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Third Generation Display Layers Other than OS X?

Posted by Cliff on from the breaking-out-of-the-pixel-paradigm dept.

jayegirl asks: "The display subsystem in MacOS X seems like a 'really good thing'(tm), and so, I was wondering, what other third generation display layers -- using screen representations based on shapes, rather than pixels -- exist or are under development. Are there any open source projects in this direction?"

4 of 33 comments (clear)

  1. Of course, Berlin by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3
    Berlin - an open source (LGPL) windowing system - has a ThIrD-GeNeRaTiOn display layer. It's far more advanced than Apple's quartz too (quartz is not at all elegant though it shows promise). Arstechnica compared Berlin to Quartz about a year ago and found Berlin to be much more logical. But wait! Don't acuse Berlin of being slowly developed! It's been rocketing along lately - see screenshots). Most of the perceived slowness of development in "Berlin" is that it (appropriately) relies on many other developing softwares: Freetype, OmniORB, and GGI. Many Berlin developers also write for GGI which serves the same purpose as X (as in the kludgy framebuffer).

    Berlin is resolution independent, uses CORBA, blah blah blah. All the good stuff.

    The main issues now are getting hardware acceleration for Berlin. It can run in an X window, or on SVGAlib - which isn't fun for anyone.

  2. Timeline by maggard · · Score: 3
    Interesting posting regarding NeWS & it's history from someone involved

    --
    I don't read ACs: If a post isn't worth so much as a nom de plume to its author then I wont bother either.
  3. OpenGL by ikekrull · · Score: 3

    OpenGL would be one possible base on which to build a resolution independent GUI, with support for hardware acceleration of many operations, including evaluator functions - for curves etc., and vertex level operations using NVidia and others' geometry processors.

    This is happening slowly on a number of fronts, the most widely known being E's EVAS.

    Other options might include HTML/CSS, SVG or even Flash/Shockwave formats.

    Postscript/PDF is pretty unwieldy, from what i have seen, but is obviously quite flexible with good typography support, which is the biggest missing element in all the others.

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    I gots ta ding a ding dang my dang a long ling long
  4. PostScript by maggard · · Score: 4
    PostScript is generally though of as a Page Display Language however it's been applied as a display rendering layer also.

    Sun Microsystems' James Gosling created a displayed PostScript as the basis for NeWS around 1985. This implementation was never particularly Adobe/Apple-PostScript compatible and was only licensed from Adobe shortly before Sun abandoned it. However it was the first use of PostScript for a windowing system.

    NeXT then licensed & underwrote development of PostScript into Display PostScript (no direct relation to displayed PostScript.) This was the basis for NeXT's NextStep interface and lives on today in GNUstep.

    Apple has recently independantly implemented the PostScript-derived PDF from public specifications for it's Quartz rendering layer in it's recently released MacOS X.

    Thus you've a single well known, well documented language that's been used for three independant windowing systems over the course of 15 years, two of them independant of the language's licensors. Add that to it's direct application to printing and it's a pretty powerful argument for further consideration as an X-Window alternative/successor.

    --
    I don't read ACs: If a post isn't worth so much as a nom de plume to its author then I wont bother either.