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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 :)
But when some Windows-weenie slaps together a VB control in five minutes to do the same thing in Win2k, the readers get all bitchy and start complaining about how "useless" it all is. Well, duh. But why didn't you complain about MacOS X's uselessness too?
I object to this story, too, but for a completely different reason: this isn't news. Windows 2000 has always had the ability to display transparent and translucent forms. Windows 2000 can do a whole load of other useless things with forms, too. Ask any Delphi developer -- I can't stand Delphi myself, but a lot of my friends use it -- and he'll show you dynamic desktop magnification and a bunch of other demos that the development suite comes with. It's not news. It may be news to Slashdot's "We only use Windows for games, and Quicktime, and word processing, and financial apps, and graphics work, and email, and web surfing -- but we use Linux for writing Perl scripts, so we're hackers, right?" loser crew, but it's not news to anyone else.
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I like to watch.
And without a hack. But it's normal for the Windows freaks to go around saying "I've been waiting for this", implying the poorly implemented feature Microsoft just stuffed into their system is something new or even desireable. Yes, this is not news. Your glow feature, on the other hand, as least has some novelty to it.
"Software engineers are so busy doing things because they can, they don't stop to consider if they should" - (I forgot who said it)
It would be interesting to do some research to determine the impact that this would have on the psyche. My guess is that it encourages ADHD and Schizophrenia. In a world where processing the information we have at our disposal is like a sip from the firehose, do we really need to turn the pressure UP ?
Guns don't kill people; Physics kills people! - John Lithgow as Dick Solomon on Third Rock From The Sun
Call me a troll, but this looks rather useless, if not stupid.
3cx.org - A truly bad website.
Not to be offtopic or rude or anything, but is this news? Who cares how fast the transparent window render is in any OS. Do most of you honestly care if your GUI is pretty? How shallow is that? Why should I be drooling? Show me a well done OS with good VM, FS, and outstanding uptimes under intense load and I'll be standing in a puddle of drool. Pretty colored things that made neat noises ceased to be overly exciting about the time I started crawling out of my playpen a few decades ago.
The most important thing any republican needs to know.
Also, please note that Windows 2000 did this before OS X did this. Not that it matters, but it's true.
If it doesn't matter then why bother mentioning it?
I'm sure "SlashdotMedia" will improve on all the wonders that Dice Holdings blessed us all with
I looked at the screenshot. I'd spent extra to make this NOT happen. This just a way to make displays more confusing. Having windows bleed through each other sucks, IMNSHO.
"that's not encryption - it's a new perl script that I'm working on..." - from some Matrix parody
He's not saying that Windows did this first, the author is stating that this transparency does not come at a loss (or at a negligible loss anyway) to the system performance. X Windows kills system performance right away; alpha transparency throw out the system along with it.
Geez....for a bunch of Linux whiners....all you morons sure did jump on the site fast enough !! Shouldn't you jerks be at work?! How about letting some of us TRUE windows users get a look at the site !!
Please, provide a mirror of any small site you post. You have harmed both the people who wrote the software, and the people who want to get the software.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"