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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?
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.
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.