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Translucent Windows for X using OpenGL
Anonymous Coward writes "Take a look at this! This guy is working on an OpenGL backend for X. But he needs pizza and some new hardware. He's on a TNT2 for heaven sake!"
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Finally translucent windows will be coherent since they'll show the window beneath them instead of the background image :)
Man, the boundaries of science sure have expanded in recent years...
Everybody seems to be obsessed with all this "3D-accelerated desktop" stuff but IMHO it's all overrated.
Using OpenGL will not automatically make everything faster. Heck, I wouldn't be surprised if some things become slower. OpenGL is good for 3D stuff, but sucks for 2D stuff. Ever tried blitting in OpenGL? Slooooooooow. And guess what? Most applications use 2D drawing primitives.
The biggest performance bottlenecks are, and have always been: 1) the driver 2) the kernel.
2 has already been addressed (my system flies with these patches; it's even faster than Windows!). The upcoming 2.6 kernel will be amazing.
1 remains a problem. X's architecture doesn't cause the slowness, it's all in the driver! If the driver doesn't implement all OpenGL features then you'll still be stuck with slow drawing speed (or maybe even slower, since emulating OpenGL is slow beyond imagination. ever tried running TuxRacer in plain non-accelerated Mesa?)
In an update to our earlier article - X hogs network resources, we now present - "TransluXent hogs local *and* network resources."
This sig is empty.
Many people have begun saying that the Linux Operating System is Ready for the desktop market. For normal people to use instead of Windows as their exclusive operating system, and yet this is news worthy because someone finally brought this feature of truly transparent Windows to Linux.
Now do not get me wrong here, this is cool as hell, I'm glad someone is working on it but for someone to finally start bringing OpenGL as a backend after all these years is sad. It should have happened a long time ago. The X Windows System is not even capable enough yet on it's back end to be a desktop.
Anyway for people working on this project. good job.
"...did the tnt2 even support opengl!!"
What do you think the answer is? Sheesh.
And you reckon?
Two more uses besides alpha blending that instantly spring to mind:
- scaling (with interpolation)
- color depth independance
without the underlying application having to know about this at all!
The Amiga's are gonna have something similar, only with menus. Of course, their dockies make it even better.
AmigaForever!!!
Really?! That's great! I'll just go download the sources off a local mirror and install...
Oh, that's right. It's not free. Well, maybe now you understand why some of us are excited.
Yeah, but it *does* mean kick-ass translucent windows that actually show the window behind it. Yeah, yeah, it already exists on Mac OS X...whatever ....we're talking true transparent windows for X! :)
My journal has hot
> its dead already.
It's not dead, it's pining for the fjords.
If I'm not mistaken, recent Windows use the 3D acceleration to draw all 2D operations, which means they can accelerate everything. I'd love to see XFree do the same thing. Really, this is more than a nice hack.
'Nothing the Mac doesn't do already'
Not yet I suppose, but that doesn't mean the project won't turn into something the Mac doesn't do.
It would be nice to see the active window more opaque than the in-active windows. (maybe even blue/grey tint based on z)
thank God the internet isn't a human right.
Just as a matter of interest, how long has MS Windows had translucent windows? (I mean included with the OS, not as an extra application). I've never used them so I don't know.
Reality is defined by the maddest person in the room
The guy is working hungry and with poor resources, and you throw rocks in his webserver! Thanks slashdot!
Yep, the site is dead, that must be a record.
Personally, I'd be a lot more excited if someone was working on a useable desktop that used less bandwidth, especially in terms of network traffic with remote sessions. The amount of bloat on KDE, for example, gets worse with each new release, and it is killing my local network.
Alternatively, I suppose I could go for an older window manager that makes DOS look futuristic.
Please, can't someone come up with a Linux Window manager that doesn't give Windows users hysterics, but which can run over, say, a dial-up connection at a reasonable speed? In other words, something that performs a bit like MS Terminal Server (the 2000 version, let alone the XP 16-bit one)? I shouldn't need a gigabit backbone to run 10 diskless terminals...
Virtually serving coffee
Why do we need a "3D-accelerated desktop" or "translucent windows" in order to "succeed on the desktop"?
Win95/98/ME didn't have either. Were they ready for the desktop? People said they are.
Translucent windows are only eyecandy and can actually decrease productivity. When I'm typing a report I want to concentrate on my report, not all the windows below my word processor!
Translucency is nice but it's not a requirement.
This is being discussed here.
a hardware accelerated desktop would be more power to us. that's what they did with aqua quartz right ?
What kinda question is that...?
"...did the tnt2 even support opengl!!"
Sadly, it wasn't. It was an exclamation. Just goes to show, geekiness and intelligence are not prerequisites of each other.
Spiked, rhetorical questions and sarcasm fare a lot better when accompanied by grammar.
Could somebody mirror the image.
It timeout on me.
I don't know about you but when I'm reading a webpage, I want to concentrate on the webpage, not everything below it.
When I'm writing a report, I want to concentrate on my word processor, not all the windows below it.
Translucent windows is eyecandy and good for demonstrations, but that's pretty much it. Other than that, they're usability nightmares and harm productivity.
Mirror List
Mouse powered Chips, Open source Processors and Lego
It has had native support for alpha blending blitting since Windows 98. Translucent windows have been in there since Windows 2000.
s oftware=orselli - I can say they're pretty damn cool.
As someone who's been working with them a lot recently - http://www.chrisseaton.com/software/software.php?
50 fps when blending a window half the size of the screen is typical in my (very heavy and as yet unoptmised) app - no flickering at all.
More power to us? How? In what way? I would hardly call translucent windows and shadows "more power", it's just eyecandy and doesn't improve my productivity.
Quartz Extreme uses OpenGL acceleration for window compositing, but the actual drawing inside the window is still rendered in software.
Heck, when it comes to raw drawing speed, Quartz is actually slow.
I've been puzzled by transparent/translucent window fluff.
What is the point? Other than chewing up graphics card cycles.
If you have one window and a black background then super. Kinda just like what I have now. But if you are trying to code in vi, and that window is over slashdot, and that window is over irc you can't see anything!
Please tell me what I'm missing.
Windows 2000 was the first version of Windows that added OS-level translucency support... so I guess it's been around 3 years now.
Personally, I like the mouse pointer shadow and dragging translucent icons around, but I think translucent windows in general, and that fade in/fade out of menus is annoying and lame.
For those who keep talking about how windows has been 3d accelerated for ages or whatever, that's untrue. Windows did not care about 3d acceleration before Win2k, and I *believe* it still uses all 2d rendering for the new layered window stuff in 2k/XP (but I could be wrong - I know that there is a hardware accelerated alpha blit function available on every windows platform from 98 on). However, the new layered window stuff *does* buffer windows in offscreen 'textures' instead of rendering them directly to the display. But as anyone who's tried resizing a large transparent window knows, it's nothing to write home about.
Aqua, if memory serves, stores all windows and bitmaps in offscreen texture buffers, does almost all primitive rendering with hardware primitives, and then composites it all onscreen using quads (or triangles, whatever) and applies various rendering effects to it.
This system seems to simply buffer individual windows in VRam, render to them in software, and composite them in realtime using the hardware, instead of just rendering everything directly to the front-buffer. Unless they get most primitives rendered in hardware (especially bitmaps/icons), it's going to be ass-slow.
Just my 0.02c.
using namespace slashdot;
troll::post();
Another project (with admittedly a different aim) that is trying to bring exciting and modern desktop features to the masses:
http://www.directfb.org/xdirectfb.xml
Wouldn't it be nice if there was a consensus project for UNIX/Linux graphics that could integrate and manage the work of all these many people? Concentration of effort, rather than dilution?
Translucency adds the ability to read something in the background and type it in the foreground. I use this all the time when I have a terminal window open, and a web browser in the background. I can position the terminal properly and get an effective doubling of that real-estate. It's not just a clever hack. it has a use. We aren't talking transparent eTerms here, we're talking about real transparency.
Heute die Welt, morgen das Sonnensystem!
if this means adding an opacity slider to Metacity ;)
Would the Window Manager take care of the opacity of a window, so it was either all transparent or none, or would this be something the application involved did, to make parts of the app transparent and other parts solid?
Transparency is nice, I'd like to have all my popup menus transparent but not necessarily their parent windows, I think things are going to get complicated fast perhaps though!
The problem with slashdot is that most of its users were bullied and stuffed into lockers as kids!
Check out this screenshot for windows casting shadows. Apparently the server doesn't currently do this, but it's a nice effect.
There isn't any "raw" opengl interface under Linux, so you will always need to run two x servers. A quite ugly solution in my opionion.
This work should be done at QT and GTK+ level. Overhead would be much smaller that way. I can only see some advantages of the double X server solution if you want to run remote x clients.
Jan
I don't understand this whole translucent windows thing. Other than looking "kick-ass", what is the real benefit? Seems like all it does is make the windowing system more complicated and potentially slower. The only reason this would be helpful is if you could save screen real estate by overlaying windows and using both of them at once. But guess what: you can't. The human brain can't focus on two distinct tasks at once, and it definitely can't separate two sets of overlayed text. Besides, you can already lay one window over another and just switch between them for the real estate gain. I wish people would spend more time producing features that are actually useful as opposed to things that just look good.
--
Promoting critical thinking since 1994.
Errmmmm...it was supposed to be funny... :)
My journal has hot
I say make him keep the old graphics card. That's a good minimum level in terms of consumer graphics hardware and it'll ensure the end product isn't bloated if it's useable.
http://jodrell.net/files/mirrors/www.stud.uni-karl sruhe.de/
Looks good...but is it "lickable", hmmm?
That's the norwegian blue.
This is the german translucent.How small a thought it takes to fill a whole life
My experience is that when operating at lower resolutions, (slightly) translucent terminal windows can be useful for viewing information in another window I want to see but not copy-paste (for various reason - personally, I even retype short bits rather than copy-paste because I'm a very fast typist and don't like to move my hands away from the keyboard).
And it isn't distracting in other situations (at least not with my settings and working habits).
Still, I prefer a higher resolution so that I can have non-overlapping windows, but with laptops that often isn't an option.
In general, I do think that the X11 rendering features need updating, things like alpha blending can be used for a lot of things besides translucent windows. Using GL features isn't a bad idea, considering that most current and recent hardware works hard to accelerate those features, although going as far as Quartz Extreme is perhaps a bad idea since it consumes a lot of graphics memory, which XFree86 isn't currently very good at managing dynamically (everything used by the X server is permanently allocated to it).
In fact, if you look at the recent RENDER extension, it's very similar to OpenGL. It looks like it's probably the direction rendering APIs are headed for. The biggest problem with OpenGL isn't that it isn't suitable for 2D - it works very well for 2D - but that it isn't specified to a pixel level and that it doesn't have decent font rendering support.
Since TransluXent is based on XFree, I wonder if X is at all multithreaded and SMP aware? I'd love to run this on an SMP box!
To-do List: Receive telemarketing call during a tornado warning. Check.
Start pr0n
Enjoy Pr0n
Girlfriend comes into house.
Franticly load word processor to cover pr0n
Scream as you notice you have windows transparent
Girlfriend kicks you out of seat and takes over pr0n viewage!
Wake up
===Sig===
of course you totally miss the point of Quartz Extreme.
When (not if) graphics chipsets are powerful enough to render display PDF into a texture then all the graphics drawing and compositing will be taken care of on the hardware, completely alleviating the CPU of all the donkey work.
I can see apple taking this route as soon as its viable with the hardware, infact I wouldn't be surprised if thats sooner than anyone expects.
Translucent windows is eyecandy and good for demonstrations, but that's pretty much it. Other than that, they're usability nightmares and harm productivity.
I would agree with you in theory, but in practice I found that setting the Terminal windows in Mac OS X to black, and adding a tiny little bit of translucency actually makes for a more pleasant reading experience than a completely opaque window.
I suppose the key is subtlety and not overdoing it (overdoing it would happen in a demonstration to show off the feature).
JP
At least his OpenGL /works/.
I hate all your people who can get their video cards to work properly!
Just because you read success stories from people with the exact setup~ just because you don't get any error messages~ just because it works on windows~ just because god loves you~ well it's still not going to work, k?
Yet another cool-looking thing which I can get easily in windows and love, I can't get in Linux >_
-- 'The' Lord and Master Bitman On High, Master Of All
And the only thing we have to do is to wait until that hardware becomes available for x86?
Quick, this guy's poor, can't even feed himself or afford a graphics card made after the Stone Age; let's slashdot his website! muahaha
the coolest club on
...I'm sure that will work fine in my s3 trio .. ;) ...!!
for heaven sakes have pity on me instead
I fuse with Mercer every single day...
Skinux makes use of Win2k's alpha blending in its user interface toolkit.
Napster-to-go says "Fill and refill your compatible MP3 player", which is a lie. It's not MP3. It's WMA with DRM.
Well actually I use it in OS X all the time. You need to toy with the levels enough to get it just right, but its actually somewhat useful to cascade a couple of windows, one with a man page or a browser showing help text behind a shell that you are trying out the command in. Not essential, by any means, but useful enough to miss when you can't do it.
-- Oh Well
Yep, it's eye candy, nothing surer. :o)
But some will argue that anything more sophisticated than 80x24 console mode is eye candy. In some scenarios (servers..) it is. But we're talking desktops here
Personally, I think X rocks. I'd like to see this incorporated into the XFree code base, but optional, so that older hardware is still supported.
In response to earlier posts along the lines of "but I want to concentrate on the browser/app/whatever, not whats behind them..." -- fine - you will not be forced to use this feature !
In any case, a slider control in the widget set on each window to control the opacity would be wicked !
$ strings FTP.EXE | grep Copyright
@(#) Copyright (c) 1983 The Regents of the University of California.
All I saw was a transparent window after the site has been /.ed. And I'm using a ATI Radeon 9700 Pro!!
www.rexguo.com - Technologist + Designer
here
My mom never taught me to sign.
XDirectFB has had translucency, KDE 2.2 introduced it too.
And as someone else pointed out, were Win9x/NT not ready for the desktop?
Pish
I've been wondering lately if I should upgrade it. Now I know for certain that I should!
(I don't play a lot of games, so it's been pretty good for me, actually.)
--RJ
Desktop domination comes from shipping the OS installed on OEM systems. It could be a worthless peice of tripe, but if Dell/HP/Gateway ships it, it's mainstream. Unlike a picture frame, people just use what comes inside their machine.
Yeah, maybe I'll have to move the window occasioanlly, but IMHO, its problem free. YMMV with translucency, but my opinion is that they are a good thing when implemented correctly.
And yes, I guess you can have a dual monitor setup, but for a 12" iBook, its really not an option is it?
Fight Crime - Shoot Back!
IMHO "ready for the desktop" is a moving target. For goodness sake, Windows 3.1 was once a viable commercial product! Today it would be laughed off the market. If the current KDE desktop had gone up against Windows 3.1 the world would be running Linux right now. Yet many people used Windows 3.1, because it was such an improvement over what had come before.
I think Linux is entering the desktop race at an unfortunate stage. So many people are now so used to Windows that I'm not sure what can be done about it in the short term. IMHO KDE as a desktop environment can mostly stand toe to toe with Windows. But it doesn't matter, because it isn't exactly what people expect.
The number of computer users has exploded over the last ten years, until now much of the technological world is dependent on them. But that also means a lot of people and companies have standardized on one thing - Windows. There's not a whole lot you can do about that - one the decision is made and people are trained, the inertia in the system outweighs EVERY other factor.
We as geeks tend to forget this, but many people want the computer to just do its job and stay out of the way. Which really means "do what I expect". What they expect is what they are used to. Checkmate.
I consider the computer desktop to be a natural monopoly, even more so than things like phones. Phones were only a natural monopoly while there was one way to get a signal to the home, and it involved laying lots of cable. But technology changed that situation, and the people were ready to use it, because it didn't involve any significant change on their part. The monopoly with computer software, however, is driven not by technology but by the USER HIM/HERSELF. There is no solution for this problem based on technology. I know the thought is usually used in other circumstances, but it applies here - you can't apply a technical solution to a problem rooted in people. The monopoly comes from people.
Yes, Linux still has some weaknesses. But compare it to Windows 95, for example, which kicked off the PC boom. Being "desktop ready" is all relative. And in the end, I think worrying about being "desktop ready" won't make any difference, even if we are somehow defined to have "made it". I'd worry about inertia. That's the real enemy.
"I object to doing things that computers can do." -- Olin Shivers, lispers.org
I have experiemented with translucent terminals in Mac OS X and found that things are less readable on the whole. Maybe the trick is in the user interface. Since I often find myself minimizing, hiding or otherwize moving a terminal window out of the way, maybe the solution is to have a key combination that makes an app window translucent while they key is held down? This might be more useful to me.
-- Solaris Central - http://w
This is the way to go for eyecandy, using the Hardware, which lies unused when in a 2D session. I've been waiting for something like this quite some time now. Good thing it's here now.
But there's still work to do. Note that the windows are translucent all across, borders and all.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
I don't suppose anyone mirrored the mirror, did they? Sheesh... I'll look tomorrow, when the excitement has died down.
Okay, so it's cool. Yay, I can make all my windows translucent.
I've used OSX quite a bit, seeing as it's on my laptop. I like a lot of the graphical diddlies (such as the alpha blending support for anti-aliasing and stuff, although it begs for high resolution I don't have), don't care for some UI stuff (dock), and think some of it (transparency) is totally useless.
I know when it comes to linux, geeks want a WM/windowing environment that's tailored to their exacting needs, not something that's generally usable. However, transparency is ugly. Things in the real world are not transparent when they contain a lot of information. Your desk is not transparent. If you want to read two things at once, you put them side by side.
I'd like one good usability reason for having transparency. I'm not talking "it makes me horny because it's so pretty and leet and futuristic!", I'm talking "it's more useful."
It can be quite useful to have windows which become translucent when dragging or resizing. It gives a nice halfway ground between showing outlines and showing contents. This is the setup I use on my Win2k box; it'd be nice to be able to have the same in Linux.
I'm stuck on an NVIDIA Riva 128 with 4 megs !!!!! Quake 3 at 320x240 oh yeah!!!
> > I've been puzzled by transparent/translucent window fluff.What is the point? Other than chewing up graphics card cycles
.... now I can show her! Incase you didn't realize, women like these bells and whistles (especially shiny sparkly things). I could never get her near the pc when I used console/DOS. ;-)
Gotta justify to my wife somehow why I needed that 3.0ghz CPU and 2gig of RAM
Say the name of that OS that MacOSX is based on? BSD? Good. Now say the price of it. Free? Are you surprised? I don't.
Less is more !
If you read the page then you'll notice that the excitement isn;t really about a quick hack to get the abysmal transparent windows working, it's about an OpenGL X-Server.
This would mean some of the drawing done by the GPU instead of the CPU.
What's the point?
The basic need is that, well, it needs trying out!
It's easy to say "oh, it will never work" but that's nto really true until someone can show you a well crafted OpenGL desktop and it doesn't work.
I hope it works because for the most part my expensive graphics card pumps out a 2d desktop.
There are places where the networks are not touching,and there are places where they are-Boeing's Lori Gunter
It already exists for windows too. I thought it was neat for about a week.
--Jimmy has fancy plans; and pants to match.
We know you submitted the article. If you want hardware, why didn't you just say so?
Translucency adds the ability to read something in the background and type it in the foreground.
Or you could cut and paste, saving yourself all that typing
Sheesh.
Chris
I think I would like translucency if I could enable it, get a quick look at other windows I was interested in monitoring (log tails, builds, irc, etc.) then disable it and get back to work on the top window.
Translucency might also be useful if it could be enabled on a per-workspace basis. One or two translucent workspaces with tails and the like could be interesting.
Anyway, it does look pretty cool.
slashdot broke my sig
Direct link to one of the mirrors.
For me anyway.
Mouse powered Chips, Open source Processors and Lego
I played around a lot with translucency in different apps when windows 2000 got that feature.
As you say while being cool I struggled to find any practical use for it.
Perhaps it might be useful on a small resolution but at 1600x1200 if i want to look at more than one app at once I can just arrange them side by side.
no sig.
Or you can be using an app that doesn't select properly and ends up chunking an entire webpage into the buffer. I did this once. I ended up flooding pages of text into a webpage, simply because I started my selection a hair to far left in my browser window. Since then, I learned to be very careful about such things.
Heute die Welt, morgen das Sonnensystem!
The TNT2 is fine for the workstation, but when I changed to the Geforce MX 420, I noticed a significant improvement in text quality.
This really makes a difference for wordprocessing / coding ect...
No mod points so I will just say "great post".
no sig.
That one is indeed working fine!
The idea implemented here has more value than the novelty of translucent windows. Because each "window" is actually a texture stored in offscreen memory a window is never actually obscured. No more expose events! No more clip lists. Perfectly smooth window dragging in your window manager. Minimising a window won't cause obscured windows to redraw. It's like save unders but with hardware acceleration.
A little bit of history is required here. X was written back when video memory was very tight: the framebuffer (what you saw) was ALL of the video memory. There wasn't any unused video memory for textures or pixmaps or caching. So obscured windows caused a big problem: what do you do when you unobscured the window? One technique was to store a bitmap of the window as a "backing store". If the backing store is on the X server then it is called a "save under" but it's the same concept. When a region is exposed you'd just draw in the previous contents from the backing store.
Unfortunately backing stores use up heaps of memory. So the preferred technique was to send an Expose event to the application, tell it which region just got unobscured, and the application would redraw the necessary pixels. CPU was and still is cheap compared to memory! This is the technique still in use today and explains why you get messy redraws when you drag a window around your desktop.
For people who are serious about removing all the cruft in XFree86, you could make serious headway by forcing all windows to be allocated with this TransluXent technique. The amount of legacy code you could rip out of XFree86 is staggering. All the clip mask code. All the loops around drawing code. Lots of tests become useless. No more need for Expose events. Also imagine a proper Xshape extension using alpha masks instead of clip lists.
This TransluXent technique is unfortunately only hackery. They've implemented a "framebuffer" type based on cfb (colour frame buffer). This is the intermediate model that XFree86 uses before your video driver gets involved. So even though they get the translucency they won't get any of the potential to simplify the X server. If somebody could implement this idea higher up the chain - say as an extension to save unders!? - then you would make XFree86 a serious contender for Aqua style graphics.
Of course, the downside is that you'll chew up serious amounts of offscreen video memory (aka texture memory). You might need to implement some code that "swaps" unmapped windows into system memory.
Chill out matey.
We've just gone from PII 333s running NT to P4 1.8s running XP. Most of my applications run slower now. Paint Shop Pro is now a joke, IE takes even longer to open, Word crashes more often, windows don't redraw themselves properly...
I am just one of the end users so yes, I probably have the shittest administrator EVER too, or XP is bloated to the max..?
I happen to like Windows and happily run 98 24/7 at home.
This post contains benzene, nitrosamines, formaldehyde and hydrogen cyanide.
Anyone looking at the framebuffer device as salvation is barking up the wrong tree. Yes, its direct to hardware, but it's slow as molasses when there's anything happening on the screen. Try running a console-intensive app on a fbconsole and watch the latency of all your apps go through the roof. I can't even play an MP3 when the framebuffer is busy, and I have a top-end system with optimized software.
XFree86 has direct-to-hardware rendering, it has DRI and MITSHM. Granted it uses a few more megs of memory than I'd like it too, it's our best bet for 2D performance out there. It really is quite good, I think a lot of the desktop environments need optimization (KDE is a bad performer all-around, IMO).
The framebuffer exists for three reasons:
1. Simple to program for.
2. Needed for 68k and most PPC machines (no native console mode)
3. Platform Independent.
it doesnt:
1. Perform well enough for casual use.
2. Play well with others.
3. Run X programs without the overhead of X anyway.
"Sometimes, I think Trent just needs a cup of hot chocolate and a blankie." -Tori Amos on Nine Inch Nails
Why is this in science and not in developer?
I find translucent windows handy for SOME things - for instance, one editor I use on Win2k allows me to have the search/replace dialog stay on top and be translucent. Instead of opening and closing the window all the time, you just keep it there
-- 73 de KG2V For the Children - RKBA! "You are what you do when it counts" - the Masso
UK people often say "reckon" and its a perfectly valid word unlike "kinda" and "sheesh".
no sig.
I was making fun of people who get geeked about translucent windows. Yeah, it's cool for about 5 minutes, after that it gives me a headache. :)
My journal has hot
Actually that's not such a big deal. Modern graphics hardware has optimized blitting operations, line drawing operations, and so forth, i.e. everything needed for 2D stuff.
What's interesting in this case is suddenly you have new operations at your disposal, namely, everything that the texturing units can do. Texturing hardware _is_ the meat of modern graphics chips, but that's out of reach of APIs like X11's, since in those APIs bitmaps are things you put on top of other elements, and that's basically it. With OpenGL as the backend, the frontend can start doing interesting stuff: rotating pixmaps for free, or compositing operations, or *gasp* bump mapping.
You really don't want to have an X server that uses OpenGL as its internal API, but this is a great playground for testing new ideas. Eventually, you can take the OpenGL driver appart and move the stuff from there to the X server, but it is important that your existing applications run unmodified in the new environment.
You have translucent windows in Win2000? How'd you do that?
I've only seen this working in WinAmp3 but I'd love to have opacity settings for my WinXP and 2000 desktops.
Moderation: +1 pwnage
This is super cool. If you don't like it or don't have the CPU or graphics card for it, don't use it.
Every cycle not used is lost forever! Remember that.
(The same goes with bandwidth.)
In XFree86, they do use the GPU for many drawing operations, even without OpenGL behind the scenes. It's called XAA (XFree86 Acceleration Architecture) and it supports the basic 2D acceleration on modern GPUs (blits, lines, fills).
Since "the hardware" is powerful 3d accelerators, it will probably be available for x86 *first*.
"He's on a TNT2 for heaven sake!"
Good for him, if he's smart he'll keep using the lowest common denominator hardware so he can develop code that has the best chance of performing adequately for the most users.
Throw together some code and get free pizza and a new graphics card :-P
SIGFAULT
Hmmm... I wonder whether a PDF renderer could be implemented as a set of shader programs?
Okay, it would seem to me, that 'j4ck50n' was trolling, and 'Spiked_nightmare' couldn't help but start the flame war. So both need to be spanked, but Spiked really shouldn't have tried to defend himself. Especially if he was going to leave huge holes in his reply. If I was Jackson, and I'm not, I would have responded like this...
Its a retorical question, im expressing that its an old piece of hardware and may not implement the whole of most recent opengl specifications or standards
yeah I caught that, but still, it supports enough for him to do his work... as per the screen shots
it was meant to be a joke/sarcastic comment
It was stupid, and uncalled for. I'm sure it made you happy to click on the submit button. Do please get over yourself.
but dont flame me because u got up out of the wrong side of your bed.
At best, my post was a troll, yours was the flame... check it out, and you'll see that I'm right.
BTW, it wasn't my bed I got out of this morning... it was your mom's, and I did get out of the wrong side, because she was so fat I couldn't reach the left side... so here we go
There is a fundamental limitiation to modern graphics displays that limits the usefulness of translucent windows - the lack of different accommodation depths.
Consider driving along the road as it starts to rain. Normally, you are looking downrange - your eyes are focused on infinity (as far as your visual system is concerned). The rain drops on your windshield are forming an image on your retina, but it is out of focus, and so is easier for your visual system to ignore.
Should you want to look at the raindrops (to evaluate whether the rain is sufficient to require you to change your driving pattern), you shift the focus of your eyes. Now the raindrops are forming a clear image on your retina, but the road is not - now it is the road that the visual system can ignore.
So, to extend this to a computer display - at a minimum, you would want to employ some form of blurring on the windows in the background as well as reducing the contrast. For this, a 3D card with motion blur might work without too much added work.
But the second thing you need is a good, quick way to shift focus from window to window. If the back windows are fully obscured by the forward windows you cannot just click on them. You cannot just shift focus - the system has no feedback where your eye is focused. As a result, you have to minimize the forground window, or have a "send to back" button, or something like that, and you still get into the "nope. Nope. Not you. Nope. Nu-uh. Nyet. Aw, c'mon!" mode.
www.eFax.com are spammers
Spiked.. dude, really... Just give up... It's better for you to take the high road, and not follow this thread anymore. Let the /.'er(s) work over your comment, and just go about your business... Anything else risks you looking more and more like a karma whore, and that's bad. Karma isn't worth what it used to be.
here: http://www.stupendous.net/mirrors/transluxent/
;)
In case of slashdot effect
It's been a while since I ran 2K for my workstation but I believe that the folder option for "show window contents while dragging" is there. I know it is in XP. Though you will need a registry tweak on most systems to reduce the %translucence down so that you can actually see the items underneath (the default is like 80%, kind of hard to see things through it).
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
No, PDF is not going to be accelerated by GPU anytime soon.
It has nothing to do with GPU performance or GPU ISA. It has everything to do with video memory vs. system memory. With OpenGL/Quartz Extreme, you can't use _existing_ 2D acceleration because window textures can be located in system memory (think of it as: VRAM/RAM and System RAM/swap) and GPU can't access system memory at all - unless you use some kind of Unified Memory Architecture, thus creating yet another bottleneck.
If you want to use 2D acceleration for drawing into textures, you need:
1. Create texture
2. Upload your texture into VRAM
3. Draw into it using GPU
4. Download it from VRAM back into system memory, so your backing store doesn't get lost when VRAM space becomes full
5. Upload it again as needed
If you want to use 3D acceleration with software 2D drawing, you:
1. Create texture
2. Draw into it using CPU
3. Upload it as needed
Guess which approach is faster? Hint: the slowest parts are bus transfers.
P.S.: PDF is _not_ used for every drawing operation in OSX. In fact, most applications use old-fashioned bitmaps for drawing. PDF in OSX has exactly the same status like SVG (librsvg) in GNOME - it is optional and you can use it, if you need it.
Enlightenment can do semi-transparent windows while dragging - this was available as an option in the Red Hat 6.0 desktop. But I think it was done in software.
-- Ed Avis ed@membled.com
Translucency in win2k? You want this. The author of this software posts on /. sometimes.
Do not read this
> It can be quite useful to have windows which become translucent when dragging or resizing. It gives a nice halfway ground between
> showing outlines and showing contents. This is the setup I use on my Win2k box; it'd be nice to be able to have the same in Linux.
geez dude, (E)nlightenment already did that back in 1999 (0.14.4 i think)
You "are able to have the same in Linux" for a long time.
cheers.
``If a program can't rewrite its own code, what good is it?'' - Mel
I use them on OS X and having a terminal/vi and a IDE (e.g. Project Builder) visible at the same time (terminal over source editor) is _really_ useful.
It's also useful when Googling to fix system problems (web browser underneath, term on top) or to diganose system problems on multiple hosts (with a large number of overlapping x terms).
I have no problem seeing though 3 levels of terms, or reading translucent terminals. The exact level of translucency, the color scheme and not having a very distracting desktop background are quite important factors though.
I'm all in favor of other people doing things like Quartz Extreme in the open source community, first of all, because it gives Apple something to compete with, and secondly, because it might do things that Apple didn't think of. In the latter case, users can benefit from the free version, and perhaps Apple will try to incorporate those same innovations back into Quartz Extreme.
"Give a man fire, and he'll be warm for a day; set a man on fire, and he'll be warm for the rest of his life
Can you make BSD look identical to like Mac OS X? Could you run OS X Doppelganger of x86-machine running BSD for example?
Lesbian Nazi Hookers Abducted by UFOs and Forced Into Weight Loss Programs - -all next week on Town Talk.
In fact if this guy keeps his hardware low-end and makes it useable.. he will out-code all the other schmucks out there that call themselves programmers.
and the remark by the article's editor about the TNT2 is proof that many people have no clue about computers even so called geeks.
No, it's proof that you didn't bother to read the article, in which the author clearly states:
"* Implement more graphics primitives using OpenGL instead of cfb. This currently is kind of stalled since I only have a poor TNT2 which lacks pbuffer support and has a buggy implementation of Copy[Sub]TexImage2d. So rendering to textures is kind of hard with this hardware."
Have you got your LWN subscription yet?
IANAL but im pretty sure no site would bring legal action against slashdot. All they do is link to an article.
Slashdot - The one stop shop for procrastination
I say we all start a world wide campain to force all programmers to use 2 generations slower computer hardware (except device driver writers, they get the good stuff) to force these prima-donnas to actually write good code.
Have you ever contributed any code to anything?
Have you got your LWN subscription yet?
KDE wouldn't suceeded vs win 3.1 with the hardware you could run 3.1 on =) Heck its kind of slow on Ghz level processors I don't even want to think of the pain of running it on a 386 with 4MB of ram and a 256k graphics card.
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
Know your facts before you troll, buster.
Go to Apple's QE site and follow the link to the technology brief.
IIRC, one primary reason is the card has to support non-square textures, something the TNT2 does not, otherwise QE cannot function.
Actually, that hardware path has already been trod down, and the market didn't really support it...
At work, we used to have these clunky old Pentium 133 computers with a dual monitor setup running SCO and some proprietary drawing programs...One videocard was a normal old S3 card, but the other one was called a PixelWorks card...as I understand it, they were specifically optimized for displaying and rendering postscript (cause that's what the program made!). And for a P133, they were damn fast... Of course, the company moved on to cheap commodity hardware...FreeBSD is a helluva lot nicer to work with than sco, let me tell ya...
I really haven't heard anything at all about Pixelworks cards living past that iteration... Maybe the next gen of vid cards should take up Postscript acceleration, too?
Sig currently under construction. Mind the gap....
And since the coders then will write programs for the 2 generation slower hardware the consumers will scream "Where is feature X, bell Y, whistle Z??" and so on... ;p
Don't you mean the male human brain? :)
But sadly (to some), most of the people here that will download it are excited because it's free as in beer.
--- What
Yes, because cutting and pasting works so well between different applications on the Linux desktop...
Dude.
What about when I want to change my music while concentrating on my web page/word processor.
And what about when I want to take a quick look at the message I recieved while maintaining in my current window
Translucent, if it wasnt so damned slow as it is, is SWEET.
[I can picture a world without war, without hate. I can picture us attacking that world, because they'd never expect it]
See translucent and transparent.
Patrick Doyle
I mod down every jackass who puts his moderation policy in his sig. Oh, wait a sec....
All programmers should be forced to write their programs on hardware that is at least 2 years old. Am I the only one who gets sick of having to upgrade my hardware because programmers can't be bothered to optimize their code a little. Some of the recommended requirements on games these days reads like a NASA shopping list. I'm as much of a hardware junkie as the next geek but developers need to recognize that not everyone has an unlimited upgrade budget.
Actually, a few things are worth having translucent. My Trillian window for instance on my Win2K work box. I have Trillian set up as always on top, and knock it down to pretty translucent. Allows me to keep an eye on who's online while not completely losing that screen real estate.
I agree. All QE does is speed up all the eye candy (drop shadows, semitransparent titlebars of inactive windows, etc.) that shouldn't have been there in the first place. Not saying it's evil or shouldn't exist, in fact, I'm *glad* Apple finally delivered something to make OS X responsive, assuming you've got a suitable video card.
Dear Slashdot: next time you want to mess with the site, add a rich-text editor for comments.
I wonder how much performance would suffer running this. Looks like his CPU is getting hammered pretty good and he is not really doing much.
Got to admit is looks nice though.
Leave it to a true geek to underestimate the value of "looking cool." Take a look around, the world is FULL of eye candy.
Single? Maybe a Linux laptop configured to make everything look cool will change that.
People can be dumb like moths . . . to ignore this fact would be to ignore the BILLIONS spent every year of advertisement. Might as well use it to our advantage . . .
Sdelat' Ameriku velikoy Snova!
I've been puzzled by the lack of transparent/translucent windows.
Why not? All it does is chew up a few unused graphics card cycles.
If you have one window and a black background it would look super! Kinda just like what I want now. If you are trying to code in vi, and that window is over slashdot, and that window is over irc you see everything!
Please tell me why its missing.
You seem to only see one side of the picture. Try doing a tutorial on some webpage while using a terminal to follow the instructions. Its not just cool to look at, it is functional to see what you are doing below the terminal window. On a small monitor, you don't have to move the windows every time you want to read a line, while working.
... if you are going to be working on porting X to OpenGL (a really cool idea if you ask me) then why don't you also work on making windows "rotatable"?
I can see it now. I "minimize" an Xterm and instead of becoming an icon near the bottom of my screen it slides over to reside on the side wall of my desktop... which is, btw, cube shaped.
This one open ended cube would give me 5 surfaces to drop things onto and one open space in the middle to have things that I can work on. Or if you think the top surface would confuse you too much you configure yours so that it doesn't have a visible top surface and instead what you have is two side walls, a back wall, a desk surface, and the "working area" is what ever you are holding in your "hand" to read.
This kind of paradigm could be very easily implemented in OpenGL I imagine.
Transparency could then come into play when you needed to see "over" what you have in your hand to select something off of the walls/desk. You could do this by employing the middle mouse button (or some other configurable key/mouse combination)... while holding down the middle mouse you are scrolling in the wall/desk space, while not holding down the middle mouse you are scrolling in work space.
42 - So long and thanks for all the fish.
it is MOSTLY eyecandy. i can think of a few times where i needed translucent windows (monitoring multiple servers with a couple different applications). i didn't have it, i did without, it would have been much easier with it tho
:P (i'm not one of those that'll be installing this, my computer is slow enough as it is!)
granted, those cases are rare and far between, but eh...
geeks love eyecandy, leave it to them
Yay, a NeXTDimension board for PCs!
For those who don't remember, NeXT made a colour graphics card for the NeXTCube called the NeXTDimension, which consisted of an Intel i860 processor running at 33 MHz, up to 32 MB of RAM, and a bunch of video/audio I/O interfaces. The card was designed to offload all Display PostScript operations from the CPU (besides the added video editing capabilities). Since the NeXTStep GUI used Display PostScript for everything, the GUI got a hefty boost from the dedicated hardware.
I wish there was something similar for Display PDF.
In Soviet Russia, Jesus asks: "What Would You Do?"
This is true - trouble is, Enlightenment seems to have lost its steam (April fool's pranks aside). Pity, though - I thought it was really cool back in '97 or '98.
I would gladly change my POV on this if the help was a bit more helpful. I think the author has done a fine job to provide translucency, however, I really do hope that he can provide adequate documentation, or perhaps make it modular so people can package binaries for it.
Agreed, this is eye candy.
However, the potential for creating useful 3D widgets is something that warrants investigation...
As a crappy example, take a widget that uses floor plans at design time, and presents 3D fire escape routes, or directions around a building, or whatever, at runtime.
If I had a better, more general example that would be better suited to being a widget, than I'd go make it. The point is, their is potential there beyond eye-candy, that *could* increase productivity.
NetBSD is working on that. And you can't anyway, odds are OS X Doppelganger was compiled for PowerPC anyhoo. Assuming it's closed source, that is.
mrg
Not at all. Without non-square and two-to-the-power support, it still can function. The only difference is speed, and by definition it can slow down only by a factor of 4 at worse case senario.
damn transparent windoz look swzeet!
Yet many people used Windows 3.1, because it was such an improvement over what had come before
Windows 3.1 was such an improvement over DOS for PCs and compatibles only. I had an Amiga: preemptive multitasking, scalable fonts, multiscreen gui (I could even drag a screen with different video mode), a nice Unix-like command line environment, up to 24 MBs of RAM (for 68000) and up to 4 GBs for later Motorola CPUs, 4-channel 44 KHz sound, blitter and a video chip that could do hardware scrolling, hardware sprites, a mouse, joystick ports...I could access my files directly from Workbench where as I needed to open File Manager under Windows 3.1. I had a flat 32-bit memory model whereas in PCs I was stuck with segments. When I got to Windows 3.1 due to college obligations, for me it was such a backstep!!! Windows 3.1 sucked!!! I imagine that this was the case for Mac owners, too.
By the way, I personally don't think transparent windows are a good idea. Especially when developing software, I don't want to look to source code windows other than that the one I am currently editing, since it is confusing.
This effect has already been created years ago with DirectFB. Nothing new to see here....move along.
MacOSX is not free, while X is free. MacOSX works on a fraction of % of all world desktop computers, while X can work virtually everywhere. Therefore OpenSource multiplatform project TransluXent is good and I wish them to succeed, while MacOSX is bad and ... let Steve Jobs to worry about it, not me :)
Another point about opensource role in Steve Jobs' success:
If you doubt about opensource's goodness, than remember that without BSD there will be no MacOSX. So, bitching opensource while you enjoy its stolen code is amoral at least.
Less is more !
It's never too late for adoption of a new product or idea. . . if its better. People are born every day. They experience the world as it is presented to them. If a young person learns Linux/KDE at the same time as Windows they will probably form an independent decision.
.and RMS.
Anything can be changed with time. Anything. . . look at the stories surrounding Rome, Ghandi, Martin Luther King, Napolean, wind and water.. .
I think Linux is entering the desktop race at an unfortunate stage
But that's the clinch. We want our 'nix desktops to be close enough to the windoze ones that users can make the switchover fairly easily. On top of that, we want it improved so that the advanced users can get more productivity out of the 'nix desktop. Realistically, the windows desktop and/or GUI aren't the problem, it's the bugs and the licensing/restrictions etc.
What users want is basically a windows (does it run app X) without so many crashes/bugs. What corps want is the above, and an affordable licensing scheme.
What linux supporters want are both of the previous, and killer app to draw normal users over (we're already drawing corporations over because of the cost benefit, I know since I work at one of said corps)..
So basically, once we have:
a) Application support - at least the most popular apps, preferable most of the apps without crashing due to OS bugs
b) Good cost/licensing terms, fewer restrictions than windoze
c) A killer app, something to draw a crowd
If you had these three, you wouldn't even need a windows GUI. As long as the user could get into his her app, or her apps - most of the configuration stuff can be ignored. Where I work, nobody goes beyond their little sandbox anyways, and the "Control Panel" in windows can be almost as taboo as a commandline or 'nix menu.
The extra desktop sales alone would justify his salary.
Red Hat, are you listening? SuSE? IBM? Sun? Anyone, anyone, Beuller?
-- My choice of computing platform is a symbol of my individuality and belief in personal freedom.
Maybe I'll be able to run X in something other than 640x480 on my 3DLabs Wildcat Pro 4210. Great OpenGL card, sucky everything else (no drivers at all).
MORTAR COMBAT!
no, your admin has nothing to do with how fast windows runs on a PII 333 (!!!), try an upgrade, or install windows 95 (it'll scream on that hardware)
Why don't you get a Matrox then?
Analogies don't equal equalities, they are merely somewhat analogous.
It's not the processor; it's the amount of RAM.
And yeah, when Win3.1 was current, PCs had approximately no RAM,
so current versions of KDE would have sucked in the uttermost.
Cut that out, or I will ship you to Norilsk in a box.
I know, doesn't it work great?
The real benefit is that (at least the way I use it), you start a somewhat long running job in a window in the background (file download, build on a remote system, etc). Bring something you want to work on to the foreground, and set about a 10% transparency to the window. Now, when you want to, you can quickly focus your attention to the background task, without switching windows, then return your attention to what you're working on.
If you have Win2K, or WinXP, vitrite for Windows is a great utility to provide this transparency. And you can select which window and how transparent each window is. Very cool.
Overrated / Underrated : Moderation
> I don't know about you but when I'm reading a webpage, I want to concentrate on the webpage, not everything below it. When I'm writing a report, I want to concentrate on my word processor, not all the windows below it.
Spoken like a man who doesn't use nude babes for his wallpaper.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
Sure, being able to skimp on desktop real estate by being able to see through a window what's happening behind it, but I'd rather have virtual desktops of the kind X window managers have done for ages.
Its kind of funny, I'm reading a lot of comments like yours. Which is fine, of course. But there is a sort of big push right now for just this sort of thing on Linux desktops. Eye candy, it seems is underrated here?
As a user who has been using the Linux desktop for about 4 years now I'd have to say this is a very exciting project. You should take a look at kde-look to get an idea what types of eye candies are being kicked around. I've been using translucent aterms, Convectivea crystal icons and the Mosfet's KDE liquid module for quite a while now, I love it.
Btw, check out Karamba, its a new KDE extention that suports (fake) transparency, lots of fancy do-dads and themes. Beefs up the candy factor (and some functionality!). Might as well look good if your going to have to use it.
Last one! Check out Slicker. Its a collection of utilities which provide an alternative to KDE's kicker, and looks good. I don't know about you, but I got tired of looking at screen shots of OSX.
Quack, quack.
"Translucent windows is eyecandy and good for demonstrations, but that's pretty much it. Other than that, they're usability nightmares and harm productivity."
Not for me. I have a desktop switching app (called Altdesk, it's for Windows though) that has this tiny bar with all my desktops and apps on it. It's an 'always on top' window that I have at the bottom right above my Start Menu.
Unfortunately, it blocks information occasionally because some apps throw stuff there. It blocks Opera's message about how fast stuff is coming down, for example. No problem, the bar's transparent. I can still read the stuff plus see what each button does.
You're right that it's limited, though. The bar is only icons, and the stuff below it is only text. I don't think it'd work if it were text on text. I'm just saying you can't apply an absolute rule like that here.
Well, there's traditionnaly been much support for "focus" in window managers, we could extend the notion of "focussed" window to that. :)
Semantics is the gravity of abstraction
If you have an ATI Radeon, ATI has a utility called "Hydravision". It was built to make using multi-head machines easier, but it includes a virtual desktop manager and transparent windows (as well as some useless effects).
You "develop Air Traffic Control software for the US", on X-windows???
God help us all.
Semantics is the gravity of abstraction
He's on a TNT2 for heaven sake!
So what? My TNT2 lets me play very competitive Q3, DK2, Dungeon Siege, WC3, etc.. If you're telling me that it can pump out 60 FPS in Q3 with a few minor tweaks, but can't handle this guy's GUI, then maybe there's something wrong with his code.
steve
Oh, you're not stuck, you're just unable to let go of the onion rings.
Windows XP loves RAM. 512 MB is probably the minimum for reasonable performance on daily stuff. So if these new machines only have 256 MB (or less), that's probably why they're dogs.
-ZA
Well, if you're worried about your productivity... reading & posting on Slashdot isn't going to help you much ;)
I have nothing against eyecandy. I do have something against eyecandy that harm productivity. In this case, translucency.
Translucent menus make the menu labels unreadable. Translucent terminals make the terminal text unreadable. That's what I call useless eyecandy.
A lot of people here are saying this would just be resource drain and basically just 'eyecandy' but: you don't know how much I've *wanted* this.
Being on a finite budget, I'm stuck with an 18" viewable monitor,
so there's not enough space for everything. Being able to have
my windows be (say) 80% opaque (20% transparent) so that I
can see if anything changes in the window behind (a log tail for
example) or if things _stop_ changing in the window behind (like
a make or wget) would save me from my current practice, which
is to have my windows shrunken enough that the bottom couple
of lines of the window behind show underneath, and the bottom
couple of lines of the one behind that underneath them, and so
on and so forth. Sometimes I stack them five deep that way, and
that can take away a fifth or more of the height of my screen.
With this enhancement I'll be able to tile those five background
windows and then run my main window (a browser say) fullscreen
in front of all of them and just slightly transparent.
I also want an always-on-top clock that's like 90% transparent.
So, thanks for doing this, and keep up the good work. I'm going
to download it and try it out next week, after I get my desktop
working again[1].
"I filter at +6, and have yet to miss out on an important comment." (#822545)
"The biggest problem with OpenGL isn't that it isn't suitable for 2D - it works very well for 2D - but that it isn't specified to a pixel level and that it doesn't have decent font rendering support."
But you see, it's not really a problem...
glOrtho2D mode means you're basically manipulating at the pixel level, so draw your layout verticies and render. If you want a pretty picture, there's always texture mapping.
Glut mouse events return pixels, so you're basically working pixels to pixels.
Considering that even the crummy integrated graphics on today's motherboards are twice as fast a TNT2s, I don't really think rendering speed will be a problem.
Man is the animal that laughs.
And occasionally whores for Karma.
Translucent means that the object behind the material is distorted in some way.. such as darked or discolored. Transparent means that the object in the foreground is invisible, causing no distortion.
Clear glass is transparent, colored glass is translucent.
Sure, and I'm not trying to argue with you. I just happen to disagree. :-)
Of course the cool thing about Linux based desktops is all the choice you've got! I'll install this and try it out myself. If I don't like it *then* I'll go back to my Blackbox/Kicker setup. Kudos to the developer though!
Quack, quack.
Apple I think really has not picked up the ball on the capabilities of Quartz/Aqua to make a useful as well as pretty interface. For example, when you have an Aqua (not brushed-metal) window in the background, the titlebar becomes translucent. This is really not very useful, merely eye-candy. How does it help me to be able to see a slight bit of color through the window's titlebar? It just obscures the piece of useful information I might want to see when I'm hunting for a particular window. And if there are lots of windows in the bg, now I'm looking at a bunch of confusing information. It would be much more useful if most of the content of the window became translucent, and the titlebar stayed opaque. Then you could gain some sense of what's really behind the window and still be able to identify and drag it easily. Yes, I know you can get WindowShadeX and make that happen, but it's obvious that Apple didn't really flush out the possibilities of making the interface useful. Apple could surely have implemented it with an additional 5-lines of code and perhaps another widget in a nib file to make it a customizable option in the preferences.
(i'm gonna rant for another paragraph or so. I'm just in a ranting old mood.)
Another example of the waste of Quartz/Aqua is minimizing windows. This is more of a problem with the Dock, but when I minimize a window I just want get it out of the way temporarily so I can get to a window that's behind it. often it's to interact with two different windows (drag and drop). Usually I then want to go back to the minimized window. Sometimes I want the window to stay hidden for a while.
Sending the window to be an icon in the dock is really useless, as it just blends into the other items in the dock, and now it's lost. The little thumbnail icon it receives is not useful for discerning between, for example, two different Safari windows. Now I have to look at the title of the window which pops up, and if you have a bunch of tabs (thank the Hyatt for adding those) that's useless too. (I'll stop listing problems since I could rant for days about minimizing alone...)
There are a couple better ways:
The old OS 9 windowshade functionality was pretty good. This is how numerous X window managers work, and I've found that when I'm using Apple's X11 I get quite frustrated by the lack of the simple window shade functionality, since I do it out of habit from using the same X apps on linux. It's extremely useful, because the titlebar stays where the original window's titlebar was, so you can know what window it was purely through spatial memory.
The Minimize In Place hack for Os X is also pretty good ( my system seemed a little wiggy with it installed though). There was talk of adding it to WindowShadeX but I don't know if they did that or not.
But a useful and innovative way of dealing with minimized windows needs to be forthcoming from apple.
A simple suggestion: how about some kind of slide-out drawer showing all minimized windows for an app when you click it's icon in the dock? Or maybe, by the power of Quartz and Aqua, when you hover over the icon of a minimized window in the dock, the actual window pops onto the screen translucently so you can see which one it is before you click on it. They need to work on this though. (and we mac-addicts are holding our breath for Panther)
Basically what I'm saying is, for all you linux peeps who crave the Aqua thing: concentrate on making a useful interface and not on the alpha-blended, animated, and vector graphiced mating display we've seen with Aqua. (ok maybe vector graphics are pretty useful.)
I'm sure you've heard that said before, but I'm just sa
"What thou shalt not, I shalt did!" -Bart Simpson
scripsit EnglishTim:
Yes, in fact it does.
In principio creauit Linus Linucem.
Patrick Doyle
I mod down every jackass who puts his moderation policy in his sig. Oh, wait a sec....
Translucent windows is eyecandy and good for demonstrations, but that's pretty much it
Actually, the real win in putting windows on GL textures isn't the transparency, it's the ability to offload window compositing to the GPU.
In Mac OS X, for example, the CPU impact of dragging a translucent window around on Quartz Extreme-capable machine is negligible.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
He's got a paypal account now... send money to his e-mail address if you're interested.
--Bennett Prescott
Former Lord Of Packets
The 2D primitives in those cards may not have support for the latest fads, however, translucency and anti-aliased renderers. Those have been understood for decades (no, Apple didn't invent them), but they used to be considered gimmicks. But, hey, whatever it takes to get people to upgrade. The next gimmick after that will probably translucency with blurring (blur window content that is behind other windows), which also looks really nifty and requires yet more compute power.
Now, having said that, an X server with an OpenGL backend would be useful. But that's not because it may give you translucency or high performance, but because it could be easy to port to different platforms (Windows, MacOS) in windowed mode. But starting with the XFree86 sources, as this guy did, is probably not the way to go: if you go with an OpenGL backend, most of XFree86 can be thrown away because it's only going to support TrueColor and it doesn't need a generic driver infrastructure.
However, an OpenGL backend for X11 is unlikely ever to be fully conformant with the specification. X11 specifies (quite wisely) where every pixel needs to end up when you draw a line. That's necessary so that things meed up properly when they are drawn, and software relies on that. OpenGL implementations are not guaranteed to conform to those specifications.
why not call it "TransluceX" - say it 5 times fast.
-- Dirty mind at work again!
a) i can't get linux to install, mostly because of b) my hardware is about 10 years behind the rest of you, so i shouldn't be seeing this for a little bite -prompt. it'd be great for people trying to Read digital books and do other stuff at the same time...unless i have it wrong somehow.
but i've been wishing for some transluceant windows - [add multiple mice&keyboards' it'd be perfect!]... something where i can use two different colour schemes[darklight darklightcolour2] and refocus my eyes quickly between them so there is no putting-down-the-book-and-taking notes or moving-my-head-to-look-from-the-book-to-the-googl
i hope they keep going with it.
GENERATION 26: The first time you see this, copy it into your sig on any forum and add 1 to the generation.
XFree86 uses hardware acceleration already, and has done so since the first cards with hardware acceleration came out.
OK, having a window transparent so you can watch what's going on behind it is kind of cool. It's opengl people, we can move the windows sideways and view them edge on too. Have a stack of 30 or so windows edge on, with just enough angle so you can see if anything changes.
Secondly,
He's implementing the hardware driver as opengl. I think this statement is very important. Device drivers can be written to OpenGL. All of a sudden the hardware manufacture's have an easy route to support Linux. WOW!
The card was designed to offload all Display PostScript operations from the CPU (besides the added video editing capabilities).
Not exactly correct.
The ND card rand the "device" portion of the DPS interpreter. Most of the math (glyph generation, etc) was still done by the CPU.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
Windows 2000 and XP have already done this. And it works for nearly every video adapter on the market.
I love the way the desktop is using translucent windows, but the mail icon is still the same crappy monochrome (1 bit!) icon.
I would realize its a dream right there. It would not get any further.
What signature defines me as a person?
"Lucent" means literaly of, or pertaining to, "light". In English, this is derived from French, from the Latin "Lux."
"Parent" is again, no surprise, of Latin origin, via French. Latin "apparens" is related to everyday English words like "appear" and "apparent"
So, Translucency is a necessary condition for Transparency. In sufficient degree Translucency is Transparency.
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."
1. Some people are so naive that they keep their home doors unlocked when they are out in town. We don't call it beauty, we call it stupidity.
2. When the other people come to such unlocked house and take something - we call it stealing.
3. When someone take something for free from the other one, use it and then tell publicly that it was a bad quality - that is amoral.
Less is more !
When you look at a road partially obscured by raindrops on your windshield, your "visual focus" is doing two things
1 - pointing your eyes to get the correct stereopsis for the object of attention (a.k.a. vergence or crossing your eyes)
2 - focusing (accomodating your lens) the optics to optimize the clarity of the image plane on the object of attention.
Chaning your "visual focus" to the windshield requires changing your vergence to maximize the correlation of the windshield images and changing your accomodation to get that visual plane focussed onto your retina. It's possible to mismatch vergence and accomodation: that is the effect used in the "magic eye" 3-d illusions. The mismatch is also why some people have a hard time appreciating the 3-d effect of "magic eye" pictures, and is also part of the reason for why pilots using HMDs (head mounted displays) get airsick. Part of their brain sees vergence cues telling them that the object they're looking at is 20 meters away, but the focus cues (and parallax cues and a few other things, include visual lag time) tell them that the focal plane is only a few centimeters away.
To get a 3-d effect of being able to change your "visual focus", you need to be able to track your eye position AND you need to be able to present a true 3-dimensional display or at least separate visual displays for each of the eyes which you can re-merge with your brain into your "3-d" image of the world.
These "3-d" cards simply hardware accelerate the rendering of the 2-d projection of 3-d data and textures. The effect you'd like would require the presence of multiple planes of imaging to focus on. There actually have been a couple of LCD dispays that use multiple display screens at different physical depths to give a partial 3-dimensional visual effect. These, however, differ so slightly in distance that the vergence/accomodation effects on the eye might not be very significant.
But current 2D primitives aren't very useful for a whole lot of things. They do lines, fills and blits. In today's interfaces, that's becoming very limiting. For example, who wants non-antialiased lines anymore? The minute you hit a gradient (and there's a *lot* of those) you're back in software. OpenGL can support most of the SVG imaging model, including filters and gradients, in hardware. The SVGL project has seen up to 100x performance improvements just in preliminary code. The whole point is moving beyond today's relatively poor interfaces to richer more detailed (and resolution independent!) ones. OpenGL is just the enabling mechanism for that.
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
I agree.
People ARE switching to linux, because it fits them. As more and more people convert, more and better software will be written.
Currently Linux is a solution for some people. They in turn are providing the feedback for other things they would like. Some other person checks it those things out and finds it better than what they have, and switch too.
Some people are expecting something to just make everyone grab a distro and install... It's not going to happen. What is happening is PCs being sold with linux as a home solution, with word processing, email, internet... all those small things you do everyday are the killer application. If you can do them nicely and quickly, why not opt for the cheaper solution? Then people find out the other freedoms in Open Source...
So... make it work one piece at a time... it will come to the desktop.
If the current KDE desktop had gone up against Windows 3.1 the world would be running Linux right now.
except Linux+KDE would not run customers' current MS-DOS applications.. oops!
cpeterso
Where have they claimed it was bad quality? I've only heard the opposite.
Latest Paradox . My Z-Machine background vs Translusent viewing that other window . Role on those 28" plasma screen price reductions .
No. You can't look at my Sig; it's mine, and I'm not showing you.
There's an option in the nVidia drivers for windows transparancy while dragging as well.
"For every expert, there is an equal and opposite expert"
don't forget us Atari ST'ers...we laughed at the Macs back then...black-and-white you say??? ha ha ha!
"Right now, somewhere in this world, Scott Baio is plowing a woman he doesn't love," - Peter Griffin, *Family Guy*
"Take a look at this!"
So now instead of posting stories with links, the story starts by strongly encouraging to click right away on this link.
He doesn't just need pizza now, he needs a new web page too.
--- Hindsight is 20/20, but walking backwards is not the answer.
I haven't played Quake3 since the leaked alpha!
-- 'The' Lord and Master Bitman On High, Master Of All
Likewise, translucent and transparent have specific English meanings. The former means that diffusion of the transmitted light prevents the formation of a clear image. A thing is not transparent merely because it is "translucent enough". It's not a matter of how much light is transmitted---as the latin translation would imply---but rather a matter of how much diffusion occurs.
Man, I really need to stop posting about this now. Take a look at a dictionary, and if you still disagree, then that's your prerogative.
Patrick Doyle
I mod down every jackass who puts his moderation policy in his sig. Oh, wait a sec....
Translucent windows is eyecandy and good for demonstrations, but that's pretty much it. Other than that, they're usability nightmares and harm productivity.
I couldn't agree more- I use OSX as my main desktop, and the translucent crap is not only slow, but for menu's just started driving me batty (contextual, menu bar, etc).
I installed a 3rd party theme awhile back, and the lack of transparency made things feel RIGHT again (ie, OS9 or Windows/Linux) and improved my ability to actually know what was going on with lots of windows open.
Getting rid of the pin-striping was a godsend for OSX too... try it, using theme changer (only one of them that really works) and OSX just gets alot more enjoyable. Text in menus and the menu bar and app windows is sooooo much easier to read.
Of course then the blinding aqua white kind of got to me, thought my eyes were going to burn in... happiest now with the cappucino theme. It has some rough spots, but it is a ton more usable than aqua.
You need more monitors. I have four. You're right though. The bottleneck is now on the human/computer bus.
Thanks for the laugh.
Cut and paste does not work consistently across applications on any Linux desktop. It's no use saying that it *could* if only application developers would implement it for their apps. They haven't, and the result is an abortion compared even to the indifferent support seen across Windows apps. Of course the complete consistency of cut, copy, paste, copy/paste style in Mac OS is in the realm of distant fantasy for x86 desktop users on both sides of the Linux/windows fence. Maybe if every Linux app were rewritten for a particular desktop (say KDE), but that aint gonna happen any time soon.
When you control-click or right-click on any running application's Dock icon, you get a pop-up list of all of that application's windows. The foreground window has a check mark next to it's name.
"do you think people new to computers have inertia?"
Individually? Of course not. But they will be surrounded by Windows users, and since computing is now a social activity the tendency will be to follow the herd.
"what is the best way to thwart the blind inertia that they may well pick up from those around them, from their predecessors, from so-called "insightful" slashdot posts?"
Education. Schools need to stop teaching off of one operating system. Make people learn everything there is out there. Force them to adapt to new interfaces. Make them learn how to learn a new interface. Then they can decide for themselves what they like using, and adapt more quickly as advancements come out. I have a huge issue with the way computers are taught in schools now.
"I object to doing things that computers can do." -- Olin Shivers, lispers.org
scripsit Raffaello:
I can only speak from my own experience, but I have used (at least) KDE, Gnome/Sawfish, XFCE, WindowMaker, Enlightenment, and IceWM recently, with KDE, GTK+, Mozilla, E, and Athena apps -- and a lot of good ol' fashioned xterms -- and I haven't had problems with X cut and paste on any of them. Highlight to select text and middle-click to paste it seems to work on damn near everything. I fairly regularly cut and paste UTF-8 text among xterms, Gvim, Galeon, and other apps -- mixing local and remote apps, often running on different commercial Unix flavours -- with no trouble at all, except for the occasional app lagging in its Unicode support. I honestly don't know what people are doing that causes so much trouble. I really don't.
In principio creauit Linus Linucem.
Ok you beat me: my version of quake 3 is the 'Demo Test' version!
"Credibility?" End your Photoshop snobbery! You must not have used Paint Shop Pro in a long time. JASC has put a ton of work into it and it's bordering on being as powerful as Photoshop. There's always been a lot that Photoshop could do that PSP couldn't, but that's down to "not much" these days. Nowadays there's a lot that PSP can do that Photoshop can't (like picture tubes, which are cool), and in many cases, PSP is EASIER to use. I use both and love both, and think that both complement each other. Plus Paint Shop Pro is about 10x cheaper than Photoshop, which is kinda nice too.
1. He was talking about Transclucence.. read the grandparent poster's SUBJECT. Windows has supported this since Windows2000.
2. While you are correct in saying that Windows does not use OpenGL in compositing windows, much of the theory is the same. Replace OpenGL with the GDI, and you have another interface to graphics-card enabled compositing, abiet a slightly less versatile one.
1. He was talking about window transparency.. read the post next time.
2. While you are correct in saying that Windows does not use OpenGL in compositing windows, much of the theory is the same. Replace OpenGL with the GDI, and you have another interface to graphics-card enabled compositing, abiet a slightly less versatile one.
Yes, in fact it does.
Well... no, it doesn't. The problem is that different programs use different systems. If you're trying to copy from a program that only supports middle mouse button pasting to one that only supports a copy/paste clipboard, you just can't copy between them. It's right annoying.
Sure, it works a lot of the time, but I do quite often find cases where it doesn't.
scripsit EnglishTim:
I guess I've never come across a program that doesn't understand X copy/paste (i.e., highlight and middle-click). Can you give non-trivial examples?
In principio creauit Linus Linucem.
Here: just today I tried to copy a section of text from an OpenOffice document and paste it into an email I was writing in the Mozilla mail client.
It can't be done. I think in this case it's not that mozilla won't accept a middle mouse click paste, but that OpenOffice doesn't provide the proper X highlight information, or something. I also get a similar problem when using jedit, except that it won't accept the middle mouse button to paste. To be fair, it's a Java application, but the cut and paste in jedit works just fine under Windows...
scripsit EnglishTim:
With OOo 1.0.2 and Mozilla 1.0.0 it works for me (Debian Sarge, XFree86 4.2.1, IceWM 1.2.7). Well, I don't use Mozilla mail (HTML mail == evil) but I can paste into a Mozilla browser text box just fine. If you're sure it's OOo that's the problem (e.g., because you can't copy from OOo to an xterm either), and you've got a reasonably recent OOo version, file a bug! What you're seeing is not normal behavior. You don't mention what distro you're using, but if you find these problems pervasive you might consider that the problem is with your distro and not Linux or X in general.
I can't say anything about that, except that I would expect no less from a Java application... <duck>
In principio creauit Linus Linucem.