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

Old hat - rubbish 'news' story

[The Government]

Why is /. posting this tripe? This has been available for ages on the Mac - with PowerWindows on OS 8.x (i.e. 1996-7 if I remember properly), and on Mac OS X since it came out. OS X users - go and get yourselves a copy of WindowShade X - not only can you combine the old minimise-in-place windowshade feature of OS 9 and before with the Dock minimisation, but you can set any window to your chosen degree of translucency at will. Find it on Versiontracker. Then understand why this news story is a waste of time. Mac OS X's graphics system has a far more powerful compositing architecture to WinXP - let's focus on the real news.

how cool is this!

[el'gwato]

Wow, now I can further confuse my cluttered windows desktop...