Fast Alpha-Blending In Your GUI

visnu writes: "I've been waiting for this for 2 years now -- a REAL glass-like windowing system. And yes, it's Microsoft to do it. Ever since W2k came out, and they included alpha-blending in the GDI, I was tempted to write a little tool to turn on any window's transparency, but of course I'm way too lazy to do that. These guys weren't though: glass2k runs in the systray and handles turning on any window's transparency. yes, here's a screenshot. I'm not too sure about the speed in W2k, but in XP w/ the newest Nvidia drivers and a somewhat recent video card, it's hardware accelerated, and yes, you should be drooling." Update: 11/26 19:00 GMT by T : Links updated, so hopefully you'll be able to actually get to the content again :)

Comments

Been There...

[Moonshadow]

I wrote an app that did the same work about 6 months ago. It started out as an app to set any window to permenantly be on top, and shifted to being a translucency editor for Win2K, too. It even has this nifty little pulse thing that will make a window move between 2 transparencies in a set interval, giving a "glowing" feel.

I submitted it to download.com, but of course, they rejected it. I need to see if I can find a copy somewhere, after 2 hard drive reformats without backing up. Think I'd learn my lesson.

And why exactly is this news? Any Slashdotter could have done the same in 20 minutes.

Drool? Hardly.

[dirtyhippie]

Why would I drool over such a thing? Isn't the whole point of a window so that you can put one on top of the other, and not be confused by what's beneath it? It's great for games, but why on earth would you want to use it in your windowing system? So you can open more porn simultaneously? I don't get it.

-DH

Re:Drool? Hardly.

[mgv]

Like alot of things, there is a difference between doing somthing because you can do it, compared with doing something because it should be done.

Alpha transperancy is a good thing, used wisely. Like the nice shadow on the mouse in win2k

Makeing whole windows transparent has limited usefulness to my mind.

Can anyone see a real use for transparent windows?

Michael

Re:Drool? Hardly.

[SerpentMage]

No offense meant here, but this is something that has already been solved very well in the windows world. It is the key strokes "Ctrl-c", "Ctrl-v".

I do not mean to be offensive here, but Windows actually has this one solved really well. I know on the LINUX platform this is an absolute mess and pain in the butt.

drooling??!!

[boy case]

Well that doesn't make me drool it makes me sick! When will people start thinking about doing some real work and how to make that easier.

How the heck does having my document half obscured by a calculator help me in any way!?

Get a life! Ask yourself what your GUI is actually FOR?? Seems like for most people here's it's for playing around with and looking 'kewl'! What a joke..

i don't think this is real

[rfsayre]

if this systray app makes everything transparent, shouldn't I be able to see through to an inner dog turd or something?

OS bloat

[resprung]

Three words for you:

Operating System Bloat.

Apart from fueling the market for >1 GHz machines to run office applications (!!!), I see no benefit from this eye candy.

For once, Apple got it wrong in OS X. You ought to experience how sluggishly it performs your UI tasks.

We all know that Microsoft will release a butt-ugly and more or less broken copy of whatever Apple does. And XP already demands ~90 Mb of System RAM just to tick over.

Anybody apart from me believe that the UI should be lean and fast as hell?

Re:Ho Hum, Already Done

[markov_chain]

It sure is neat, but is not done in hardware, which was the whole point of the article.