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.
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!.
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"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.
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
I fail to see how parent was insightfull, but let me comment on this:
You have two choices for the window decorations in OS X: Rainbow Jelly Beans, and Grey Jelly Beans
This is beta, unfinished software. Also,
Now KDE, on the other hand [...] can be customized to your heart's content, modified in any reasonable way
Well, so can Mac OS 9, and Windows*. Lastly, I'll comment on:
and most of all, not used at all if you don't feel like using it!
Nobody forces you to use Mac OS X.
Let me remind you why you seem to like Linux: free Speech (oppose Free Beer). Part of that is your freedom NOT to use Mac OS X.
Karma karma karma karma karmeleon: it comes and goes, it comes and goes.
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.
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
Try here: http://www.flyingbuttmonkeys.com/mirrors/ftp.kde.c om/pub/dot/img/
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Napster-to-go says "Fill and refill your compatible MP3 player", which is a lie. It's not MP3. It's WMA with DRM.
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.
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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/
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Napster-to-go says "Fill and refill your compatible MP3 player", which is a lie. It's not MP3. It's WMA with DRM.
Simply stated, VGA montiors do not emit light at equal powers for equal changes in the values stored in the raster image. They relate by a power function (or gamma function, hence the name) Since the anti-aliasing works by linearly interpolating between the foreground and background, the edges might look too fuzzy and dark to the human eye due to that inconsistency. To make it seem more smooth, like text on paper, we fuddle with how much blending we use between the foreground and background to account for gamma and the eye's sensitivity. Same thing in Quake, you adjust the gamma for different monitors so the transition from light to dark looks convincingly real.
Hope this helps.
Black holes are where the Matrix raised SIGFPE
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
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)
If your antialiased calculation is that a pixel is 50% filled (a = .5), the simple but wrong answer for the output pixel is .5*f+.5*b (where f is the color of the letter you are drawing and b is the color that is already there). But say f=1 and b=0, the result is .5, which is not half as bright as f, but instead only about 25% as bright.
The correct result should be about .71, which is the pixel value that is halfway in brightness between 0 and 1.
An easy way to do this is to calculate an alpha value instead of .5 of .71, and then use the normal linear compositing rule. This will result in perfect white on black text. However if you use it to draw black on white you will get .29 in the pixel, which is more wrong than the .5 the simple rule produces (the correct answer should again be .71). It appears this is the solution being done here (except he calculated the alpha for black on white), this can be seen by the rather bad appearance of the reverse-video text.
The correct solution is to composite an output value that is pow(pow(f*a,g)+pow(b*(1-a),g),1/g) where g is the alpha value. This is computationally ridiculous so some kind of approximation must be used, though I'm not sure what yet.
Yes: http://www.flyingbuttmonkeys.com/mirrors/ftp.kde.c om/pub/dot/img/
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Napster-to-go says "Fill and refill your compatible MP3 player", which is a lie. It's not MP3. It's WMA with DRM.
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.
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.
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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.
Uhm. I submitted the article, and I think both are "pretty sweet" ;-)
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that's not "Insightful," it didn't even answer the guy's question!
sure this may be the reason why you like KDE more than Aqua, but your little rant has nothing to do with the fact that Aqua is considered "waste" and KDE is "cool."
and as far as Aqua goes, who cares if it can only be changed through options that "Apple doesn't normally want you to tweak?" in most cases these things can be changed. i would be very surprised if the final release of OS X didn't have an option to shut off Aqua's effects, perhaps through the "default" command.
but at any rate, wah, you don't like Aqua, you don't like the "Jelly Beans." that doesn't give you an excuse to write an evangelical flame in response to a legitimate question.
- j
sure this may be the reason why you like KDE more than Aqua, but your little rant has nothing to do with the fact that Aqua is considered "waste" and KDE is "cool."
By whom? You do realize that if person A says that Aqua is a waste and person B says alpha blending on KDE is cool, that doesn't mean that person A also thinks alpha blending on KDE is cool, don't you? Furthermore, if person C says that KDE is cool and Aqua is not, that doesn't mean that everyone on Slashdot but you agrees.
Contrary to what some believe, everyone on Slashdot does not share exactly the same opinion on everything at all times.
*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