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."

Comments

Groan - more alpha blending

[Matthias Wiesmann]

While it might rejoince some that everybody is jumping the alpha-blending anti-aliasing bandwagon behind Apple's OS X, what annoys me it that they do not copy the intelligent concept behind Aqua: display PDF.

What Apple has done is define an abstraction for graphical applications. What other copy is some of the nice uses of those abstractions: anti-aliasing and alpha-blending.

It's really a shame the only thing they understand is the surface...

Re:evas? displayPDF? instrumentality!

[raster]

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.

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 :) 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.)

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 :)