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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 :)
If this was bound to a key that was togglable on my keyboard, it would be nice. I could hit the key, and see where each window lies. Perhaps making the windows transparent and alt-tabbing through them while putting a red border on each one instead of having them pop up would be nice.
Whatever the case, it looks kind of hokey. I would like to see something like this where the widget graphics have alpha channels. Right now everything is one level of transparency. One step at a time, right?
Applying alpha blending to all windows is not really an interesting problem. There are some hoops to jump through, and you have to be realistic about what you expect, but otherwise it's a simple, straightforward process (don't believe me? This article gives you 90% of what you need to write such a tool. The other 10% is bookkeeping.)
More interesting is applying alpha blending to specific applications. This lets you be much more creative by doing something that complements an application. A translucent Internet Explorer is not interesting or useful (in fact, it's likely a drag on your system, and hard to read). A translucent Winamp, on the other hand, is a match made in heaven. What I'd really like to see is more application developers taking the time to add layered windows to their applications where it's appropriate, rather than taking this one-size-fits-all type of approach. But then, I've been playing with layered windows for a year and a half now, so maybe I'm just not getting the "wow" experience anymore.
For what it's worth, OS X has the capacity to do this as well (and with WindowShade, you can phase any window on the screen). I haven't found the feature incredibly useful, yet, but it sure does look cool.
B1 (or maybe one of the interims between this a b2) of Win2K had this. B1 was released in september 1999. It's been sitting under the hood in GDI for bloody ages. I remember somone wrote an app during the beta that allowed you to do JUST was glass 2k does. So even that app is old.
Yes, maybe XFree has it a year ago, but that puts it to mid-2000ish. Still after Win2K.
Who cares which came first? What matters is how it's used. And on one or two windows, and in other places, it works VERY well. But for your whole desktop... no way.
It looks like one of those things you install for a couple of minutes for the gee-whiz factor, and then delete. Worthy of a front-page story? Maybe on a slow day -- it is cute -- but:
I've been waiting for this for 2 years now -- a REAL glass-like windowing system. And yes, it's Microsoft to do it.
Seriously, where has 'visnu' been, and why isn't Timothy editing? This maybe a first for MS, but from its inception, Mac OS X has had not just alpha blending, but a completely new compositing system has been a central feature of Mac OS X from inception. And they didn't just slap alpha blending on current windowing, making it harder to use or just to make it do cute my-mouse-has-a-shadow tricks, they integrated it into the usability of the desktop.
Strange to see a /. story claiming MS innovation where there isn't. You'd think it would be the other way around.
When will we see more functionality additions instead of just eye-candy? Admittedly translucency can be considered a navigation functionality, but its seldom talked about as one.
One thing that they (GUI developers -- KDE, MS, Apple, etc) should implement RIGHT NOW is a feature I've seen on SGIs: A wheel widget that scales the contents of a file browser window. Even at 1600x1200 with a dinky font, I work with plenty of directories that just aren't easily navigable with a full-screen window. Too much scrolling. The ability to scale the contents of the window would be awesome, especially if it was coupled with a magnifying lens area arround the pointer.
Even normal windows with no content scaling would be more usable if we could hold a key and get a panning-type movement feature for windows with more content than screen space. I know plenty of applications do this, but this should be a base feature of the file management tools as well.
The point is, too many recent "developments" in GUIs seem to have more to do with making it fit stylistic or visual appearance goals and less with making the windowing system MORE USEFUL. Nice to look at makes it more enjoyable, but more useful means I can get the job done faster and get more time to look at something else.
To me, translucency in apps would be much more useful if you could have varying levels of translucency within the same app. For example, when you make a text-editor window transparent, it gets really hard to read because the text gets transparent too.
So it would be nice to vary the translucency of window text/icons separately from the rest of the window, if desired.
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NeXT used Display Postscript for its imaging, which as far as I know had no support for alpha blending. Apple wrote a new graphics layer (Quartz) from scratch for Mac OS X.
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The problem with that is it's not supported by all the video drivers in XFree86 4.x
For example it just recenty started to support my Rage Mobility LM chipset, before that I had no RENDER support so stuff like anti-aliased fonts in KDE wouldn't work.
And I *think* that's the reason why people aren't really using it for transparency and stuff. Cause if it's not supported on a persons computer I'm not sure if there is a nice clean way to handle that. I keep hearing about how they can't add it to stuff like KDE or GNOME because so many people wouldn't be able to use it.
What I really want to know is why someone hasn't put together a special terminal emulator that uses this. Because then just the people who have the render extension could download it and use it, and the people who can't will just have to hope that at some time they'll get RENDER support too.
Perhaps I should look into that, but I think it's a little too advanced for me to take on.
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No, it's not useful when it's not useful. WindowFX has done alpha in Win2K for a long time.
The problem is, you need to make certain windows transparent, and only on a selective basis. A clock app, for example, would be a good candidate for alpha. WinAMP is another. Something you want to remain "on top" but still want your whole desktop real estate for.
Hell, I think having the Windows Taskbar alpha out instead of roll away is better.
Alpha is cool, but not intrinsically useful. It depends on the app, it depends on the user. But the way it's been implemented so far is just flawed. Not everything should be alpha'd.
Now what would be really cool is to SCALE windows with the mouse wheel. Roll a window away, and roll it forward. 150% down to 50% (so you can't use them.
Hell, make the mouse wheel a BALL. Now you can rotate your windows in 3D. Need more room? Just tilt that window away from you a bit. Add a titlebar to the side so you can tell what's there.
With 3D chips in nearly every computer these days, this shouldn't be hard.