OpenGL Presentation at Siggraph Available

Visigothe writes "Siggraph has made available the Apple Quartz Extreme Demonstration PDF. The PDF has an overview of some interesting Quartz Extreme features, including the OpenGL calls that are made, as well as the new OpenGL extensions that Apple created for their upcoming Jaguar release. This is going to be a very interesting window system indeed!"

Comments

Re:OpenGL contributions

[inkfox]

The .pdf didn't indicate (it's a PR/marketing piece,) so I'm assuming that the new extensions will be contributed to the OpenGL folks for inclusion. Is this correct? If so, a very nice contribution by the Apple folks!

The wording is a little deceptive.

Most of these are extensions already existing for Windows and other OpenGL ports. NVidia example. ATI example. What they're basically saying is that the Mac drivers are caught up, and/or use of the extension is new to Jaguar's version of the Quartz engine.

There are a few Apple-specific extensions in there, but they're very specially purposed to Quartz' preferred data formats. Essentially, they're just a way to reduce the portability of the system (restricted pixel formats) in favor of some speed boosts, which is a pretty fair tradeoff if you're a company like Apple who only deals with a pocketful of vendors who make special concessions. You wouldn't want these back in OpenGL main.

There's some damned fine engineering going on at Apple, as always. But there's also the familiar nice spin, though. I wish they'd keep that much out of the technical presentations, or at least would more clearly mark it as such.

Wild Predictions

[BandwidthHog]

I've been saying for a while (ever since I first switched to OS X back in the 10.0.3 days) that the whole Aqua thing was mostly a placeholder. Every major shortcoming and non-sensical policy could be explained that way.

Why try to prevent theming? Because what was coming would utterly break any theming software imaginable.

Why the clunky Finder and Dock? Because they were mere halfway points in the journey, to get people used to a crude version of the real thing so that it wouldn't feel quite so alien when it finally arrives.

What journey? To a fully native OpenGL-based 3D windowing environment. Even this, Quartz Extreme, is just a small step along the way, but it's at this point that it starts becoming obvious. The magnification effect of the Dock isn't just cool eye candy, it's a 2D approximation of their long-term ideas.

Mark my words: This clunky 2D Aqua we've got now will be long gone in two years or less. In hindsight it will be obvious that it was just transitional. See how many bad design decisions you can explain away this way?

Re:Wild Predictions

[BitGeek]

It its done right, you'd want it for the same reasons you want a GUI over the command line.

Pointing out that there are many people who would prefer the command line-- even think its *faster*.
I don't think Apple's going 3D for the UI any time soon...

But you can't deny that with 10.2 the OS X UI is way ahead of anything else that's out there.

People who have never used it often dismiss it as "eye candy"... these are the same people who think the new imac is just a design statement because they don't realize how useful the movable display is-- after all, *they're* happy and they haven't needed to move their piano weighted display.

Aqua is Aqua not because its pretty- Its pretty because it makes it a LOT easier to look at for hours on end and a lot easier to use-- meaning you get things done faster.

This is the next step towards making it even prettier, smoother, and easier to use.

And I'd say apple's extended its normal 2 year lead over the rest of the industry to a 5 year lead with this. I can't imagine Linux doing this within the decade, and Microsoft will have a knockoff in 5 years that meets the checkmark requirements but doesn't really work that great.

I have a friend who keeps asking me "so, why don't you put linux on that thing". I like linux, and have used it extensively, and actually intended to make one of my boxes a linux server, but after installing it, never booted it again. Why bother? it takes work to use.... the Mac user experience takes NO WORK to use, you just use it. Which means my time is spent programming.

This is a freedom that you have to experience to understand... so those of you who poo poo OS X, I encourage you to try it out for awhile and see what all the fuss is about. Don't just assume its those "mac heads ranting". You'll be missing out.

Re:Wild Predictions

[foobar104]

As a matter of fact, I'm using OS X right now. When I'm wearing my "proposal writer" hat, I sit in front of it 8 or 10 hours a day. This week, it's "proposal writer" time.

The revolutionary thing about Aqua isn't that it's pretty-- as you pointed out. It's how incredibly simple it is. That's why I balk at the idea of an interactive 3D UI. It's not simple, and it won't be simple until our input devices change dramatically. The mouse is an acceptable input device for now because it's not too hard for the mind to associate moving left-right-up-down on the tabletop with moving left-right-up-down on the screen. That's not too bad. But learning to navigate a 3D interface with a mouse is hard. You either have to throw in a number of new mouse buttons that alter the axis of focus as you move the mouse-- which is just heaven for us RSI sufferers, let me tell you-- or you end up "driving" or "flying" through the UI. That's not simple. It sucks.

On the other hand, a true 3D UI might make sense in an immersive environment. (So how do you spell "immersive," anyway?) I remember reading years ago about a Media Lab project called "Put That There" that combined some voice recognition technology with some kind of body-tracking technology. The idea is that you could point at a thing on a wall-sized screen and say "Put that..." and point somewhere else and say, "there." The computer would read your voice and your gesture to figure out what you meant. I don't know how far they took this, but it's a neat idea. Eerily similar to the "look at me! look at me!" computers in Minority Report.

So until our whole idea of what a computer is and how we interact with it changes, I think 3D UIs are going to continue to be a terrible idea.

Re:Wild Predictions

[BandwidthHog]

To the naysayers: I didn't mean fully immersive 3D like SysQuake; I meant only as 3D as it needs to be. One example is the Dock's auto-magnify feature. The concept is that everything's there; whatever has focus will just be more there.

Same with the drop shadowing on all windows: they only use two levels, foreground and background, but the foreground item (never more than one) has twice as much shadow as everything else. Everything not at the front layer has less shadow, making it further away from the user, and some transparency to it's title bar, implying, to me anyway, distance blurring.

I've been wondering what ancestral role (if any) the multi-column view will have in any forthcoming 2.5D/3D GUI. Any ideas, or is it just a cool NeXT holdover wiht no future in the 21st century?

There's a full 3D file browser called 3DOSX that give at least some idea of what's possible. If nothing else, it'll make you realize that cubes and large, flat surfaces (with their need for more axes of control) aren't the only concievable 3D workspace.

saw this yesterday

[paradesign]

what interested me the most was the absolute limitless posibility of enhancements, and hacks. mind you 3d can go from flat like QE and South Park(they use Alias|Wavefront software) to Quake 3. i wonder when OSX is going to show more of its 3d nature soon. like 3d modeled icons would be cool, and theyd animate when you clicked them, like the dock icons. or a screensaver that replaced the defailt lighting to two spotlights that dance around on your desktop, with real shadows.

theres plenty of good GLhackers out there, itll be interesting to se what they can do, mac kack 2003/4 will be prove interesting.

It's very nice

[zephc]

"Hi. I'm Steve Jobs, and here at Apple we've done in 1 year or less what the Berlin Group has been trying to do for years now."

Re:Why don't you just get a REAL operating system.

[DavidRavenMoon]

I chose Microsoft products because of their performance, stability and reasonable prices!

HA HA HA HA HA HA HA!

Let's see, reasonable prices... $299 for XP Pro Vs. $129 for Mac OS X.

Stability? Ha ha ha ha ha! Yeah, ok.

Multimedia Answers: Macintosh poses fewer problems than Windows

"If you are looking for a new computer and are open to a superior ownership and computing experience, look at an Apple before you buy," states Don Lindich of the Post-Gazette. The "Switch" campaign struck a chord because "with a Mac, programs and peripherals install without fuss, and there are no more missing .dll files, hardware or software conflicts, system slowdowns or surprise crashes. The last time I was forced to reboot my Macintosh was eight months ago, and it was my fault that it crashed."

"When I use a Windows machine, I have to reboot two or three times a day. Though Macs are the computer of choice of most creative professionals in the art, advertising, music, movie and publishing worlds, it seems to me that home users need them the most."

"Not only do Macs really work, they are effortlessly intuitive and fun to use. Switching to Macintosh, I traded Windows' 'Blue Screen of Death' for the Mac OS X (OS 10) 'Blue Screen of Life,' as I like to call it."

Why don't you just come out and say there's more software for you to pirate! Be honest now.