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Afterstep 2.0 Beta Includes XML Graphics System
vaevictus writes "Afterstep just released its 2.0 Beta 1, after a long merge from its development branch. One of the most interesting new features is an XML-based graphics system, where any picture for any part of the WM can be a simple chunk of XML, which can do transformations, scaling, gradients and some other nice graphics mods. I've personally used this to cut my 1600x1200 image size from a 2.4mb PNG to a total of about 37kb. This leads to some very compact themes. If you're not familiar, AfterStep is one of the older WMs out there still in active development; all of you WindowMaker fans should check out the WM your WM branched off of, so long ago."
Assuming you're trolling, let me point out that WindowMaker isn't a fork of AfterStep, it's a from-scratch window manager in the same style. AfterStep on the other hand is a fork of another wm, twm was it?
I've always wondered why AfterStep still exists, actually, having tried both AfterStep always struck me as being a bit clumsy and crufty in comparison. Maybe some AfterStep fans want to explain what they like about it compared to WindowMaker?
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Friends don't let friends enable ecmascript.
Actually you're not too far off...
take a 17KB greyscale tile (defenseless elsie, in this case), and load it with this chunk of xml:
<composite op=tint>
<gradient width=$xroot.width height=$xroot.height colors="BaseDark BaseLight" angle=45/>
<img tile=1 tint="#7Fffffff" src="tiles/DefenselessElsie"/>
</composite>
an d you've got a beautiful 1600x1200 image with a gradient that passes through the entire background , not just a single tile. It will also pull the colors for this gradient out of your current colorscheme, unless you would like to change some simple xml around.
There *is* a program I enjoy using on windows... It's called FDISK.
Afterstep was a fork of fvwm2 (a very old school window manager; think Redhat 4.2 and earlier). Both Windowmaker and Afterstep are recreations of the Nextstep GUI. When I tried AS (admittedly years ago), it still showed its clunky fvwm2 roots. All configs were in text files including the Wharf (called Icon Dock in Next). The dock on the Next had draggable icons which was pretty cool for its time (first came out in 1989), and WM had that too, so it was a closer imitation of the Nextstep GUI. Correct me if I'm wrong, but I think the AS Wharf supports drag and drop for launching files, but not for application icons.
Sure.
cat input.svg > output.xml
No, its not compatible with SVG, and actually has different goal. Afterstep's XML images merely provides interface to powerfull functionality of libAfterImage, including image overlaying, scaling, tiling, cropping, and so on. It has many uses, such as compiling complex icons from simplier clipart, creating scaled down thumbnails, changing colors of images to match that of colorscheme, and so on.
It is very usefull in different fields, such as web design, where you can create a script that generates all of the website's images from some clipart ( including text rendering ).
Note that AfterStep does not need to keep multiple copies of the same image for different pourposes, which is what KDE does with its icon themes, etc.
Property of AfterStep Window Manager.
AfterStep 2.0 is a complete from scratch reimplementation, Its much more flexible then WM, its graphics subsistem is much more advanced and powerfull, resource management is better ( consider the fact that AS now compresses images in memory - something no other desktop environment could do).
It was redesigned to be compliant with new window management specs, and as different from WM it is actually being developed right now.
Property of AfterStep Window Manager.
Its not just the text antialiasing, although AfterStep 2 can antialias both TTF fonts and good old X bitmap fonts. AfterSTep has a very powerfull graphics engine with things like in-memory image compression, high quality image rendering with dithering, high quality and fast scaling, 15 ways to overlay image on top of each other (similar to GIMP) Hue Saturation Value manipulation, etc. Note that all of it is very fast and memory efficient.
Now AfterStep's desktop model is much more flexible then Window Maker's
Menu editor/prefs thingy is probably the only absent thing in AS 2, but I'm working on it.
Originally AS was anal about being too NeXT strict, which prompted creation of WM, and if you'd look into possibilities of WM's titlebar and frame decoration configuration, and compare it to AfterStep - you'll see enough advantage in AS.
both written in C, but let me tell ya, that you don't want to be messing around with WM's codebase - it sucks.
AfterSTep does not plays catch up - in 2.0 version we have several things that no other desktop environment has - XML images, Menus adjusting to use pattern, Colorschemes, to name just few.
Property of AfterStep Window Manager.
We don't have too many ppl working on AS.
I mean I do all the development, clipart design, support, and pretty much everything else.
I don't have no time whatsoever to work on web site, and it was rather dead for quite a while, and only recently got revived by Remmy. One of the purposes of releasing this beta was to attract more ppl to the project, and get some help.
You can take a look at my devel site on SourceForge:
http://afterstep.sf.net
and screenshots on
http://afterstep.sf.net/afterstep20beta/
Property of AfterStep Window Manager.
It shouldn't. Since the XML is used here only as a configuration file, it's going to be interpreted only once while loading the theme. It might be that this slows down theme switching a bit but I'm skeptical. Metacity themese switch quite fast and they're all XML based.
The end user doesn't gain much since the XML is anyway hidden from him but it's much easier for someone to tweak a pre-existing theme to suit his purpose if it is written in XML. This screenshot (136 kB), for example, shows a mod of Metacity's Metabox theme. I could do it because the config file (seen in the maximized terminal) was not too difficult to understand and I didn't have to learn new syntax rules for manipulating it.
Depends on the interpreting application. XML is no more difficult to screw than any other format. This includes breaking well-formedness of the document.
For me it's OK. As long as I get to tweak things to my preferences without much ado, it doesn't matter.
The fact that AS was too bloated and more of a hack was the reason for me to rewrite it. It is no more "just a hack" in 2.0
Property of AfterStep Window Manager.
Then again, I would not be surprised if NextStep had this feature before...
I think the XFCE4 windowmanager works the exact same way.
So no slight to the AfterStep developers, but they where beaten to the punchline with almost a year on this one