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Rasterman Speaks On E17 And The Future
JigSaw writes: "The team consisting of TheRasterman and Mandrake (among others) are hard at work to bring Enlightenment 0.17 to the Linux desktop. E17 will be a lot more than a window manager, something closer to a complete GUI solution for X. OSNews hosts an interesting interview with Rasterman and also features some (unseen-before) screenshots of E17. Some say that E17 will be the next big thing in the GUI design (even if Rasterman states in the interview that Linux won't probably take over the Desktop), with plans to incorporate libraries like eVas, which look very modern in concept, design and implementation."
I'd have to agree with that - my wife easily figured out the Gnome panel and menu system which is more-or-less a W95 workalike (OK, OK, there's a lot more neat stuff, but for her it's W95 all over again) and she has no problems using Linux for email, web browsing, and word processing, but installing it would be something that she would never do. Not that she'd install Windows either, but of course most Windows users never have to.
Your right to not believe: Americans United for Separation of Church and
the fact that evas has is "canvas" is nothing new. it's an ancient idea. the fact that i did start it off simple and dind't go completely bezerk with abilities and features (display postscript, display pdf) - just kept the core and basics, meant that i could actually finish it in time to use it for writing the app i needed it for: e 0.17 AND it menat i could also accelerate it via multiple back end rendering paths. it's quiteodd too the apeolpe assume it is ONLY opengl - in fact i woudl not suggest using the gl backed rendering engine on anything but an nvidia driver because so far no driver i have found comes even clsoe to being stable enough or complete enough. but nvidia is about the closest. my own software rendering (imlib2 does that for evas) which is quite fast is what i normally use for evas - so you don't NEED hardware. you can use normal X11 pixmaps and X primitives as a rendering back end for evas too. this keeps it simple - but still makes it able to be extended easily, and has allowed me to make it work and work well in a relatively short period of time with a relatively small amount of resources.
:) the end result is a canvas that is fast.. hardware accelerated or not, that does its primitives well and does the job i need... and can be improved in time with no effect on the programs using it other than positive ones (new features... or faster & better quality rendering etc.)
:)
:)
that is what the power is.. and it can be easily extended. new object types can be added - new things like having clipping paths could be done, extra object attributes can eb added that affect their display.. but the more complex the feature the harder it is to support in the back end rendering... and the less likely it is to be able to be hardware accelerated and instead have to be done more slowly in software - even the software optimizations are lezz liekly to be effective the more complex it is. thus i choose to only impliment what i really need - and that can go a surprisingly long way
evas solves the problem in an elegant way... and rememebr it isn't the same as dps/dpdf - its a canvas. that is a different concept.
i also know a bit more about apples display technology than you think - it defintiely is pretty - and yes... i'm not going to comment much in detail on it as i dont, imho, think i know enough details to make a very concise sumamry of it and get it right 100%. but i know enough to know what they are doing (approximately) and why etc.
evas is a different technology - it is much closer to the java canvas, tk canavs, gnome or qt canvases. it can be extended and wrapped and made more pwoerful with layers ontop that use it as an optimized rendering system... and that is incendentally one of the side projects happening right now
anyway.. just thought i'd comment a bit - don't want to flame - just want to fill in the gaps ininformation that wasn't provided for you before
--------------- Codito, ergo sum - "I code, therefore I am" --------------------
I would like to see this Display PDF spec.
Second, Quartz is merely based on PDF. There is more functionality there than in plain PDF, so the PDF spec alone wouldn't be sufficient to build something with equivalent functionality.
Third, simply having the spec wouldn't help much when it comes to implementation. What would really help is source code. It sure would be nice if Apple were to license Quartz like they do Darwin, but they're not going to do that because it's a key feature of OS X.