Slashdot Mirror
Alpha-Blending On KDE
PimpBot writes: "Check this story out on The Dot. The KDE team is getting some pretty sweet alpha-blending going with their latest CVS for KDE 2.1. The story has pretty eye-candy." Most of what is there is already being done within efm, but kde probably has a larger installed user base. Of course this stuff is really only with icons and images, and not fonts, which await the ubercool Xrender extension which does just that (or even cooler, the RGB Decimation for antialiasing text under X on LCD screens). Yum.
A couple months ago, slashdot linked to my site, at this page, from this slashdot article. I actually had a few emails back and forth with Rob (CmdrTaco) in the week before the link, and I asked him to avoid linking until I could get all the images over to a faster vitual hosted site, and I was still putting a lot of work into overhauling the page and writing the latest info (I had just finished a new board design for the player).
Well, the slashdot effect was indeed mighty, and my poor little site served up about 40000 hits, which appears to have been less than 1 in every 5 attempts, perhaps even less, I'll never know.
A couple people posted links to the google cached page, which was actually this older version of the project... not at all the same thing, and certainly not the one that the slashdot article was about.
So based on my real experience, a sample of one, the google cache was not only ineffective, but it did more harm than good. Rob linked to the page right after new content was posted (a common scenario of a news site), and the google cache had an older (totally different) version that led many readers to find material older, but similar enough that they could not tell the difference.
PJRC: Electronic Projects, 8051 Microcontroller Tools
Funny, it (KDE2 standard install) runs pretty fast on my old crufty S3 ViRGe DX (4MB) at 1024-16. Zooms on the G200, but quite a bit faster than Gnome on the S3...
--
"It's tough to be bilingual when you get hit in the head."
One place I worked at was so cheap that I had NT on a 486 DX2/66 with 64MB RAM. It took 15 minutes to boot up, Word took a couple of minutes to come up, and it was barely usable for anything other than a mainframe session. I think you're talking complete crap somehow.
Well if it's difficult for a multi-billion dollar corporation like Microsoft to do anything fresh, I don't feel it reflects too badly on the KDE people to make baby improvements over the windows interface. But somehow deep down I can't help feeling that the desktop metaphor is just a local maximum with respect to what could be done. It just isn't elegant. Example: Why does the desktop metaphor need a "show desktop" feature? Sure it makes it more usable, but surely there's a way to present things so that kind of quirk just isn't possible.
Oh well, so far, it appears not.
Every post CmdrTaco does about KDE is riddled with excuses ("Most of what is there is already being done within efm...", "Of course this stuff is really only with icons and images, and not fonts...").
Well lookie here!.
--
"Oppression and harassment is a small price to pay to live in the land of the free." -- Montgomery Burns.
Luckily this doesn't mean that it can't be innovative. KDE (and Gnome) have many features that Windows doesn't, particularly in the area of customization, and I think those differences will give it a leg up eventually. Unfortunately, in order to get into the homes of the average user, it is going to have to offer them an interface that they can recognize, something that looks like Windows.
one must give credit to microsoft. Their interfaces are easy to use and make quite a bit of sense. They dont spend millions of dollars in research for nothing. Every car has a steering wheel. They all look basically the same. Why? Because it's a good idea. Just because MS put it in doesnt mean its immediately evil..geez some zealots on here cant see beyond their own ass...
-
I don't know. Embedded Qt has some merit (it does alpha blending as well!) and Berlin is always there. But seriously, I see Linux and I am happy. I see X, and I reboot into BeOS.
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
"If I'm wrong, and the [MS] guys have managed to make [GDI] jump through a hoop that high, kudos to
them." - George Hoffman, Be Inc.
(Paraphrased, replace MS with E, and GDI with X)
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
Cool. Now I can have a desktop with anti-aliased fonts, alpha blended icons, and long uptimes. Who would've thunk it.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
See Steve Gibson's comments at his Web site about this. (Sorry, too lazy to give an exact URL.) He debunks M$ quite effectively (and has some quite nice examples, which I'd love to see on a laptop).
No, he doesn't.
See Ron Feigenblatt's website for a more balanced (and informed) view on this.
And here's what ClearType is from the Microsoft Research team:
Brief overview
IEEE paper on the technology
Paper for the Society for Information Display Symposium
Try reading those. Gibson literally does not know what he's talking about here. For a start, what the Apple II does is NOT sub-pixel rendering. It's not even pixel-color splitting, as all the color splitting occurs in the NTSC signal, not at the phosphor level (you'll see more than one green phosphor per green pixel).
Simon
Coming soon - pyrogyra
Why is it that when Apple uses alpha effects in Mac OS X it's "a waste of CPU power" but when KDE uses alpha effect it's "pretty sweet"?
Can anyone get a mirron with some JPG files instead? Thanks.
- I don't care if they globalize against free speech. All my best free thoughts are done in my head.
But it seems to me that this 'RGB decimation', although cool, is the exact same thing, but a different approach, to MS ClearType (tm?).
NOt that MS deserves the credit.. but the point is.. isn't this technically a patented MS technology? or is it only the end result that is the same, and the process is quite different.
Umm, MS didn't beat anyone to the punch. 1) MS doesn't have REAL alpha blending (and neither will KDE) like OS X does. In these GUIs, the translucency effect only lasts as long as the object the transparant window is over doesn't change. After that it breaks down. Its nothing that cool, BeOS, QNX, and even E has had it for a long time. 2) X still doesn't support anti-aliasing, and its not an easy thing to implement. X has a major problem in that its designers left the door totally wide open for different GUIs, but decided to keep the rendering protocol hard to extend. As such, it thinks that all fonts are monochrome bitmaps. It took a ton of work to get X to do TrueType, and anti-aliasing, which needs to blend the text with the window underneath will also be a ton of work. Its great that it is so far along now, but I can guarentee it wasn't easy. Its a nifty effect, but it is not easy to implement, (since it changes the rendering model significantly) and everyone except X has had it for a while now.
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
You make a good point, but these screenshots weren't meant to accompany a press release. This functionality was added in the last week and the pictures were generated in the course of discussion between developers. (See this thread.) I doubt if they were intended to be seen by such a large audience.
You just have an alpha components in addition to Red, Green, Blue components that indicates % transparency. So given two overlapping pixels RGBA-1 and RGBA-2, the new pixel is calculated at:
R = R1 * A1 + R2 * A2
G = G1 * A1 + G2 * A2
B = B1 * A1 + B2 * A2
A = A1 + A2
If you're using floats to show intensity, anything results greater than one equals one, with ints anything greater than 255 is 255.
Some people go the other way where 0 Alpha is opaque, so you'd substitute A with (1 - A).
It's really no big deal, just eats clock cycles.
Trolls throughout history:
Jonathan Swift
It's sad that X is so far behind though. One one hand you have OS-X and its fully anti-aliased, alpha-blended primative model, and X is struggling to get anti-aliased fonts to work. I don't care what the sysadmins and UNIX grognards say, X is holding Linux back.
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
Ok, I know I should let this silly thread die, but I'm a sucker for trolls...
That's very much a matter of opionion. Linux is easier for me, I have lots of friends who find MacOS easier. In any case, you haven't established that "ease-of-use" == "success". If that were true then Windows 3.0 would never have made it against MacOS.
Two reasons: 1)for most hackers ease of use for the end user has absolutely nothing to do with success; 2)the folks who do care about ease-of-use haven't been at it very long. Considering how young the products are, they're doing extremely well.
And what do the stock market valuations of Linux "dot-coms" have to do with anything? Most of them had no possible hope of making money to begin with. A few (RedHat & VA for example) do have real business plans and will become profitable companies. But this does nothing to change the fact that well established, profitable companies see value in supporting Linux.
Actually IBM is going full-steam ahead. Linux is a great way for them to compete with Sun. Then there's Dell, Compaq, Intel, and a small herd of embedded companies that I'm not very familiar with. Add to that thousands of much smaller companies with niche products or services that you'll never hear about: ISPs, system integraters, consultants for small offices, vertical market developers. They make money in their markets and contribute a little back to the community as a whole, even if it's just the odd patch or a small network administration tool.
It is tempting, if the only tool you have is a hammer, to treat everything as if it were a nail. - Abraham Maslow
There are lots of false statements in this troll, but the communism analogy is interesting because it looks correct at first glance (most of the others are obviously wrong and don't really need to be addressed).
Looking a little deeper you see the flaw: Communism and Capitalism are about allocating scarce resources. There's only so much "stuff" (T.V.s, houses, whatever). Under Capitalism the people who own the capital get the stuff, under communism everybody gets a little bit of the stuff.
1) Intellectual property is fundamentally different. There's no limit on how many people can possess or use intellectual property, and my use of certain information doesn't hinder anybody else's use of the same information.
2) Certain types of IP are actually _more_ valuable if more people use it. If I can get you to use my wordprocessor, for example, then my copy of the wordprocessor is actually more valuable to me because I can exchange documents with you more easily.
The people who thought up Capitalism and Communism lived in an era where "hard-goods" were the only commodity worth thinking about. Neither of these theories is going to get very far in explaining the economics of software.
It is tempting, if the only tool you have is a hammer, to treat everything as if it were a nail. - Abraham Maslow
Whose butt, because I've seen some pretty sweet ones...
PS Does anyone have a mirror of that supposedly pretty eye candy?
Alex Bischoff
---
Alex Bischoff
HTML/CSS coder for hire
Furthermore, Linux is bad for humanity because it means people will no longer take Computer Science degrees - there won't be any money in Computing because of all the free software, so software will suffer a brain drain
Good. People who take CS (or any other discipline) degrees because of the money they can make are precisely the sort of people that Computing (or Architecture, or Law) can well do without.
Most software is never distributed. It is written in-house, to be used in-house. None of that is affected by free software (apart from the bottom line of the vast majority of companies).
Computer Science graduates tend to be the least able programmers of all the people I deal with. For every MIT turning out brilliant programmers (none of whom would dream of working at my company) there are a hundred state universities turning out VB monkeys and Delphi parrots.
Is this flamebait? Sure, but it's also true, and my karma is maxed out anyway.
--
--
E_NOSIG
Images HERE and
HERE
Not that great IMHO
no sig.
It's even in the FAQ as to why they do not mirror things. But if you want a mirror, look at http://www.flyingbuttmonkeys.com/mirrors/ftp.kde.c om/pub/dot/img/
________________________________________
Napster-to-go says "Fill and refill your compatible MP3 player", which is a lie. It's not MP3. It's WMA with DRM.
apparently you haven't looked at KDE 2. Even out of the box, KDE 2 is very attractive. Over all, it can be customized anyway you like. I'm getting really tired of everyone bashing KDE everytime there is an article about it on slashdot. It happens to be the most complete and stable desktop/window manager.
zerovoid
Oh, really!
IBM is operating on the ABM plan: Anything But Microsoft. Almost all IBM apps support the obligatory NT/2000, as well as Sun, Linux (4 distributions and gaining), and AIX. Today at IBM I attended a lecture on Linux and Globalization. Don't kid yourself, IBM isn't dropping Linux anytime soon.
(Especially when it took them ten years to step away from os/2 and they still make fixpacks for that!)
A host is a host from coast to coast, but no one uses a host that's close
Yes, you're point is correct, but..
:)
On this issue, Keith from the X core dev. team has hacked QT libraries which actually shows you EVERYTHING on KDE.
Which means - once this extension will be officially released (probably in XFree 4.0.2) - and TrollTech will add Keith's modifications - then you could use the anti-aliasing fonts - but it won't be worth to lots of people here..
Why? cause only Matrox graphics card got this hardware accelerated. Others (for now) if they want to use it will need to use software rendering - which is VERY slow.
So, Matrox users - smile
Hetz (Heunique)
It was at about this point that you should have determined that this was a troll. Maybe the next item after that, but that's pushing it.
Bonus points if you picked it up after "Open source software is, plainly, too open - like Communism". Don't be fooled by the fact that the first few paragraphs were on-topic and fairly reasonable.
Your right to not believe: Americans United for Separation of Church and
Yes, it all looks very nice, but it's not earth shattering is it?
Imlib2 has been able to do the alpha blending thing for ages, it hasn't been used much outside efm, but it's there. Dunno about antialiased fonts yet though.
Maybe the reason nobody knows about it is because it's not actually that usefull. But i'm sure that's missing the point - it looks nice, and that's what's important. Ace.
*sigh*
The XServer gives fonts to the XClients as black-and-white (1-bit) bitmaps.
In order to do antialiasing, you need to implement your own font-handling system, which will by nature exclude all pre-existing X apps, and anything which doesn't use your font handling code.
Duh.
I'm spending a lot of life building GUI's (in Java) and I have some questions about icons and eye-candy:
As hackers, we all know that you can unplug one icon and replace it with another, the type of graphic art is totally unrelated to the quality of the code and the app, and so on, but, the look and feel can have a pretty major effect on the way people take to your software.
In my experience, if people are a little unsure how much they should trust your code, and how much time they should invest in it, 'clean and professional' is more likely to give the right impression than 'cute and well drawn'. Think Nokia mobile phone vs. a Micky Mouse novelty candlestick one. (I'm not saying that the icons are as bad as that - just that that's the sort of distinction I'm trying to make).
I know it's all themed, and you can set the theme to be whatever you want, but I would suggest that the default theme should be much more 'serious'. We all love the penguin, some love the KDE dragon, but would we get more respect if the images were less cuddly - harder? I guess this is why the Playstation 2 looks like it does, and why it's logo is made up of a set of straight lines on a white background. It looks hi-tech and cool.
Someone else (rebelcool) made the point that 'looking like Windows is a good thing because Microsoft have spent a lot of money on research and they know what they're doing'. I kind of agree with that, but there is a better reason: Most people who use a computer understand the Microsoft GUI. It might not be the best on a level playing field, but the playing field isn't level - pretty much everyone is familiar with Microsoft's GUI.
To use the same steering wheel analogy: Every car has a steering wheel because every car has a steering wheel. Thus, steering wheels make the best user-interfaces, simply because they mean that anyone with a driving license can just get in and drive off.
One final point, I'm so used to Unix I find typing on a Windows box feels like I have boxing gloves on. I hate it, I find it frustrating. So I install bash shells and emacs, and do everything I can to make it look like what I'm used to. It's a pain, and I certainly can't do it on a stranger's computer I happen to be using for a bit. I have an enormous amount of empathy for Windows users in a hurry who have to make the switch in the other direction.
really. all that posting stories does is denial of service attack someone's server. the links point to two measly png images. how hard can mirroring that be? it's been said before and it needs to be said again, slashdot editors need to be more considerate and responsible, considering their site's popularity.
---
Santa Claus: "Ho ho ho!"
NO CARRIER
There are typically three componenets to every pixel in the image you see. A red component, a blue component, and a green component. When working with images, there tends to be another component used on top of these three, called the alpha channel. Essentially, the alpha defines how transparent each pixel is. (ie; how much of whatever's below it is mixed in with it. This gives the illusion of one image showing through another.)
Alpha blending's simply become a necessity these days. The fact that it's taken X this long to even contemplate getting true support for it's a danged shame, but better late than never I suppose.
As an aside, to all of those of you who're suggesting people check out Berlin instead, I would caution you to hold your horses. Sure it supports alpha blending, and a host of new features, but it's not a drop-in replacement for X. X and Berlin are totally different beasts, with totally different purposes. (ie; X is a dumb terminal, displaying whatever the client programs want it to, while Berlin tends to be more object-oriented, with objects relied upon by clients having the capability of running on the server-side.)
For an X Client there is a bunch of Xlib calls that draw fonts and they could easily draw antialiased, without changing any API at all. Yes it would require a TrueColor visual and only the copy transfer function would work (any other combination would give you 1-bit fonts), but this if implemented would be immediately useful by almost all X programs.
Windows did not have antialiased text at first either, you know. They successfully added it so that programs using the old calls could draw the antialiased text. They had exactly the same limitations I propose for X, ie it does not work for non-true-color modes and does not work for binary functions other than copy.
The fact that the interface to the font server would have to change is not an excuse. The font server is an internal api as far as the majority of applications are concerned! Besides the X server could interface to old font servers by asking for the fonts 4 times bigger and doing down-rez antialiasing.
The real problem is complete laziness and a paranoia far worse than MicroSoft about back compatability from the X Consortium.
Engineering and the Ultimate
gdk-pixbuf, which is already included in Gnome, and is part of the upcoming Gtk+ 1.4, has done alpha blended pixmaps for quite a while.
--
The world is divided in two categories:
those with a loaded gun and those who dig. You dig.
--
The world is divided in two categories:
those with a loaded gun and those who dig. You dig.
One possibility for the legal problems would be to cook up a standard for automatically providing permission for other people to cache a site, similar to how a robots.txt works for spidering. The iffy part would be figuring out what the default behavior would be in the absence of a 'cache.txt'.
Even nicer would be a distributed group of authoritative servers where cached copies could register themselves. Those servers could also serve as authorities to provide hashes of the mirrored files, allowing clients to automagically verify that a given cached copy is legit.
Although I suppose to a degree, such a project would be reinventing freenet. On the other hand, it'd be simpler to implement since you wouldn't be worrying about anonymity issues, as much.
1) Any alpha-blending code out there for us graphical newbies who want to see how it's done? .deb yet?
2) Second, has EFM been released as a
--- Jump!! Fire!! Bullet time!! - Lego version of the Matrix
You start off by saying that [it's] an Explorer ripoff and that's a bad thing. You then go on to say how much you like a Mac interface, and that something that worked more like a Mac would be a good thing.
Your last sentence is Howzabout some innovation, instead of redoing something someone else has already done?
Forgive me if I'm misrepresenting you by paraphrasing... Isn't making a GUI work a bit like insert your favorite GUI here redoing something someone else has already done.
I agree with your point though, whatever system you use, faffing around to get it to feel like the one you would like to be using is a pain in the backside and best to be avoided. As I said in a different post, if you're trying to persuade people to trust and use something new, making it behave and look like something that they are familiar with may well be a good thing to do.
Dropping features you like - rather than turning them off, is clearly a mistake because if someone else gives you those features you're going to go with them. My main point is different though - it's what the default should look like. Themes and L&F allow you to offer a 'look like a new mac but with the cool bits from the old mac' functionality with one click.
*groans*
...there's probably a lot more but I don't want to misrepresent.
Also, do not confuse Linux (the kernel) with GNU's entourage (compiler, libraries, tools, etc.) and XFree. The distributions put these together. Talk to them about packaging innovative windowing systems.
I'm a CS major. A lot of us Linux users are. We hate not knowing how the NT kernel works. We hate paying thousands of dollars and signing non-disclosure agreements just to take a peek. Linux is an attempt to do it all over. And guess what? It's doing a damn good job, considering that it's practically reverse engineering (minus any BSD stuff). Linux==communism? Hardly. Linux is the means to an end. I think the vendors who see it destined for a desktop market, etc. are disillusioned. It's bringing the Unix environment home. How do you think I learned Solaris (Sys V)? Training courses? Innovation? Here's innovation for you: Kernel modules (no reboots!) Proc filesystem Clone syscall interface
Black holes are where the Matrix raised SIGFPE