Slashdot Mirror
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 :)
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.
There are some apps that I would like to run "always on top", but most of the time they get in the way. This would sure be a nice way to still sorta see them .
:P
Great stuff, now implement it for NT4 and win98
karma capped
...but it strikes me as "Not that useful". Most of my users get confused with standard GUI look and feel. I'd hate to think what this would do to their poor little minds.
The simple truth is that interstellar distances will not fit into the human imagination
- Douglas Adams
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
..but it would drive me nuts after a while. :-)
Heck, I even reverted to non-transparent xterms, because the background made the text in the xterm partly unreadable, which is kinda bad if you're programming
But still a cool heck to impress friends with.
Well... might not be the nr.1 most useful invention ever, but it certainly looks nice. At least you'll always see 'where your windows are'...
There is an Extension called PowerWindows that will do that with live dragging of windows in MacOS 8/9. You can adjust the level of transparency too
"I would say that 99 per cent of what my father has written about his own life is false." - L. Ron Hubbard Jr.
It's rather cool, but not free, in either sense of the word.
I thought there was an entire damn OS previously on slashdot that could do this, it even had transperant VIDEO windows That to me is alot more amazing, oh well
Microsoft IIS is to webserving as KFC is to healthy eating
It runs just fine.
:)
w/ GeForce 2 Ultra, on an overclocked 1.6ghz Athlon CPU.
No lag or resource drain to mention...
Now I need to stack *10* maximized windows in front of my porn when mom comes. If I put just one like I'm doing now she would see through.
Am I the only one thinking that this is a big old mess? I can just about make out what windows appear to be on top of each other (I think), but is it really a big whoop to have your desktop background smeared all over your word processor?
Suggestions as to who would find this useful will be gratefully received. If this appeared on my desktop, the first thing I'd be looking for is the (translucent) button to turn the damn thing off.
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
Neet. Sure. Useful? I don't see how having more visual clutter helps me.
[news for me, stuff that doesn't matter]
Would you really imagine working in such an environment ? Making windows transparent when moving them would be cool, but using a transparent Word-like would kill my eyes.
But its useful to have a few screens transparent and on top while I read email! No excuse not to keep an eye on stats now.. doh
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.
Check out http://www.enlightenment.org/pages/evas.html (sorry I can't figure out linking in Slashdot. I think my account is broken) Evas from the new Enlightenment does this sort of thing (hardware alpha-bending, anti-aliased text, etc). There is a neat little demo included in Evas which shows off the features. I'm not sure about transparency (which I suppose this article is about). I think I remember reading some threads on the E developers list where Rasterman said that there are some very dirty ways of achieving this (transparency) with a BIG performance hit, but he wasn't interested in supporting it seriously until X offered some better tools. Or something. Anyway, if you're interested, check out the mailing list archives.
Athough I can't really think of any practical reason for it - when I'm working / concentrating I usually minimise all but a couple of windows anyway.
And I think it could be a little dangerous while surfing at work. You know, the boss comes around and you swiftly alt-tab to your work window...to find that it is 90% transparent.
Does look nice, though.
Just a thought,
Matt.
http://www.xfree86.org/~keithp/render/translucent. png
.
And, an alternative to X http://www.directfb.org/screenshots/gimp.png
My 7 year old Mac did that already, 7 years ago.
:)
Yes, it wasn't hardware accelerated and maybe it would stutter when dragging a larger window, but it worked. I don't see why this is such an innovation.
Slow news day?
OSX could do this easily. So far, the option to turn it on is only presented for the terminal (and on by default for the dock and menus), but it shouldn't be hard to make a hack to do it for anything. But guess what? I tried it on my terminal windows, and immediately switched back. Why? Simple, when I have the terminal in the foreground, I want to be able to see what's in it well, when I don't need to see it, I just let other things cover it. Transparency is like so many other things in this day and age, it just doesn't live up to the hype.
BlackGriffen
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?
If you have Xfree86 4.x, you have the RENDER extention which does the same thing. See http://www.xfree86.org/~keithp/render/ for a description (screenshot at the bottom). Now you just need the guy who'll patch Gtk to use this.
And this is how we'll enter the brave new era of computing: Not by actually designing and using tools to make our lives more productive, convenient, and satisfying, but by slumping in our chairs and staring at useless eye-candy while we touch ourselves. I can't wait for the future.
Do domain names matter?
translucent.png
I'm sure the main issue of this tool is only to have a cool desktop, "ala Linux" .. (cfr wterm, Eterm ). /.ers are complaining.
But it's sure that it's not usefull, as lots of
It's just a matter of taste and choice.
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.
If all background windows could be made transparent, thus drawing attention to your foreground window.
Justin
ROFL, I clicked on the link to figure out who she was (interesting choice, btw, I don't really see it myself) and was amused to notice the site is nearly slashdotted. Seems strange to mod somebody down as troll when so many people are clearly interested in the post.
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.
as not a good idea
creasingly being interested
ot to be confused with the
i.e. noise. The only purpose it serves is to faster identify the window you're dealing with. This has become unnecessary with the invention of the taskbar. Further additions to this concept, like window summarization and application-specific taskbars, make it even easier to use. If you want to view a lot of information simultaneously instead of having everything in full-screen mode, a smart window-manager like ion will rearrange windows automatically in useful tiles. Additional usability can be gained with clever hotkeys for application-switching.
But while overlapping windows are stupid, transparent windows are really part of a vast right-wing conspiracy to stupidify the masses by making computers incapable of displaying information. The next step will be window-spectific screensavers, which turn on after a specific period of inactivity in a single window. Just you wait. Thanks to transparency:
If you like eye-candy, you may "drool" over this one and get your brain fucked by the Illuminati. A frontal lobotomy may be a quicker solution though.
and now someone hacks it for Win2K. Gee...make it work on Windows XP.
*snore*
Apps like WindowShade X will allow one to drop the opacity of windows in the OS X. It's quite cool to have an MP3 player rendering visuals at 30 percent opacity behind BBEdit or something ;).
;).
;).
I'm fairly sure WindowShade X beat Glass 2k to the consumer opacity punch...but who really cares.
Unfortunatly, the whole GUI in OS X is not hardware acellerated due to the fact that it is vector based. No current video cards support this... but they are going to have to eventually. PostScript is the obvisouse evolution of the 2d GUI.
However, transparent windows still seem to work at a very respectable speed as long as they are not huuuuge with lots of animation. It's quite impressive actually... considering the graphics card does nothing really
And yes zephc, PowerWindows has been doing this kind of neet'o stuff for a million and 5 years. However it tends to be quite slow on older machines. But then again, the old OS 9 GUI was not designed for stuff like this. No one at apple cared to dump window buffering into the damn OS
"Things are more moderner than before- bigger, and yet smaller- it's computers-- San Dimas High School football RULES!"
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.
--
I like to watch.
Sure, but Windows 2000 beat OS X to the punch by nearly a year. Not that it really matters or anything, but if you want a "my OS is better than your OS argument", there you go.
but it's hella slow. Not sure what good it is though. Only usefull for "always on top" folders, like the taskbar or some monitoring tool.
-adnans
"In short: just say NO TO DRUGS, and maybe you won't end up like the Hurd people." --Linus Torvalds
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?
Now is the winter of our disco tent
In case the server can't handle the /. effect, here's a mirror of the screen shot: http://shakti.tky.hut.fi/slashdot/glass2k-screensh ot/
You load that up on the average bloke's computer & they'd be complain about their buggy Windows desktop till the cows come home.
For a look on how alpha blending should be used in a window manager check out OS X instead.
Somewhere in the heavens... they are waiting.
Excite personals classifieds adult slide show running under a transparent slashdot... Life is so good!
If voting were effective, it would be illegal by now.
Over a decade ago in the NeXT computers. Transparency (alpha-channel) was part of their graphics system (including their windowing system built using Display Postscript), pretty much from day one. I wrote software which depended on it - some funky drag-n-drop stuff which used transparency in icons. It was fast back then on a 25MHz 68040 - eighty times slower clock speed than todays high end processors!!!
Helping with organizational effectiveness is our job.
The whole transparency thing screams of "1337 euro-democoders" crap, it's a complete waste of effort and time.
/. moderation system.
A GUI is supposed to enhance and make things easier -- this app just makes things a complete nightmare. You can barely make out the mess of the ruler on the left side of Word, and the transparent buttons of Calculator are a complete mess.
Can you imagine trying to read a book where all the pages were transparent celluloid? How about the desktop in your workplace where every paper you had was transparent? Can you imagine what a nightmare that would be?
Why in the world would you want to do that to your windowing system then?
And why is this a "newsworthy" item anyway?
Moderators: Please mod this post down, and demonstrate the complete and utter failure of the
i haven't tried it, but from what i can tell from the site it's written in vb? hrm...i've been using this for a couple months... http://www.veridicus.com/tummy/programming/powerme nu/ (it's called PowerMenu)
personally the whole transparency thing is really annoying to me and no matter how good your vid card is, it slows things down.. but hey...whatever makes your eyes happy
There has been a program out since one of the betas of Win2K called Transperizer--it no longer seems to have an official homepage (as in development has apparently stopped), but there's a review here. It allows you to set certain windows as transparent based on their window titles.
In other words, this seems kind of like old news--though I'll probably try it out, since I haven't tested WinXP's transparent window code.
~=Keelor
It's not a big deal. I don't see why this story is on the front page.
I wrote a small free app called PowerMenu which does the same thing and more. It extends every window's system/controlbox menu with new options like always on top and transparency.
SetWindowLong(hwnd, GWL_EXSTYLE, GetWindowLong(hwnd, GWL_EXSTYLE) | WS_EX_LAYERED); SetLayeredWindowAttributes (hwnd, 0, 180, LWA_ALPHA);
GUI programming in Windows is quite snappy.
¦ ©® ±
Sorry, no.
What if I want a large workspace, but I'm working on multiple applications? I create two or more windows with a total surface area greater than the desktop size and overlap them. I can switch more easily than via a taskbar (not so far to move the mouse), I can still drag items between windows, I can see what's going on in different windows. Say I'm comparing two lists of contents. Each window may well contain rather more than the list, but that's all I need at that point. So, I lay it out so I can see both lists and compare away, without losing the larger workspace in the primary application.
Or maybe one is performing a task - by just displaying a portion of its GUI, I can monitor that task without losing a potentially large portion of my desktop for its full UI.
The day a desktop GUI bans me from overlapping windows is the day I look for new GUIs.
Greg
(Inside a nuclear plant)
Aaaarrrggh! Run! The canary has mutated!
Sure, this stuff has been done before on other operating systems. Sure, Win2k has had it hidden in the API. THE POINT IS that this is being done by your GRAPHICS CARD....nothing on the processor end. Oh, and its a 54K yes 54K download, and is easy to use. Calm down people. Why start flaming someone without ever checking out what it is?
I'm out of my mind right now, but feel free to leave a message.....
There might be a very good reason it's taken two years for the glass-like windowing system. And that would be that it isn't a good idea.
Sure it looks pretty. It's technically cool. It's very nice eyecandy. But useful? Hardly.
If our desktops were three-dimensional, there would be a point - in that case you could refocus on a window below your current. When refocusing, the frontmost window would be so blurry to you that it didn't interfere with your view of what was behind it.
But desktops aren't 3D (and "fake" 3D doesn't work, refocusing requires that your desktop is not displayed on a single plane, as that plane only has one focus), and you can't refocus. What you get is just a blur of all windows that happen to be ontop of one another (and the background if you have a background/wallpaper image).
I would guess that the only time that transparent windows help is if you have an OS/wm that does not offer workspaces or similar. The transparency might help cram an extra three windows onto the screen. Using workspaces you can just put those extra three on another workspace instead.
I have yet to see anybody argue how great it would be if all books were printed on plastic rather than paper, so that we could see through them.
a far better gimmick would be to be able to drag windows around *behind* other windows with the right mouse button, something riscos has had from the start.
update comments set karma=-1, reason='offtopic' where sid=26315
PowerMenu has given this for months (years?) on the corner menu of each window, as well as the option to set OS priority, and windows Always On Top. Essential stuff to have around.
I've always been wondering what kind of stuff was inside my screen...Perhaps the fact of setting my win2k desktop to transparent would answer this question ? :)
____
nico
Nico-Live
There's a Sash weblication called Layered Window Manager that does the same thing. Once you get Sash, the source code is available for free and only takes up 17kb.
*cough* X11 has had this for over a year now. feel the beatdown. (and get your facts straight: it was open sourced before it hit the m$ and apple alike. yeah, it's a nice feature, but it's not a necessity. nothing more than useless eyecandy. but since longetivity is your forte, I will gladly lay this smack down upon thee. :-) )
You know, I'm a real sucker for eye-candy, so I was really looking forward to this too... then I saw the screenshot. Holy crap, is that ugly or what? I think the reality is that it's darned hard to read text when you can see through the window. Kinda like reading pages in a book made of celluloid. It's one thing when a transparent window is overlapping your wallpaper... it's quite different to have your windows overlapping each other.
I recently moved from the GNOME desktop to MacosX. I was used to having several terminal files open so I could edit in one term, and copy data of another one. Or comparing some data between terminals.
;-)
Since MacosX has no always-on-top feature, and I had to run it at a lower (1024x768) resolution, I really had some problems getting used to switching between terminals.
Until I set some terminals transparant. Now I could read through the window ! Obviously this only works when the top terminal isn't cluttered with text itself, but it works great enough for me. And because the fonts in MacosX have really great AA the text always remains legible. And transparant windows only make sense to me if they're transparant to the layer beneath them , and not for instance the desktop background. That's why i never used them in linux
I guess it's a question of taste and the abillity to use your choice of desktop efficiently for YOUR needs.
By the way, I'm running MacosX on a iMac g3/233/128ram and it still feels snappier than windows on an comparable system, so choose your bloat statements carefully
blaah !
Basically all you have to do is make a dll to hook the WM_CREATE message. Then you just have to check which type of window (or even which window).
... well, for the look of the thing ;)
Easy-peasy, done in an hour or so, back when w2k came out.
It *is* bloody useless, though, I only use it
Presumably, though, OS X doesn't require anyone to write a program before it can be used.
Does a Christian soccer team even need a goalkeeper?
Personally I'm appreciative of any hackers work, so dude thank you so much for putting this out in the public arena!! Keep up the good work!
3000 dead over past 2 years, still no free Palestinians, still
If you don't use a screensaver, eventually your windows desktop will be burnt into your monitor with disastrous results
It's ugly. I wouldn't want alpha blended windows at all. It's of even questionable utility inside an OpenGL game, where alpha blending is practically free.
Yet more pointless eyecandy. I'm sure there are worthwhile applications of this, but I cant think of anything important right now.
Wow, that's what I'm talkin bout. I don't care if it's done before, it's something I'd always wanted, but never bothered to look for/write. This is great
__________________________________________
Take comfort in your ignorance.
Grandmaster Plague
This looks nice, but it's not going to do anything for my productivity.
How about a utility that switches the CAPS LOCK key based on the window that has focus? For those of us still programming in legacy CAPS LOCK systems (Represent, Informix Universe, PICK Mode!), it would really save some time.
Does this already exist somewhere? I couldn't find it.
.jelling
Opinions were like kittens / I was giving them away
MS have been trying to write Windows for 15-odd years and only *now* have they made them see-through - surely that was on an early spec? My gran's had see-through windows for *years*!!
R&D department is told to solve the problem of too many windows and you can't use 'pager/workspaces' because they aren't cool enough.
'Welcome to Rivendell, Mr. Anderson...'
Some X11 environments have faked various forms of transparency. Now, X11 supports alpha channels, but I'm not sure whether it actually allows partially transparent windows (does anybody know?). In general, the feature seems to be more eye candy than useful. Transparency is primarily useful for 2D and 3D graphics within an application, not for windows and other user interface components.
and why exactly should we be drooling? Oh yes, because our venerable X11 can't. A few windowmanagers have hacks to enable something like it (enlightenment with Eterm for example) but its just painting a shaded section of the current wallpaper a window's background, not real, actual transparency.
And until we all get supercomputers on our desks, rewrite X or ditch it entirely for something that isn't old and bloated we're going to carry on losing on the eye candy front.
I'm guessing that Microsoft has more time and money to spend on UI research than you do, which is the context for your off-the-cuff judgement that they are "brain-dead". The desktop tricks that you describe are all very nice, but they disrupt the continuity of the desktop metaphor. In other words, they stop it from being the case that what you see on the screen is an accurate representation of your workspace. And it turns out that preserving the metaphor is more important for usability than occasionally requiring a few annoying switches between windows.
The principle is called "designing for the common case". Sure, it can be useful to have active windows not on top when you're copying text from one window to another, but what about when you're not? Usually, when you want to activate a window, you want to bring it to the front at the same time, and you want to be able to do so with a single click anywhere in the window. Microsoft sets itself up this way because they've done actual work to find out whether it's better or not, rather than ad hoc theorising.
Go on then, is it quicker to use keyboard shortcuts or the mouse?
-- the most controversial site on the Web
Well, it is nifty, I'll give it that.
But, I can't find a use for it so far. Maybe if it could make *all* of those 'about' boxes semi-transparent, but there's no way it could know what's an about box and what isn't. Nothing else I tried looks useful in a transparency.
And, it's buggy, or apparently so. After about 10 seconds' thought, I think it's Windows that's buggy. Big surprise there. The Windows console window won't do transparency at all, and sometimes it even draws incorrectly when it's behind a transparent window. It doesn't work with Media Player; in transparency mode, the movie window goes black, and sometimes bringing it out of transparency mode doesn't fix it. Quake3 won't show transparent. Ultima Online flickers badly and slows waaaay down in transparency. Hmmm, DirectX/OpenGL interfering perhaps? Buggy video drivers? So typical.
Wouldn't it be cool if it could make all the menus fade in and out? *rolls eyes*
I just installed it on my Win2k box with ATi Radeon 32MB DDR and v3276 drivers and it runs very smooth, the windows are draggable with content at full speed on 1600x1200x32bpp. A year ago, some registry hacking tool did this too, but then all drivers were software rendering the alphablended windows and it was dogslow. However making Internet Explorer semi transparent isn't that fast. I guess (but do not know for sure) IE is redrawing the complete page every time something changes in the window (like typing in an edit box).
Never underestimate the relief of true separation of Religion and State.
"and yes, you should be drooling." - NOT.
Actually how useful is this? It's better to get drunk, take LSD or something.
Please don't implement this in KDE.
http://www.millnet.se/ GO/U d- s+:+ a C++ UL++++ P- L+++ E W+++ N+ w++ M-- PE+ t+ X++
no, but you should be able to see anyone who's sitting on the other side of your monitor.
That was classic intercourse!
Come out of the bar and fight like a nerd !
bau
However, the ability to open a screen at a lower resolution (or higher resolution with less colours, etc) was great. It is less pertinent now when you have a large desktop by default with 32-bit colour, and TFT displays which have a default operational resolution which you should use unless you like jagged interfaces.
The Amiga got a lot of the desktop metaphor completely correct, amazingly. It just worked correctly, even if the default interface now looks like a dog. Operationally it was great.
Who's that babe in the picture ?
I really hope the pic comes with the utility !!
bau
Some other things that are otherwise featureless are translucent. This is for eye candy value. Example: the background of the dock is translucent. But for things that you have to be able to read or complex toolbars, translucency is a pain. It looks cool but is impossible to use unless the transparency is very, very low. Example: my terminal window is black and set at 90% opaque. Still readable.
Here is someone elses screenshot (sorry, I couldn't find a bigger one). Note that in the Terminal the translucency is done well. Only the background is translucent, the actual letters, scroll bars, title bar, etc are opaque.
Basically, I'm not impressed with this glass2k thing. It doesn't really compare to the fine grained control native to MacOSX.
Note: I'm not trying to be a Mac zealot, I use Windows too. But in this case I think the Mac does transparency better and uses it well to improve the interface.
Great ideas, especially about limiting transparency to only windows beneath the app, not the entire background/desktop. An ability to limit transparency to just X windows deep would also be helpful. Finally, if transparency were able to be limited to the applications workspace (and exluded from say, the title bar and menu bar areas, as well as the borders) it would LOOK better as well.
Of course Windows would probably be tons better in this department if it was just a configuration option, and not something you had to have some people write a specialized app for, but all the same... I agree about terminal windows though, IMHO that's about all I'd make transparent given the chance..
All I know about Bush is I had a good job when Clinton was president.
Okay, this story makes it offical... I'm the only person who wants a desktop that is quick, and extremely easy to use, and doesn't give a damn about how sleek it looks.
From anti-aliased fonts, to theme-able browsers, to transparent windows, I still don't give a damn!
If there is anyone else out there that wants a fast and extremely intuitive and easy desktop, use XFce.
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
Bander
What we need more of is science!
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.
I am not sure of how useful this would be for all windows, but Textpad has had this functionality for a while now.
When using one of the search(&replace) tools, when the dialog box loses focus, the box becomes partially transparent, so that you can read the text behind it. Then when focus returns to the dialog box, it becomes opaque again. This is pretty useful, as previously I would end up dragging the box around the screen trying to find the text hiding under it.
John
...is to can make a window larger than your desktop, 100% transparent, and always on top.
Translucent windowing has also been in Linux; here is an example (not mine; look it up on Usenet). (Warning: Partial nudity.) I don't know how it compares since the site referenced in the article has been slashdotted.
you should be drooling.
Why should I be drooling? Because I can can have all my windows look trasparent on Windows? I've been seeing windows through Mac OS X's terminal for the past year now and I have to say that it's the only app that it's actually really cool to do it with (yes, you can make other windows transparent). This demo has the entire contents of the window transparent, buttons, menus and all. That doesn't really help anyone use this OS any. At least Mac OS X, and ETerm I think, keep the title bar opaque so you can see where the freakin' windows is.
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.
Really? Can an active matrix?
Funny. I've got the same setup, 768M, and XP. When I drag a window, my CPU tops out and the windows slowly try to track the mouse.
Oh, and try using the Start button and watch the remnants...
I think it's a one-click-wonder - screen shot tells all.
Any sufficiently well-organized Government is indistinguishable from bullshit.
It's almost as dumb as the "futuristic computers" with see-through screens (Deus Ex?).
...
I'll shut up now.
You know, that screenshot looked like crap. Transparency looks good in MacOS because Apple got it right.... but in windows it just looks STUPID. Imagine what an ordinary user would do with transparent windows! Aahahahahah!
My other car is first.
Maybe they could fix it so it makes all those porn/X10 popups transparent.
I know that part of the Object Desktop package has been doing this for a long time now. http://www.stardock.com/ The package in question, IIRC, is DesktopFX. Neat toy, but nothing really that useful or newsworthy, more useful than the 'fake' alpha blending most commonly seen in nix (only blend with the root window, ignore all others). For nearly real alpha blending, you could use KDE and use mosfet's (www.mosfet.org) liquid theme and at least have alpha blending on the menus. The reason I say almost real, is that while it does blend against windows as well as the background, it only blends against the screen as it was when it was first drawn, if background changes, the liquid alpha-blended menu does not. Xrender hints at the ability to do true alpha blending w/ hardware help, but I haven't seen it actually used for anything except AA-text.
While Alpha-blended windows give nifty screenshots and initial "ooh" factor, people switch it back off in moments because it really makes programs harder to use in the long run. It's hard enough to make sure colors within an application always have text that is readable against the background without other applications lending their colors to further mess things up.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
I'm running the program in Win2k right now on my 950 Duron/256MB SDRAM/32MB GeForce2 box, and the slowdown is pretty mild. To be certain, Internet Explorer scrolls down in spurts instead of smoothly like it did before, but beyond that I really can't complain.
Uses for it? None as of yet. But that probably has to do with the fact that I just became aware of its existence about twenty minutes ago. This is one of those things that I'll keep running in the background and FIND uses for. Some time, maybe a week from now, I'll be working with a program and say "hey, transparency might help me out here," so I'll fire up my little 54K download here and get it running, and BOOM! there it is. Who care's if its not practical yet. Just wait until you need it; then you'll see just how practical it can be. Besides, for 54K what's not to like?
~Forager
Quick after thought: I've already got it running, making my taskbar semi-transparent; I have it set on the left side of my screen, so when it pops up to announce a window update it gets annoying if it's directly over my text or whatever; on 30% opacity, it's much less annoying. Little things like this will make me glad I spent all 20 seconds (56k connection here, people) of my life it took to download this utility.
student of animation and the fine arts
While I haven't looked at this program yet, I know that they're certainly not the first to do this in Win2k or XP. In fact, alpha blending was one of the first GUI hack to come out with Win2k.
Hell, if you program in Delphi 6 you can set the transparancy level in the Form Designer!
Personally, I use PowerMenu to handle my window transparency. It does a few other exceptionally useful things too, and it's only ~50k to download.
Pax, Ardax
not that its the first to do it either, but that been done since the first non-beta release of aqua (front end of Macintosh OS X). my IM app infact will pan windows with unviewed messages in and out of transparency, its pretty cool. in fact all around, darwin/mach is pretty cool.
The pie menus in The Sims use a combination of desaturation, darkening, and alpha blending to feather the edges of the menu.
Why transparency and the other effects? I didn't want the pie menus to obscure too much of the scene behind them. You can see through the pie menu as the animation continues on in real time behind it. The head of the currently selected person is drawn in the center of the pie menu, and follows the cursor by looking at the currently selected item.
I found it necessary to somehow separate the head from the rest of the scene, otherwise it looked like a giant head was floating in a room of the house! Drawing a solid opaque menu background would obscure too much of the scene. But even a partially transparent menu background still did not visually separate the head from the background scene enough. It looked muddy and cluttered, instead of crisp and bright.
So instead of simply alpha blending, I actually made it desaturate the background (removes the color so it's gray scale), and darken it (like casting a colorless shadow).
I wanted the colorful head to look sharp and bright up against the dark gray background. So the effect looks at the Z buffer to clip out the head in the menu center, so it remains bright and colorful against the dark gray background. That gives it visual "pop" that separates the head from the background. The edges of the effect are feathered, so there's no sharp line dividing the inside and the outside of the menu (useless visual clutter).
The gray shadow just gradually tapers off with distance, suggesting that the pie menu active area extends to the edge of the screen, not confined to the borders of a circle. The labels are drawn with high contrast drop shadows around the pie menu, so they stand out and easy to read, partially overlapping the shadow so they're look like they're part of the menu.
There's special code to perform that particular combination of pixel filters in real time, to every frame just after the 3D rendering phase.
The pixelated censorship effect works the same way as the pie menu shadow, like a Photoshop filter run after the 3D rendering phase. There's a special suit type that's tagged as a "censorship" suit. It consists of bounding boxes attached to the varius bones of the skeleton that you can select to censor. So if you just want to censor the head, you attach the head censor suit to the head bone. The 3D character renderer transforms the 8 vertices but doesn't draw anything, and stashes the screen bounding box away for the pixelation filter to draw later. That's how it can censor just the crotch of naked men, but also the chests of naked girls gone wild.
-Don
Take a look and feel free: http://www.PieMenu.com
An equally interesting feature of Windows 2000 and XP that doesn't cause a resource drain is the ability to blend cursors. CursorEx is a free program for loading PNG images in to the hardware cursor space. It uses the same acceleration used to draw the cursor shadow feature. It includes some glass-like cursors as well as a set that's been anti-aliased.
Sure they didn't include a manual with the program but the options are incredibly straight forward.
There is an option when you first install it to select how to handle right-clicks. If you leave it to 'enabled', it will take full control of the right-click. Set it to "alt+shift" or similar and it will require you to "alt+shift+r-click" to access the glass2k menu. Normal right clicks will work fine.
Also, now that right click works, using alt+shift+r-click lets you set the transparancy level for each program window. Varying amounts from 0% to 100%.
This program is excellent.. people just have to read the options...
"It does have the annoying tendency to break rightclicks though"
I can't recommend strongly enough changing the settings on the 'Transparency Popup' from Right Click to Right Click + Ctrl (or + Alt) - otherwise you'll get this behaviour.
"I Know You Are But What Am I?"
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.
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
What we really need is an option to lock a windows draw order to the front, but send it's click focus to the back (or normal layering).
This is extremely useful for apps that I want to use as "window decals", like resource meters, winamp, AIM, etc.. I want them overlayed onto my screen. BUT. I dont want them to have click focus, cause then they get in the way of the foreground app. I want them draw over everything, so I can see them, but I rarely need to interact with them. If I do, I just bring them to the foreground (click focus) like I would do normally.
Doesn't that make more sense?
And OS 7.5+ could do it from, if I recall correctly, 1997 or so onward. That'd be a few years before Windows 2000, if my memory of numerals is correct.
"Not that it really matters," of course.
--- Why yes, I am the webmaster of Microsuck.com
This was carried over into OS X and its Quartz graphics layer since its inception.
Yes, this looks like the ideal addon for an IRC client. Especially Klient :)
Stardock's Object Desktop does this, IIRC. I wouldn't have any first-hand experience, since I don't use Microsoft products, and haven't for a very long time.
As previously mentioned, it doesn't work for console windows, and as I just found out, it does wierd things to media player... aww, no alpha-blended video overlays :-( (yet anyhow).
You can have animated backgrounds in Windows now? Suddenly I feel relieved that my employer is too cheap to upgrade my WinNT 4.0 box. ;-)
You too can have animated backgrounds! IE 4 or "better"; even on Win95 or NT4, has a "feature" called Active Desktop that lets you load GIFs, JPGs, and even HTML pages (complete with VBScript, oh the wonder) as backgrounds. Just pick you favorite animated GIF, set it to tile, and let the migrane follow.
Especially good images for this are phychodelic animations that change colors completely, annoying little hamsters, or quick strobe animations. Great to stick on a friends machine (warning: don't try this on someone who has epilepsy).
It gets better! Active Desktop also has features that improve your Windows experience by making the shell crash more, both by itself and when IE falls over.
The first thing we do with those NT boxes here at work is make sure that the Active Desktop "feature" is permanently disabled :)
Now I can have a slideshow running in the foreground, but still see through it to the stuff I'm working on. That's about the only cool use I can think of for this, but it's a good one, no?
Hah, anyone else see the ICQ/MSN/AOL icons in his system tray? Nothing like having 3 IM programs and being invisible in them all.
One of my friend's coworkers had his Active Desktop set to an HTML page the same colour as the standard Win desktop. In the middle was an animated GIF of the file copy dialog box. Whenever he needed a break from work, he'd set it to that page and hide all the other windows.
"I'm backing up, so I need to let it finish"
Pure genius!
It doesn't mean much now, it's built for the future.
MacOS X has this, and I can think of 2 good uses off of the top of my head. Icons in the dock become translucent when you "hide" the application. Thus in a quick glance you can see whether an app is not running, running, or running but hidden. It makes for good, logical visual feedback. I also have my terminal windows set to 70% opacity, and it comes in very handy - it's nice to be able to park it over a browser window, for instance, when doing something in a HOWTO or whatever. You get the idea. I don't think it's quite worth the vein-popping orgasmic shock the submitter felt, but it is a handy feature. I think as people become more accustomed to it, we'll see some clever, useful applications.
Algorithm:
(1) Pre-compute all combinations of background & foreground.
About 655536 entries per channel.
(2) Just use lookups to compute result (foreground 8 ) | background.
So your characters have, among their 8 bones, a crotch bone, eh? My guess at the 8 would be: crotch, mid torso, chest, head, left/right arm, left right leg.
Just get a program like MultiDesk. It gives you a very nice way of having multiple desktops. You can easily switch between them. Additionally, it easily lets one sort out their windows. One desktop for email, one for web, one for word. All easily switchable at the touch of a button.
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Let's hit it harder next time!
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.
OtakuBooty.com: Smart, funny, sexy nerds.
I can't believe all the complaints I'm reading in these threads about something that's clearly "just a toy" being front page news on slashdot. Has everyone else been asleep while the Xbox, Gamecube, MAME Cabinets, Civ III and Freeciv, Handheld N64s, Loki Games, and Quake ported to the iPaq have made up at least half the stories here in the past few months?
Slashdot would lose half its traffic if it filtered out the Games and Id Software topics by default!
Necessary? Of course not! But pretty slick, and I bet with a bit of set up time, you could rig something that would be really nice to use. Personally, I want a background that looks like nature scene with semi-transparent terminals in the foreground, and things like trees blowing gently and soothingly in the wind. And if you could link the motion to other things (when cpu load goes up, the wind gets faster and gustier and clouds roll in) then I would be really happy. But that's just me.
Visit me on #weirdness on the Galaxynet.
err, X11 doesn't have this now. the xrender extension allows some of this kind of thing. and rasterman got sidetracked from making a good window manager into making a pretty window manager that faked this sort of thing. and there were numerous xterm variants that fiddled around with allowing a bitmap as the background, but in general X doesn't have transparency/alpha blending as a window property. (and yes, if you are using xfree86 you are using code that I wrote, so perhaps I might have an idea what i'm talking about. (course i could be wrong.))
You are not alone.
OSX could do this before it even came out. It will also do all other cool GUI hacks before they are even invented. But they won't be hardware accelerated. And I own two Macs :-)
This program offers some capability that I have not seen elsewhere, because of it's ability to change -ANY- window's transparency, but it seems like there could be more rubust functionality. Also, even though Windows 2000 has had alpha blending abilities since it's release, few programs have actually used it. (Two notable exceptions, Miranda ICQ and Winamp with one of the many available plugins.) One of these such plugins, TransparentFX not only has the ability to make portions of winamp transparent, but have varying levels of transparency for when the window is out of focus, when out of focus and the mouse is over that window, and also the speed of the fade-out/fade-in between them. I'm not sure how feasible this is to do on system wide basis, but I would imagine that it wouldn't be that tough because any application could easily find out where the mouse cursor is and focus/de-focus accordingly. Another thing, although the program has the option open the transparency options on right-click, it would be nice if you could selectively have this (when you right-click on the title-bar, not just anywhere.) This seems like a cool program, but not very polished, nor worthy of posting on the front-page of slashdot. I'm not quite sure if this actually qualifies as "news" although I am glad I happened to run across this link.
well... what are you waiting for? you've obviously put some thought into something you'd like done... do it.. people do code like this because they're having FUN.
enjoying what you do is what makes getting up in the morning worthwhile. don't rant at someone spending personal time and effort, that's just silly.
It's easy to see through Microsoft "innovation".
Do not touch -Willie
DualHead is a nice solution - if you want to use a Matrox card. If you want to keep your GeForce3, it's no good. Besides, it's a silly name for a feature that's really nothing new.
Just plug in a second (ie PCI) video card. You probably won't be playing games on your second screen, and AFAIK a cheap video card is just as good for GUI stuff - as long as you aren't running at some crazy resolution, which is out of the question if you're using an old monitor.
Not so good for hardware-accelerated alpha blending, of course, which is why this is a bit OT.
The main use of a second screen is to hold tool palettes. They're invaluable if you're doing graphics work.
That's a great idea! (No, seriously, it is!) 'Course since mice don't have pressure sensors, (yet, anyway), might need for it to be a chorded click or using some alternate keystroke. Make an OSX version too, would you please? :)
No sig. Sigh. Oh, wait... Doh!
Give a hand, not a hand-out.
Its bad enough spending 10 hours a day in front of a monitor without having to look at that sort of stuff! I had eyeache within seconds of looking at the screenshot. Lovely idea, but pointless eye candy :)
Went to the optician complaining about eyeache the other day - she said "stop using computers so much". Hmm - and how did she expect I was going to pay her?
am suprised no one picked up on it!
"glass like windows" and not one comment to the effect, of course "Windows should be transparent, other wise they are called doors or walls"!
Just one other thing that maybe Windows programmrs could answer...is there a single window mode planned? I'm partially serious. (and that is really scary)
It was in OS X dp4, and I for one loved it.
Can't beat the "switch the app/window, hide the porn" trick...saves a lot of, uhh, mouse'ing.
The API is still there, but, no way to access it save for a bit of shareware that accesses it (forget the name) but 12 dollars for one function I'd use?
I think not.
Heh, "Windows(tm) now has transparency"...and nobody said a word. That's FUNNY.
Have you read the moderator guidelines? Well, have you, PUNK? (and I want a Karma: Gnarly option)
With Media Player, it's probably something to do with the fact that they're probably using an overlay surface. Besides, could you imagine trying to real-time alpha blend a movie? Ouch.
It's exactly that. Media Player, and indeed just about all media players, use overlays for various reasons; it makes taking screenshots difficult (unless you use somehting like HyperSnap DX), and it's something transparency apps like this one don't take into account.
If you want to watch translucent movies, try Sasami2k, a lovely little movie player. It can do loads of other kewl stuff, like using a movie for your wallpaper. Nice.
What about using it on a transparent flat LCD? You could give windows flags like the LetPeopleOnTheOtherSideOfTheScreenSeeThis and the TurnScreenIntoOneWayGlassSoICanStareAtThatGirlAccr ossTheOffice flags.
At the moment i think it could be used for playing qauke and doing a spreadsheet at the same time "No, im not playing quake, im _multitasking_". Or "Someone else must have been playing quake on this machine and it burned into the monitor, but really _im_ doing a spreadsheet." Also you could use it for slowing down your computer if it doesn't have one of those "Turbo" buttons for older games with no frame capping.
This comment does not represent the views or opinions of the user.
> I would guess that the only time that
> transparent windows help is if you have an OS/wm
> that does not offer workspaces or similar.
What about antialiasing? Suppose you have a window of irregular (non-rectangular) shape, You don't want its edges to appear jaggy, and can't predict the color of the background (not to mention background images/wallpapers, lower windows etc.).
The only way to achieve proper anti-aliased edges would be to use semi-transparent pixels at the edges.
And of course we can imagine windows which use transparent areas as a part of their design.
Have you seen various skins to the K-jofol audio player? I'm sure their authors would love to put their hands on an alpha-channel capable windowing system...
I wish Slashdot would give some people the courtesy of either telling them before they post a link to their page or finding a way to mirror the page themselves. There are quite a few reasons for this... monetary, bandwidth, benefit of slashdot readers, and probably more than I have cited. I don't know the legalities of mirroring pages in the context of news or whatever, but I think it would be something to look into. It may be more costly to slashdot, but I am sure there are enough people who read these pages that have the bandwidth to help mirror, and slashdot could possibly give some kind of compensation. I've never had a link here, but it's just something I could see as being a general improvement. Thanks, LowAmmoWarning
We could all benefit from my education.
Say
Go ahead. Mod me down more you dumb fucks. Karma on Slashdot is not linearly related to the real thing, as you will soon find out.
Zero__Kelvin
Guns don't kill people; Physics kills people! - John Lithgow as Dick Solomon on Third Rock From The Sun
To be honest, it's refreshing to see some reporting from the other side of the fence make it onto /. Please continue doing it. Just not every day, ok? ;)
would someone mind mirroring the exe? (assuming there is nothing against doing this in any applicable lisense)
I wanna see if it works with video overlays. (mm...watching tv and bein able to see through it)
Troll?????????
Gimme a break, modders. "Troll" shouldn't even be an option with a score of 4 or higher.
If I were you, I'd bookmark this post, so if you ever find yourself idly wondering why Bill Gates is a billionaire while you're a ramen-eating graduate student, you'll be able to find it easily and remember why.
-- the most controversial site on the Web
What _would_ be a useful Windows UI hack would be some kind of on-the-fly conversion of context menus into pie-style menus... I don't even know whether this is possible, but it's a neat idea.
We can finally make pop up adds truly disappear!
The man who trades freedom for security does not deserve nor will he ever receive either. - Benjamin Franklin
Could someone PLEASE post a mirror? It looks like their entire site has disappeared... I would really like to try this out. =D
Wow... I can't seem to get away from metamodding. Seems like every day, "Have you metamodded lately?" Yup. Sure did.
But yes, Zero, I personally have it out for you.
Stay in view, please.
Tatsujin
When it comes to stuff like this Linux is way behind.
While Linux has KDE and Gnome, and Linux is easy to use, it lacks little nice extras that OSX and WindowsXP has.
Someone needs to start an open source project which purpose is just to create specific effects for the linux desktop.
From what i hear its difficult and requires editing Xfree86, well lets do it.
Start a project, and if you want to get paid, then ask for donations, Ill donate 5 bucks (if everyone else did that same we'd have a product)
If you use Linux, please help development of Autopac
I'm just waiting for someone to write a program to SWITCH THE FUCKING THING OFF.
<flamebait>
Isn't it great having a window manager that does all this transparency and crap without even giving you the option of running at a sensible speed?
2x faster my arse.
</flamebait>
"I think he was truly surprised at how little I cared about how big a market the Mac had" - Linus on Jobs
It's a program called Transperizer, search for it on google. It can monitor certain windows I believe, and can do varying levels of transparency.
Glass2k is still availible for download from chime.tv:
http://www.chime.tv/products/glass2k/Glass2k.exe
Sorry, but OSX beat everyone to the finish on this one. Apple has had OSX out since March and it's been doing the transparency thing since day one. Sorry guys, but Apple beat MS to market on this one, and it's always turned on.
Not to mention that this has been on Linux for quite some time now. DirectFB supports translucent windows, as do a few other things (including KDE3, as mentioned previously). It's not terribly useful yet, as this would require rethinking much of the way people design GUIs, but some day in the future this could prove to be quite useful, especially in virtual reality environments.
A solution to the problem with music today
... blue screen transparency? :)
my blog
troll (tról) n. A poster who does not hypocritically slander Redmond-based software developers.
After reading your tag line, I'm not sure how to take your post. Are you just seriously lacking in critical thinking skills, or are you trolling? Either way your post should be modded down for the very reasons pointed out by others here. Primarily because you've done nothing to show that the hypocrisy that you speak of exists. Some people think one way, others think another way. That isn't hypocrisy. But you probably knew that.
It's not enough to bash in heads, you've got to bash in minds. - Captain Hammer
http://www.patchou.com/msgplus/index.html hello world
Uhhh... you guys _do_ know that OS X does this, and that it's rpedecessor, OpenStep also does it. This is old news... nice to see Microsoft trying thought. Hahahaha.
"Politicians find new names for institutions which under old names have become odious to the people."
The speed for the extension, BTW is REALLY good. I was playing with a different program (same concept, though, hooks into the GDI) a few months ago, and you can make Internet explorer transparent and run a high-res video under it, all without any flicker or jerkiness. The ironic thing is that even with transparency, IE still performs better than Konqueror...
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
well, first of all, this is not exactly new. there has been fake alpha blending for a while, and the real stuff isnt exactly that revolutionary either. second, i dont know about the author, but in my opinion its UUUUUUGGGGLLYYY!!! on top of that, what is good about it? yuo know what the windows under the current one look like? i cant say that is exactly a functional improvement. when a window is hidden under others, seeing it because of the transparency of the one on top doesnt help me get to it. plus, how do you tell which one is on top if there are 2 windows pretty much entirely on top of each other!
.
BSD is for people who love UNIX. Linux is for those who hate Microsoft.
What I mean is that, well, it is a nice effect and all, but why would you want to have the whole app transparent. IMHO This should be done by the application programmer so that only those parts of the GUI that actually have use for it have transparency.
This is just a freeware third party app, not a critical Windows element, so it doesn't have to be all that useful. It's just a neat trick, as the story suggests.
.sig: Open Source, Open Mind
Actually, Microsoft did invent the wheel.
"I think he was truly surprised at how little I cared about how big a market the Mac had" - Linus on Jobs
Excellent example. Very useful!
The API call that is used for Alpha Blending on windows is called AlphaBlend().
The minimum requirements (at the bottom of the page) for it are Win98 or better and Win2000 or better (that means Me and XP are also supported).
Windows 95 and NT 4.0 are not supported, but here is a link to do Aplha Blending on multiple Windows platform.
Transparency in menus makes lots of sense to me but transparency in apps means eye strain I think. I like high contrast interfaces without to many nasty color clashes.. something my eyes can work with easily. Not see-thru apps. I don't want to see four windows stacked at the same time. I want more powerful menus that let me access what I want faster. I wasn't impressed with transparent windows in Linux or MacOS and I'm not impressed to see it on Windows. :)
At what price learning? At what cost wisdom? The price is a man's peace of mind, and the cost is his life.
You might like to try FreeShade. The next beta (due "soon") has alpha toggling/sliding. The current beta does shading (duh!), single click sinking, and various other natty doodads.
__
Arse
Don't people on macs have the tendency to push a button the the keyboard and then click?
Just thought I might point it out
It would be perfect if you had a full screen tv tuner card and wanted to type emails while leaving the TV screen running behind it.
I know tv tuners do some special "magic" to make the image appear on the screen. Don't they usually replace Pink or something like that?
I'm not sure if that would pose a problem or not, but a lot of times, I fire up an email and I can either make the window really tiny so I can still see the TV or I can make it bigger and constantly minimize.
I know it only cuts out one or two steps, but so does the mouse right?
Another use would be if you were using an IM with a tech and were tailing a logfile through ssh and you were conversing about the results of the logfile as they appeared.
You could resize, but I have a 17" monitor and I like to use the whole thing all at once. I can either fit everything on it, or I can set transparencies and add "depth" to my monitor.
The man who trades freedom for security does not deserve nor will he ever receive either. - Benjamin Franklin
How many people here went through school and actually realised there is no such thing as partially transparent?
The word you want is translucent. DO YOU HEAR ME ROAR! TRANSLUCENT!!!
I think I'll go lie down now ...
Have a look at the terminology.
There are a few misguided people who passionately hate pie menus, like the guy who invented LED watches with the two buttons for setting the time, that you have to press again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again.
The same guy wants the web browser to have just one button, that you press every time you want to see a new web page. If you want to go back and see a page you've seen before, you have to keep pressing the button again and again, until you've seen every page on the web, then it cycles back around to the ones you've seen before.
Some people simply have a stake in computers being hard to use, and they feel threatened when something comes along that's better and easier than whatever else they put all their time into learning. That's why so many monolinguistic Perl programmers hate Python so much. They call it job security, but I call it self imposed hell.
Pie menus: It's not just a good idea, it's Fitts' Law!
-Don
Take a look and feel free: http://www.PieMenu.com
I don't think anyone pointed this out yet, but OS X has per-pixel alpha blending in addition to per-window alpha blending. (i.e. different parts of a window can all have different transparency WRT the things behind the window)
Thank you for the heads up. I saved it as a mht and generated a PDF, for posterity.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
toggles in the window menu for...
never on top
always on top
translucent
The user can easily raise a window by clicking on the title bar or the resize border, or using alt+tab
You are clearly working on a personal, ludicrously intellectually non-rigourous concept of "easily", which means it is no longer worth discussing the matter with you.
-- the most controversial site on the Web
Everyone keeps bringing up the idea of a transparent "always on top" application like WinAmp running in front of the window with the focus. The problem with this idea is that no matter how transparent the front window becomes it still blocks you from using the mouse to select items/text on the obscured window. A more practical application would be to place the secondary application below a semi-transparent top level application. For example, I would far rather place a television tuner application in the background and watch it *through* my foreground task than have to move it around when I need to click on something under it. A hot key or widget to toggle the opacity between two set levels would be a real benefit.
I use the Mosfet translucent window theme for KDE and like it. Unfortunately it isn't true transparency as the background image is not updated while the menu is open. I would assume it's the difficulty of doing large-scale alpha blending on an ongoing basis that is preventing the type of windowing I desire.
First to say that this option does look kinda nice..
But from a usability perspective it is just not
very usefull because it doesn't help you be more
productive. Besides usually it just makes most
documents unreadable. Give me the alt-leftmousebutton-drag-window-around option instead. That just helps not having to select the
window dragbar... which makes life a lot easier..
MS would have included it in Windows if it made MS more money, gave them more market share, sodomized the competition, *and* if it helped the user experience. If it just helped the user experience it would be low on their development list, since their list looks like:
1) More money
2) More Market Share
3) Sodomize the competition
56583) Improve user experience
I still find it hard to believe you have not tried a system that does not raise the windows when you click on them. BlackBox by default raises the window on clicks (so did NeXTStep, which BlackBox copies). Last time I tried it it was impossible to turn off this behavior unless you also switched to point-to-type.
If raising to type is so important, why does MicroSoft (and Gnome and KDE) go through all this trouble of making toolbars and docks and non-modal dialog boxes that stay on top even though you can interact with the lower windows? The answer is that in fact they are working around a basic design error by "fixing" it in the specific cases where it is most annoying.
This is exactly the same as the state of word processors in 1980 or so. It took ages (like 4 years or more) for the concepts of always-on insert mode and of a newline being a character you could insert and delete like any other from appearing in commercial word processors, despite ten years or more of the existence of such ideas in Emacs or other "professional software". The reason was a total paranoid fear of being "confusing" to the end user, and this was backed up by bogus tests by people who were not novice users, but instead highly experienced users conditioned by years of overtype word processors and thus unable to handle the slightest change in behavior of their programs.
I worked on a word processor then and they had us dedicate 3 pages (!) to describing the optional insertion mode and refused to allow us to default to insert mode being on at startup.
Then in 1984 the Macintosh came out, for *real* novice users, and, guess what, the text editing was in insert *ALL THE TIME* and they spend ZERO pages in their very friendly manual explaining it!
I think the same thing is true of click-to-raise (and click-to-type, but that is another battle) and someday you will wonder how you ever believed differently.
You may think I am full of shit, but I know for a fact that you have not used a non-click-to-raise system for any serious amount of time.
As many have pointed out already the tools to do this have been in Windows (in GDI+) since betas of 2000. I and I'm sure countless others at least made an application with a 50% transparent main window before we realised you just couldn't see the damn thing...
The trick is to make the window background for example black and 50% opaque, but draw the titlebar and the text in the window in 100% opaque. Now you can see the window properly!
This is actually quite tricky because the opacity affects the whole window. What I ended up doing was to have a window with a richtext on it with its background set to transparent (as in not there at all), and a home-drawn titlebar and buttons. Then you have to create a blank window the same size as it set to be all black 50% opaque and cunningly move it around under the other window.
There are a few problems though:
a) Getting the zorder right is annoying (so the 50% opaque window doesn't come on top of the text window)
b) Because the richtext is "transparent" mouse clicks on spaces instead of words go right through to the blank, alpha-blended window underneath.
c) Even if you create a console process and hook its stdout, stderr and stdin so you can have your own alpha-blended terminal (yay!) it doesn't really work because far too many console programs cheat and don't use the stardard streams. (I haven't tried with Cygwin yet though- all of those programs might work...)
graspee
It's probably because users are used to using "Search" engines and not "Find" engines, to the dim ones out there, it might be more appealing if it is called "Search"
.sig: Open Source, Open Mind