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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.
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.
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+++========--------
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...)
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.
one thing you should consider is using true type fonts (works flawlessly under X). verdana ttf, renders nicely even in the tiniest of sizes. perfect for browsing the web with netscape. also the option "use my default fonts" in netscape makes thing better when browsing sites that use rediculusly small font sizes. (q3arena.com for one)
/largo
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.
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Joshua Deere (dphase@locnet.net)
UNIX Systems Administrator, LOCNET Internet Services
jd
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...
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
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 .....
Actually, many GUI applications could potentially make use of this. Think anti-aliased text, or PNG's that actually work correctly in web-browsers. You say that applications that need it should be the ones to implement it. Well what about other features of the windowing system, like line drawing? By having this in the windowing system, there's one piece of code to debug, optimize, and make hardware specific versions of. If each application has to support alpha-transparency on its own, then we'll never get to make use of hardware-based alpha-composition. Do you really want to see the day when GIMP runs better on Win32 than on Linux?
And your performance claims make no sense. Just adding alpha transparency to the windowing system doesn't mean every widget would have to use it. Widgets that don't need it wouldn't use it, or would have it as an option. There wouldn't be any significant performance degradation for widgets that don't use it. Widgets that do need it can make use of it, and less developers will need to reinvent the wheel by writing their own alpha-composition code.
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.
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.
Right now the only way to achieve something like this in X is through a hack. The Java X Server is merely a hack. Yes, things like EFM, Eterm, and the like are able to do stunning effects such as this, but in the end, it is actually faked. Until someone writes a protocol for X to allow this, we aren't going to see it. And writing an extension for alpha rendering is MUCH easier said then done.
Yes, there are a few projects going on to do this, and there have been a few projects going on for _years_ now to add this to X. Don't get your hopes up, because you aren't going to see true translucency/alpha rendering on X anytime soon.
--
Joshua Deere (dphase@locnet.net)
UNIX Systems Administrator, LOCNET Internet Services
jd
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
WeirdX is the one with the transparency hack. WiredX does NOT have this.
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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.
Open mouth, insert foot. I didn't realize that there were two distinct products, and was looking at the wrong one. Comes from trying to bang code and do research at the same time. Mod me down, boys, I deserve it...
www.eFax.com are spammers
Actually windows(2k) do support transparency. Stardock's tool only sets WS_EX_LAYERED flag I belive.
Check this page out.
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
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.
There's been some discussion about an alpha channel in X on the e-develop list for some time. Your idea of extending the xshape extension to include a 8 16 or 32 bpp alpha mask was discussed, the problem comes when a client tries to get information about their window, and their window happens to be alpha-blended in with 16 other windows... I personally think that it could be done through the xshape extension, but I'm not under any pretence that it would be easy. Nor do I know anything about X programming, otherwise I would go and do it myself.
-Ted
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.
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.
Actually, no it isn't. X is acutally simpler than most for opening up a window and drawing arbitrary pixels. What you're probably used to is a toolkit implementation of the same thing. If you actually tried to do programming in the Windows GDI interface or in raw Macintosh QuickDraw, you'd quickly agree with me. You might try gdk, the drawing kit for gtk+. It's closer to what you want.
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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