses Sun's libraries, which are licensed under SCSL. Looking on the GNU web site, they have java packages available under the GPL but I believe these use the Kaffe libraries, not Sun's. Kaffe does not include that many Java2 features yet, however.
I'm asking because I develop free software(tm) for the java2 platform and would like to release under the GPL, but have so far stuck with the LGPL.
-OT
then again, two kiddies who can't seem to let this childish point go is the worst...
Too bad GNOME/KDE are implemented on X11, which doesn't do this natively.
Seriously, folks, GNOME and KDE run on top of X11R6. X11R6 is the windowing system. KDE is not a windowing system. GNOME is not a windowing system.
You might try XDPC also--it acts as a proxy for the X protocol, and not only compresses the stream, but also strips out redundant X resources (one could call my last statement redundant, since stripping out redundant data is a function of compression. ;^)
Thank you for reading the original post. This is a story ABOUT WeirdX! :^P
Stating on Slashdot that I like cheese since 1997.