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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 :)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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!"
...any slashdotter who is a Windows developer, and had the idea in the first place. For the rest of us, we need somebody else to do it and then post a link to the download.
If only there were some site that allowed links like this to be posted to the interested geek masses. It'd really be appropriate on a site like that.
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.
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.
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.
MacOS X does this trick natively. The only times I have found it useful is for system monitoring windows that really need to be visible all the time but you which you don't want to kill your deskspace. In OSX, each window has adjustable opacity - the linked JPEG seems to show all windows the same - that would be ultra crap. I'd almost forgotten how pug-ugly Windows is. Shudder.
That was classic intercourse!
Windows 2000/XP also does this natively. It simply doesn't expose per-window control of it through the UI. Each window does have its own alpha level, and it's up to the programmer to decide if s/he wants all windows the same or not. For a good example, check out Lucidamp, a Winamp plugin that allows you to set varying levels of alpha transparency on each of the four main Winamp windows, and also works with the Mikroamp Winamp plugin.
Also, please note that Windows 2000 did this before OS X did this. Not that it matters, but it's true.
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.
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.
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
If you don't use a screensaver, eventually your windows desktop will be burnt into your monitor with disastrous results
It's good to see that transparency is now accelerated through the Windows nVidia drivers. Hopefully this will further improve Mac OS X window performance if similar changes are integrated into the Mac nVidia drivers.
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.
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
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.
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.
...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.
Don't judge the usefulness of transparancy by one single image that just shows how it could be used if you were an utter ididot.
... anything you would like to keep half an eye on.
Transparancy in some small floating windows would be quite nice, but I doubt I would use it for windows like wordprocessors, browsers, and such. Transparancy in all windows would indeed not be useful at all, at least IMHO.
eg. I would love to have a bit larger clock, always visible, but never obscuring underlying (non-transparant) windows. Or a IM contactlist, or winamp, or a (quake-)server monitoring app, or
karma capped
the linked JPEG seems to show all windows the same
...
...
It does allow you to give each window a different transparency. Whatever good that does
It does have the annoying tendency to break rightclicks though, if it's running and you rightclick (normal Windows behavior, I'd say), the program's shortcut menu pops up instead of the menu you'd expect.
Also, clicking on the icon it puts in the taskbar yields a shortcut menu that's hidden from sight (at least in Windows XP): only the top edge of the menu appears, the rest hides somewhere below your actual screen area. But then this kind of thing tends to happen a lot in the New! Improved! Windows, so maybe it's not their fault
Oh well, it's a cute little app, nothing more, so who cares
News and bla for computer musicians: http://lomechanik.net/
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.
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
The Windows editor "Textpad" uses the "Transparent Dialog Boxes" options just like this - very cool
BTW I think that TextPad is the BEST windows editor out there, bar none - now we won't talk about editors under *inx, don't want to start a flame war
-- 73 de KG2V For the Children - RKBA! "You are what you do when it counts" - the Masso
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
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.
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?
This was carried over into OS X and its Quartz graphics layer since its inception.
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.
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?
Algorithm:
(1) Pre-compute all combinations of background & foreground.
About 655536 entries per channel.
(2) Just use lookups to compute result (foreground 8 ) | background.
"Also, please note that Windows 2000 did this before OS X did this. Not that it matters, but it's true."
Not really. The system that Mac OS X uses is from the NeXT OS. So, it predates Windows 2000.
I have a website. It's about Macs.
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!
Not to bust your bubble or anything, but the "transparent" terminal hack is old. It is not done with per-window alpha transparency. It just maps the root background to the terminal background with an appropriate offset and darkening. This is obvious if you look at the screenshot. The lower portion of the ./sftp window does not show through into the terminal.
It is a clever, fast hack and probably more useful than honest-to-goodness alpha transparency. Careful choice of background image and foreground text color can keep the term actually legible, which is not necessarily the case with full transparency. Having said all of that, it has been in rxvt, aterm, and countless others for a long time.
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.
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.
How to solve most of our problems: 1.Lots of nuclear plants. 2.Cure aging.
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.
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?
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
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)
- menus fading in/out
- explorer drag-drop
transparent windows are cool, but to most users i'm sure they're confusing as hell - probably why MS didn't go overboard on the effect.
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
Glass2k is still availible for download from chime.tv:
http://www.chime.tv/products/glass2k/Glass2k.exe
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
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...
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're right, I should have taken a closer look before opening my big mouth. I'll still wager, however, that breaking rightclicks by default is rather iffy.
Oh well, I just downloaded the thing, ran it for two minutes to see what it did and then chucked it out. I don't like transparent Word-documents that much, really.
News and bla for computer musicians: http://lomechanik.net/
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
The reason that Mac OS X users will call the Windows 2000 method a hack is that we've used both. Almost every Mac user bumps into Windows from time to time, and many of us run a copy in Virtual PC because it's easy and cheap (VirtualPC is like $50).
... they're just a feature of a buffered window ... part of a 32-bit bitmap.
What you see on the screen in Mac OS X is a proper composite of multiple 32-bit images (a 32-bit image is a 24-bit image with an 8-bit mask that specifies 256 levels of transparency), just like an artist would make. The composite that you see on the display is made in real-time by the window manager and is totally buffered. It is just as easy for an app to be 50% opaque (a 50% gray mask) as it is to be 100% opaque (a black mask). There are no "tricks". On Mac OS X, the drop shadows are not constantly recalculated and redrawn
The difference is like comparing lighting effects from Photoshop with lighting effects in Maya. In Photoshop, you can take a 2D image and play with a filter until your 2D image looks like it's got a sun shining on it (typically you do this to get a little extra texture). In Maya, you put a sun in the sky and everything just gets lit up correctly.
All this talk about Mac OS X "not having hardware acceleration for transparency" is plain wrong. It comes from an Apple engineer talking about Aqua in mid-2000 or so and saying that there are some functions that currently can't be accelerated BECAUSE THE GRAPHICS PROCESSORS DON'T ACCELERATE THEM YET. The NVIDIA or ATI chips just don't do those calculations. However, on the Mac, the G4 chip has an Altivec co-processor that DOES do these kinds of calculations, because these calculations are the very things that legions of artists and video editors do everyday all day with Mac software. In other words, Mac OS X is designed to meet the needs of its users, and its GUI also takes advantage of that graphics power. Same hardware that can finish a whole day of work in Photoshop in half the time it takes a P4 to do the same is being put to work in the Mac OS X GUI.
... you get the responsiveness no matter what you're doing in the background.
I recently got a new PowerBook G4, and when I hooked it up to a second display under Mac OS X 10.1, the second display was clearly not hardware accelerated and was much slower. In Mac OS X 10.1.1, which came out just after this notebook, the acceleration for the second display was added, and it is an obvious improvement. I mean, if an NVIDIA card can accelerate Quake, don't you think it can accelerate Aqua? Aqua is full of the same kinds of OpenGL calls and methods.
So, to sum it up: current graphics hardware accelerates the functions it is designed to accelerate on both platforms (it's the same hardware, after all), while on Windows, the CPU picks up the rest, and on Mac OS X, Altivec and then the core CPU picks up the rest. Combined with the efficient, modern design of the Mac OS X window manager, it's trivial to have real drop shadows on windows in Mac OS X, not tricks or hacks necessary. Especially with the great multitasking, the user is not being robbed of CPU cycles on a modern machine. I don't know that I've ever felt CPU hungry in Mac OS X, running on a PowerBook G4 and PowerMac G4. The other day I had something rendering in ArtMatic in the background, another thing rendering in Bryce in the background, with both apps hidden, and I was working in the Finder and forgot that both those things were going on, and this is on a notebook. If I stopped what I was doing, my renders would finish a little faster, but who cares? I just want to keep working and let the computer use the cycles I'm not using to do those renders. Mac OS X's GUI is not quite as snappy as Mac OS 9's on the same hardware, but Mac OS X's GUI doesn't stop for anybody
A side note: don't believe anything you hear about Macs from anyone who hasn't used them to do real work. Every other Windows user has a strong opinion on the Mac and absolutely nothing relevant to say. You can try a Mac all day long at the Apple Store (that's what they're for), so there really is no excuse for just contributing ignorant noise to the conversation. (I'm not speaking of any specific post in this thread, just in general about the level of actual information contained in any conversation about Macs amongst people who haven't used them.)
QuickTime 5 also supports skinning the "player", so that your whole QuickTime movie floats on the desktop, any shape, any size, any use of transparency that you want. Audion is a Mac MP3 player that has always had great transparency features, but under OS X it doesn't have to do all the work itself.
There's too much focus in these posts on the idea of rectangular windows being made translucent. Most of the time, a mask has fully transparent areas that make the whole image appear to be non-rectangular. Mac OS X windows are not even rectangular, their title bars have rounded edges. That is a much better use for masks than just making everything translucent. An "alpha mask" is an 8-bit image, but most posters here are thinking of situations where you would have a solid gray mask, making the graphic translucent from top to bottom. Ugh.
Another good use for transparency is seen when you press the keyboard volume controls on a Mac. A nearly-transparent overlay appears near the bottom of the display with a small meter that shows where the volume is and how you're changing it. It doesn't block what you're doing, or even stop you from reading what's under it, but provides great feedback to your actions. Same with the brightness controls, and with Sticky Keys if you have them activated.
Anything that doesn't appear to be completely rectangular is using a mask. A coder would focus on "alpha-blending" API's, but an artist is just like, "ho-hum, a mask". Most objects in the real world are not perfectly rectangular. If you want to represent those objects on a display, you need to use a mask. It's so basic and elemental and necessary that to argue against transparency in a GUI is missing the bigger picture. Every GUI before Mac OS X is prologue. We are in a time where the graphics adapters and CPU's can handle real graphics, even in a file manager, if the software is done right.
On the Mac, Command+clicking a window enables you to drag it around, no matter what its stacking order (Mac OS 9 or X). Also, clicking a window widget works no matter what the window's stacking order, on Mac OS X.
> In MacOSX, this feature has been usefully
> implemented once to my knowledge.
What about the rounded corners of windows, the translucent volume and brightness adjustment meters, the translucency of dragged icons so you can see your drop target?
It's gimmicky to make an entire window partially transparent, but it's not gimmicky to use 32-bit graphics, or masks. Without a mask, a graphic is just a plain rectangle.
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.