Slashdot Mirror
Not Just Eye Candy At Freedesktop.org
Jim Gettys writes "While Keith Packard's eyecandy at freedesktop.org, including drop shadows, translucent menus and windows with alpha channels is nice to look at, and in some ways useful, *much* more important
is that the same facilities are useful for
thumbnailing, screen magnifiers, and arbitrary transforms of applications on their way to the screen, just to name a few of the potential
applications. So enjoy the eyecandy, but remember, too much candy can rot your brain. And if you want to
avoid fattening your brain, you can come help us
make this ready for prime-time, and work off
the candy you ate and pitch in at freedesktop.org."
For background, see this earlier Slashdot post about Freedesktop.org, and the brief description below.
An anonymous reader sums up this effort to revamp X: "The new X server features full support for transparency, and has window-level image compositing among other things. It allows applications to present alpha-blended content to the screen. A new X Visual was added to the server. At 32 bits deep, it provides 8 bits of red, green and blue along with 8 bits of alpha value. Applications can create windows using this visual and the compositing manager can take those contents and composite them right onto the screen. The X server project holds sources to build an X server separately from a full X distribution."
www.apple.com
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
Slashdot made the website translucent.
I don't get why the Xouvert folks didn't just pitch in on this effort. They're almost a month and a half behind their schedule.
/me thanks fdo
Oh well, I'm still getting what I want. Maybe soon they'll be able to add 3D support, as now it's just FB/VESA. Now I'm off to make some debs from the CVS.
I heard about this last night at a lug meeting (Keith had shown the screenshots at the Desktop Linux conference in Boston on Monday) and I'm wondering how long before we see this in XFree86. Particularly considering Keith's history with the project and XFree's general reluctance to release more than once or twice a year...
I read a lot of duiscussion on this new X server on osnews.com yesterday...
The major topics were the Nvidia and ATI drivers: how fast will they be ported? or will there be binary compatability?
at any rate, I would really like to see more of the desktop rendered using openGL, providing for speedy Eye candy anyway...
Looking at screenshot number 3, I think the fellow's got a few bugs to work out.
Bu-dum-chee!
Thank you! Thank you! I'll be here all week! Try the buffet!
Their server has been freed of the burden of loading pages. If only all pages functioned so, it should make your desktop truly free!
Hansel USA - Chut up and read!
Image saved before slashdotting, Here
... Microsoft announce that its still to be released OS Longhorn will feature new GUI improvements, including drop shadows, translucent menus and windows with alpha channels.
Do translucent windows sitting on top of video playback work with accepatable speed?
If translucent windows can "fatten your brain" (er..?) then is ratpoison the Atkins Diet? Someone else help me out with abusing this metaphor some more.
Slashdotters are always complaining about that X is slow/bloated/outdated/old/must be replaced/etc/etc. Yet X is slowly improving. Nonetheless, that doesn't stop people from complaining.
Now that I've seen thousands of Slashdotters complain about X, and it seems alpha transparency is finally progressing, I can only conclude one thing:
Don't listen to the whiners!
Really, *all* those people do is whining and bashing, and *nothing else*. No constructive criticism, no suggestions - just whining and bashing. And while people are wasting times whining and bashing, real developers are making real progress.
This is it. Slashdot has lost my respect. I will never listen to the whiners and bashers again.
I think it is time we make a more userfriendly, windowmanager-specific GUI for Linux/FreeBSD/etc that will be accepted by the masses and seen as "Linux", maybe make it official, this is the perfect grounds to get it accepted by the masses, making a unified interface for linux and other derivatives, then see if it is accepted. Make it like windows where all you see the whole time is the user interface, to make it better for the desktop world, some say that choice is good, and the ability to run programs remotely is good, but now days for the average desktop user, this is not very practical, and choice is becoming randomness since there is no standard user interface guideline for Linux. Lets make someone like MacOS X for x86, but based on Linux: fast, easy, etc. I could help with UI development, etc if anyone is interested in starting a project, I'm not much for coding though. Linux needs somthing original. I know, I posted this in the past, but I am wanting to get the word out.
Sig: I stole this sig.
I mean, you have to use Mozilla or a Mozilla-derivative for web browsing (Konqueror is nice and all, but the last time I tried it extensively it still felt toy-like, and Mozilla is the cross-platform standard I am used to and want to use). But that forces you to use Gtk - so forget about KDE, you need to use GNOME. But now you have to use the awful mismatched GNOME apps. Then what about the OOo monstrosity? The toolkit, widgets, fonts, etc. don't seem to match anything else on the desktop. Why does this just never happen in Windows (even OOo doesn't exhibit these awful characteristics in Windows - yes, this is a rhetorical question, I understand the technical reasons and they all indicate major flaws in the X architecture to me)?
Keith P, you are doing the right thing. I wish I had more time, I'd pitch in and help out with this project, since it might allow me to actually use X without clawing my eyes out some day (or coping with atrocious performance when you hack in all the eye candy on top).
Maybe you should have something else you can do with your life when slashdot articles aren't available.
... I mean, look at Apple. They've built most of a business around being cool, sexy, and user-friendly. This is a triumvirate for the company, and with the unix-based OS-X, they'll be expanding into hardcore geek territory as well :-)
:-)
I even wrote eyecandy (the visualisation applet) on hostip.info - it's a trade: I show you something pretty, you put in your city. Or not. Your choice, but hopefully the eyecandy helps sweeten the deal
Simon.
Physicists get Hadrons!
So enjoy the eyecandy, but remember, too much candy can rot your brain.
oh that reminds me of something.... oh yeah! THIS
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
Their webserver must be running on this X server you speak of. Ba-dum-bum. I'll be here all week.
Slashdot: The worlds only legal DDoS network.
A mirror would be nice...
Hey! Take your own advice and quit your fucking whining!
oh man, this is probably the greatest usenet post I've ever seen.
long live ratpoison!
Since I can't get to the freedesktop site right now, I'm curious about the speed increase when the alpha blending is done by the X server instead of by the window manager. The one screen shot I did see(only because someone mirrored it) had gnome with semi-transparent windows. I'm not a gnome user, I use KDE and I know it handles transparent windows and menus. But how much faster and snappier will the response be with the transparency done at lower level?
Actually, this is mentioned in the FAQ .
parasight.de
At least I contribute code. I can't say that about you!
It's nice to see some modern imaging models being implemented in X.
But it seems to me that this will just lead to a more fragmented user environment. X has always had the problem of "applications behaving differently." So now, some are going to support the imaging model, and others won't.
From a user's point-of-view, that sucks.
If you want a killer desktop environment, work on the user interface. Not the imaging model.
Can anyone explain why Xserver/kdrive doesn't support standard XFree video card drivers? It's a great project, even without these new extensions, but unaccelerated X sucks badly. Is there something wrong with the XFree driver architecture?
If I seem short sighted, it is because I stand on the shoulders of midgets
For your viewing pleasure, I have obtained an ASCII-art mirror of the screen shots:
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i find all this eye candy cool and visual stimulating. however i need as many cycles open for other stuff beside making my windows prettier and XML-ifying all config files.
How highly configurable is this system? for example whenever i am forced to sit in front of a winXP machine i turn off all graphic eye candies so it look/feels/acts like win95.
some of us do like and use all the eye candy, however i prefer eyeless candy.
at http://www.herrvinny.com/sdmirror/
I contribute code. And I don't fucking whine! So I have one up on you, smart guy.
Don't get me wrong, if you have fast hardware and are trying to convert grandma from "some other environment" go for it, but for me personally I will take lean, mean, and quick any day of the week.
I Am My Own Worst Enemy
Yeah right, and I'm Santa Clause. Keep your lies to yourself, anonymous coward.
Actually the whining is all about how the XFree86 group won't accept outside contributions and don't even seem to contribute themselves...
This is a branch, hence the advancement.
Well to be fair X has had a whole load of interesting features added to it the last few years. The automated config file creator has saved me a great deal of work setting up X on different boxes, it was probably the most important (and least known or announced) usability feature in X in the last years. The VNC extensions are also a big step in the good direction.
What X does lack from a sysadmin point of view is decent compile-time configurability (too many #defines buried in too many places in or outside the config/cf tree).
Having 3 distinct font implementations doesn't help either. It's also far to easy to shoot yourself in the foot (disabling render breaks xft), etc.
And let's not forget management issues such as who gets access to what, who maintains what, finding people willing (and capable) of doing regression testing for bug fixes/enhancements, etc. I think it would be very nice if Xfree got some more financial backing from an important player (read: IBM) so a couple of people could work on those issues full-time.
X is a great project, but of course it could be improved even further. Some people think a reimplementation is needed, but perhaps it's not and a good spring cleaning will do the trick. But the trick is still how to do that with mastodont code like X.
... if you don't need it, don't use it. The X server continues to work as before without a compositing manager.
--
Free Software enthusiast; Debian GNU/Linux (powerpc) developer
THIS is eyecandy!
Anyone know who this is?
Mirror
Here we have the KDE coders writing hacks for kde to support menu transparancy and shadows, while the gnome guys have been working to stick these features where they belong, but im not suprised kde has always been implimenting stuff where it dosent belong.
I've noticed the look of the screenshots at this site. It seems so many people want things that look and work like Mac OS X in the freeware world nowadays. Then why are so many more people going with Gnome and KDE? Why don't more people just support the GNUstep people instead? I think NeXT and now Apple has proven the world won't fall apart if you use Objective-C instead of C++. If you go to the http://www.w3.org/ site you'll even see that the first web browser was written in Objective-C. Also, OpenStep exists as a standard so it sure will make easier to port commercial applications written in Cocoa to the Unix world.
Don't listen to the whiners!
Stop whining.
They found out when we did. Xouvert and Xwin are not working together, the xwin people consider them to be amateur script kiddies. Now, theres nothing wrong with amateur hackers coding for X, this is actually a very good thing because eventually amateurs become experts. Xouverts purpose is to attract new developers. Xwin and Xfree people do not like newbie developers and they arent open, they will not help you and they do not work with you until you prove yourself. This is not a good learning environment and so the only way we will have faster developer uptake is if we actually have a newbie x hackers version for testing and experimental shit, and a version the professionals support. Kind of like how we can have Slackware/Debian and then have Redhat and Suse.
People don't exist to serve systems, systems exist to serve people.
I don't understand why people use Objective-C. C++ is the standard OO C, and avoids all of that runtime crap that Objective-C has. By all means rip off NeXTs APIs and look-and-feel, but leave that silly language behind.
I think we need to talk to people from KDE, Enlightenment, Gnome, and all of these groups and as a combined effort build the first and default composition manager.
People don't exist to serve systems, systems exist to serve people.
And if you want to avoid fattening your brain...
...you should avoid developing Tay-Sachs disease.
Thank you, I'll be here all night.
Object-C is an ugly syntatic kludge of a language. C++ isn't perfect but its FAR more consistent than O-C. Why anyone would want to
use objective C if they haven't got a gun pressed to their heads is a mystery to me.
> If you go to the http://www.w3.org/ site you'll even see
> that the first web browser was written in Objective-C.
Then they're completely wrong. I happen to know for a fact mosaic was pure and simply C
Linux will never get beyond the "its hard to use" stigma until its so much easier to use and so much nicer looking than Windows that theres no arguement left. Only then will Linux truely be ready for the Desktop.
People don't exist to serve systems, systems exist to serve people.
So when is OSS going to invent something in the usability area for a change? Cascading menus were nice 10 years ago when screen resolutions were 640x480, but with the technology today, I don't see any reason why I have to look at a small subset of the available commands at any given time.
When do we get a new screen-size "menu" system that lists all the commands in one convenient overlaid window, just like, well, the Web Site Directory portion on yahoo.com's main page? How about something new and useful instead of more band-aids for 20 year-old technology?
Also if we can do all of this why not go further and use the video card fully?
People don't exist to serve systems, systems exist to serve people.
Do you hear yourself? You are whining about whiners.
Seriously, though, I agree that there may be too much whining and that X is improving.
Still, occasionally I am reminded of how things should be done -- DJB style. Config variables are single words in a file, meaning human-readability, scriptability, and no parsing needed. On top of that, the programs themselves are tiny compared to what you'd expect based on the number of features and based on similar projects. It seems to me that when something gets as big as X is, perhaps pieces of it need to be separated out into their own packages. Not everyone needs alpha tranpsarency, not everyone needs opengl, and not everyone needs lots of colors.
Of course, I really don't know what I'm talking about here. I don't know how hard it would be to take X from one huge daemon down to many small daemons, each with their own project. Look what happened when I suggested this approach about Linux! Although almost any kernel I build will be less than 5 megs, and although the kernel source is fairly well organized, most of what's in the kernel is there for only two reasons -- either performance or access to other kernel components. All the kernel really needs to be is a scheduler!
But the practical world calls. *sigh* And even if my proposed idea could work as fast or faster than Linux, it'd be a bitch to get the Linux developers and the Linux code moved over.
At least I can savor the small victories. Imagine if X, KDE, and Konqueror were all "OS components"?
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
Hmm, this looks promising. Now all that is needed is for someone to write either a compatibility layer to bring the XFree drivers over to the freedesktop.org Xserver including GLX compatibility, make the Compositing Manager use OpenGL and eureka we have GPU based compositing.
This is close to the features coming in Longhorn, where the windows are to be considered textures rendered by the GPU.
Now my personal dream is still to see a combination of this and a high level protocol/server in which the applications and window managers send in calls where they ask for things like a button or a menu and include the data, while the rendering mechanism (the widgets) rest on the serverside (allowing for a central repository of widgetsets and almost guaranteed consistency of the UI). Custom widgets could then be implemented as either "server-side" extensions ala the scripts/executables that make up a webapplication or as client side components which are allowed to send drawing instructions to the server. It is intriguing to think about the possibilities of letting each window own a thread and socket connection (as in a modern webserver) to the application so that they can all update their own "scene" concurrently (almost anyway) and then the central compositor/renderer renders these changes from the existing application/windows tree.
A person is smart, people are deeply stupid
I do not care much about the new eye candy if I cannot use it and I do not really want software based hacks. Can this eye candy work with my ATI or Nvidia card?
People don't exist to serve systems, systems exist to serve people.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Something like XUL were you can describe your widgets in an independent manner. There (if you think about it) is little difference between a KDE widget and a GNOME widget, except looks. The behaviour is however tied to the toolkits.
By going this way, you gain some benifits.
1-Freedom to make your desktop look like any environment you want. Even one's that haven't been thought of yet.
2-Cross-platform is easier sans the behaviour issue.
3-Write once, speed up everywere. One body of code to write, get right, and speed up.
4-Remoting will be easier because you're sending higher-level information.
Seems to me, that would be as emotoinally damaging as actually being rape. The only difference being the identity of the person violating them.
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
... the same facilities are useful for thumbnailing, screen magnifiers, and arbitrary transforms of applications on their way to the screen ...
For example, parsing the content and editing it on the way to the screen. How long before it's used for pop-up advertising?
-kgj
-kgj
The first web browser was World Wide Web and written by Tim Berners Lee. Mosaic came out some years later.
KDE & Gnome should work on a standard composition manager together. I'd hope Enlightenment could also work with KDE and Gnome on this, we need standards now.
People don't exist to serve systems, systems exist to serve people.
Is this some sort of replacement for XFree86? Or a proposed patch or module add-on?
WeRelate.org - wiki-based genealogy
Alright, in the screenshots I can see translucent stuff and dropshadows. But: Eyecandy it is not.
The wallpaper is ugly, they dont even use Gnomecompliant Software such as Epiphany. I know this might be offtopic but I was expecting to see something nice and this is plain ugly. I prefer a clean (Gnome-)Desktop over this clutter when it comes to execandy.
But from a tech point of view I must admit this is heading in the right direction. All the hacks I saw so far with hardcoded dropshadows and pseudotransparency were a performance hog and didnt look good either.
So by your "criteria" Apple should be storming the desktop, and leaving Microsoft in the dust. So why isn't that happening?
Big hint: Your criteria is flawed..
We just need a unified composition manager. The last thing I want to see is 20 composition managers all which suck.
People don't exist to serve systems, systems exist to serve people.
Most people install the distro and use Gnome or KDE. Some may install something else, but most won't. I don't care much for some of the eye-candy, but things like translucent windows would be nice for functional reasons. My windows always overlap, and it would be cool to be able to see through them. I think a slider control on each window to fade the transparency level would be sweet. (and have a default transparency set for all windows, depending on type of course)
If you are looking for light and fast, try out icewm instead of fvwm. It is very configurable via cfg files. I used to use fvwm on the old Sun boxes back in the day, but I tried it recently on my Linux machine and really hated it. My main machine is KDE, but I have a couple of others (older hardware) that run icewm.
My beliefs do not require that you agree with them.
I agree. Square brackets are for array accesses... NOT method calls!
> X is slowly improving. Nonetheless, that doesn't stop people from complaining.
Maybe because X only really started improving within the last year or two. Before then it was more or less dead code for about a decade.
(When Windows NT hit the market in 1993, the commercial UNIX vendors rolled over and played dead in the workstation market. X11, Motif, CDE dev all stagnated. For most of the 90s, the most popular X Server was Hummingbird on Windows, which spells L-E-G-A-C-Y, even while being fiercely apologized for by the Unix Taliban. Its only within the last couple years that anyone has been seriously thinking about Unix (Linux) on the desktop.)
"See how the silly coders waste their time on the puny Linux desktop! How dare they build up the end user with false hope of a Linux for the masses! How it pains us to see the folly! Of course, if it does take off, we'll implement it as soon as the user base get's big enough....ahemmm"
Troll, I know.
Thats exactly my point, maybe someone like xouvert can step up and handle the role of making the drivers and submitting those kinds of patches. driver support will come soon enough, and for people who use the standard ATI/Nvidia, we should all focus on getting Nvidia to write good drivers.
People don't exist to serve systems, systems exist to serve people.
To build better UIs has got to be a good thing. OSS falls down because of the awful UIs some very good programmes have got and this is partly due to the toolkits, widgets, Window Managers and Windowing systems that are available. I wish the best of luck to this project.
I mean, really. This is sort of on the level of "BSD is dead" by now. Oh, wait...
You seem to have everything planned out, you have a roadmap, why don't you start working on it right now?
People don't exist to serve systems, systems exist to serve people.
So you are whining about the whining on Slashdot, therefore becoming that which you despise. :-)
:-)
Of course when the comunity yells loud enough for a particular feature, some determined hacker will eventually act, and things will get done. Look at the amount of noise generated in favor of font anti-aliasing, someone listened, took the time to do it, and now the community has one less thing to bitch about
All of these esoteric applications are things the average user never uses. The only thing average people use a computer for, word processing, spreadsheets, web browsing, emaiil/IM/chat and multimedia playback. Nothing else matters, the fruityloop music program only producers use, the visual studio only programmers use. So if everyone is using the same few programs the only thing Linux is missing is drivers, a professional looking Desktop, and decent fonts. Honestly when I'm writing my paper in open office for school I don't give a damn about some esoteric Windows program which might not run, I'm trying to do my work. Its funny that you care about applications when most Applications from Windows 3.1 did not work on Windows 98, and most applications from Windows 98 do not work on Windows XP, I'm guessing alot of old XP programs wont work on 64bit longhorn. People who upgrade to new software do not expect ALL their old software to work, they just expect an alternative to exist.
People don't exist to serve systems, systems exist to serve people.
SCWM, non-Lisp dialects, mercury, Pop-11, Luca Cardelli, OCaml hacking?
I don't know what the fuck you just said kid, but you're special!
No ones going to care as long as the newer cards can use it. The popular cards like Gforce Series, the ATI Raedon series etc. No one should expect the TNT or 3DFX series of cards to work.
People don't exist to serve systems, systems exist to serve people.
X11 2003 = Windows '99 = Mac OS X '98
Old news on the Windows and OS X platforms.
The last cool thing I saw on the X desktop was the work done by rasterman on Enlightenment. I have been using this WM for many years now in Sunos/Solaris and Linux environments. It's not really ready for prime time (I'm using rev 16.5), but it's really pretty. Using Eterm and now gnome-terminal, you get transparent xterms, and that to me is really cool.
With a nice background and the ripple/waves effect turned on... you get the feeling you are looking at waves and that your monitor is a real "window" to some nice parklike setting, and that those "nfs: server not responding" messages really are not so important after all.
IMHO, the gnome/KDE desktop realy need the ability to customize the window decorations, and support the ripple/wave effect that were pioneered in Enlightenment. But until then, I'll use enlightenment.
Ross Youngblood
Mosaic was not the first browser. World Wide Web by Time Berners-Lee was. Completely done in Objective-C in a NeXT ( screenshot).
And just by that screenshot it's clear to me that the NeXT interface is a much more tasteful and usable choice to emulate than, well, all other GUI's, and thus GNUstep is becoming every day more and more a real option with real advantages. Alas, blinking bars and Matrix-like desktops seem to be the "hip" thing, but lest hope that good taste prevails.
fsmunoz
Objective-C isn't the only relevant concern here. Why isn't GNUStep's Display GhostScript forked into Guartz, a GPL Quartz clone?
There are no trails. There are no trees out here.
> while the gnome guys have been working to stick these features where they belong, but im not suprised kde has always been implimenting stuff where it dosent
Um, since when was FreeDesktop associated with only GNOME?
This stuff works with both KDE and GNOME, quite obviously.
Screenshot of it with KDE
If I'm not mistaken, there is a fundamental bug in the dropshadow algorithm. If Window 1 is above Window 2, and Window 2 is above Window 3, then the dropshadow of Window 1 on Window 3 should be offset by twice the amount that the dropshadow of Window 1 is on Window 2. The shadow of Window 1 has "further" to travel (into the screen) to reach Window 3 than it has to reach Window 2.
Looking at the screenshots, it seems that the dropshadows of all windows on all of the windows below them are offset by the same amount.
I, for one, welcome our new alpha-channel enabled translucent overlords.
It has translucency? I have yet to see that implemented. Everything I've seen so far is only varying levels of transparency. I'm only seeing alpha channel implemented, no options for a scatter channel which would define the degree of scattering of the image as it passes through a foreground image.
Ah, I can't fault you. The site itself regularly misuses the term "translucent". Free lesson: if you can make out details, particularly able to read text, it is not translucent, it is transparent. Transparency is a continuum from completely transparent to opaque. Translucency is not part of that continuum. It is different, like looking through a frosted shower door, where you can get the sense of color and motion, but where details cannot be determined. Photons get scattered by the medium resulting in a loss of perceptable detail.
I'd applaud a system that implemented a scatter channel for true translucency. Trying to read text while other text is showing through it is difficult. A moderate amount of translucent scatter applied would be less distracting.
Now think, what if you could apply a visual blurring to windows that aren't in the foreground/under the cursor? Surely that could help focus the user on a task. (There'd need be some control to allow multiple windows be in perfect focus on occasion.) Simulated depth perception to enhance the window stacking model.
Oh, say does that Star-Spangled Banner entwine / The myrtle of Venus with Bacchus's vine?
I haven't done much programming in Objective-C, but I have done a little and I've done quite a bit more in C++. I'm not sure what you mean by consistency, but nonetheless that doesn't change the fact that Objective-C has proven itself to be a practical language. And since I doubt anyone has pressed a gun to your head to make you use Objective-C, I can only assume the implication that you cannot be talking from any personal programming experience about Objective-C and its consistency or lack thereof.
Getting over square brackets was very easy for me, especially since the corresponding semantics in Objective-C are much nicer for writing complex programs in fewer lines of code. The resulting return type from an [object message] expression is always the generic object type, and you are free to send the resulting object any message...if it won't respond to the message, it's quiet about it...even if that object is NIL. (Thank the maker!) Of course, if you want stricter type checking, you have that option too...but at least Objective C gets out of your way when what you really want is to be maximally expressive while being minimally verbose.
The "cue the foo posts in 3, 2, 1..." posts will commence with no subsequent foo posts in 3, 2, 1...
"Of course when the comunity yells loud enough for a particular feature, some determined hacker will eventually act, and things will get done. Look at the amount of noise generated in favor of font anti-aliasing, someone listened, took the time to do it, and now the community has one less thing to bitch about :-) "
Or that Hacker could have simply been scratching his own itch (gee my fonts suck), and the fact that everyone else's "itch" (noise) was taken care of was a side benefit.
Kind of like every other benefit that's came out of OS.
---
Never atribute to the majority, what can be explained by the minority.
All these screenshots of semi-transperant windows and menus literally gives me a headache. I think it's because my eyes are trying to bring both windows into focus at once. I know it's not something I would use if given the choice.
XJS*C4JDBQADN1.NSBN3*2IDNEN*GTUBE-STANDARD-ANTI-U
Why is it that it's suddenly so important to convert everybody's grandma to Linux? Improving X is great, and I don't have anything against that, but no one will decide for me that gnome is better than kde or windowmaker, or whatever. If some things are too hard for the average windows user to learn, let him continue using windows. This isn't a competition, this is about using what works best for you, and if that's windows there's absolutely nothing wrong with it.
I like my choices, and no one...I mean NO ONE is taking my command-line away. NO ONE you hear me???
Warning: Opinions known to be heavily biased.
X11 isn't like the stuff Microsoft or Apple churn out. Microsoft and Apple just hack something together, throw it out, and call it a "standard API". It's easy. It's quick to market. And it locks people into proprietary APIs and has all sorts of other problems.
X11 is a protocol, not an implementation. As part of defining protocol extensions, people build a reference implementation of the protocol extension. It makes perfect sense to build the reference implementation in software. Hardware vendors and implementors can then build hardware accelerated versions of it and compare it with the software implementation.
This approach has worked very well. It means that X11 has remained backwards and forwards compatible over more than a decade and that X servers have been able to take advantage of new hardware technologies as they have come out.
Note that Apple is not using the "innate RGBA capabilities of the video card" to its fullest extent either. Furthermore, even good 3D cards may not do the right thing for 2D rendering--2D desktop rendering is not simply a subset of 3D rendering.
about time they created an x server that has features that apply to the modern day environments
I think a really fast way of getting this in the hands of programmers would be to make a VNC version of this server. I may be reluctant to replace my regular development desktop with it, but developing against a VNC server with alpha transparency would be fine.
I use fvwm2. (not "too").
John.
Xouvert is Xfree, so why not merge it into Xouvert?
People don't exist to serve systems, systems exist to serve people.
And, of course, you can very well write a compositing manager to do this. That's the beauty of this extension set and architecture - the X server doesn't tell you how to render things. It just provides the means to let you do it. You could even swap composition managers on the fly, I'd imagine, or just tweak settings there-of, or whatever. Just like you can do with a window manager.
Then why are so many more people going with Gnome and KDE? Why don't more people just support the GNUstep people instead?
Easy: while a lot of people like the look of the Mac, they don't like the underlying technologies: DisplayPDF and Objective-C. Personally, I think those technologies are obsolete, inefficient, and cumbersome.
I think adding transparency to X11 is a technically much better solution. It is language neutral and transport agnostic. It also has the virtue of being backwards compatible. And it doesn't require people to throw away their existing X11 software--there is a lot more X11 software than OpenStep or Apple software.
X11 will also get server-side stored vector graphics based on SVG. Again, same functionality as DisplayPDF but more standards compliant and a better design.
Also, OpenStep exists as a standard so it sure will make easier to port commercial applications written in Cocoa to the Unix world.
In what sense do you believe OpenStep is a "standard"? Where are the standards documents? Where can you even get an implementation?
It seems that right now, we have GNUstep and Cocoa, two similar but incompatible implementations, together with some copyrighted API documents.
Note, incidentally, that few of the features that make the Macintosh API visually appealing (shadows, transparency, etc.) were pioneered by Apple, and historically were implemented without anything like Apple's software infrastructure.
If people didn't complain about Xfree on Slashdot (and elsewhere), would we see these alternative X-implementations? If we were all happy and quiet with Xfree, where's the motivation in creating better alternatives?
I bet the whining and complaining acted as a clear sign that something was seriously wrong with Xfree and it's developement-process. And that's what kickstarted these competing projects.
Lesbian Nazi Hookers Abducted by UFOs and Forced Into Weight Loss Programs - -all next week on Town Talk.
In order to play with this X server, what hardware does one need (i.e. what hardware does the current CVS version support?)
John_Chalisque
IMO, Objective-C is actually a much nicer and more consistent OOL than C++. The syntax is a little oddball, but ultimately no big deal, and the method naming actually helps.
What kills Objective-C in my opinion is that its resource management is a kludgy mess. Java and C# have bullet proof and worry-proof resource management, and in C++ you can get it if you know what you are doing. But in Objective-C, resource management and exception handling are as flaky and cumbersome as in C (Objective-C has lots of library support for it, but that doesn't help much).
Objective-C could have a renaissance if Apple updates it for the 21st century. Foremost, it needs some runtime safety and some garbage collection. Something like the Tom language. But in its current form, it will fade from view.
That was the first graphical web browser. The first web browser was text based and not written in Objective-C.
[nt]
The article said that the user had to hand modify some code to get it running with this new X server. It might look spiffy, but why the hell would I want to hand tweak every tarball I get, just because I'm not using Xfree86?!?!
I'm using KDE 3.1.4tex on Mandrake 9.1 and I have all the goodies available that they are demonstrating, drop shadows, translucent menus (I don't like those) and everything else.
Is this some big retro-breakthrough, has the time machine slipped a cog or am I missing something completely??
There, I would like to point out why something like KDE exists to -reduce- bloat, paradoxical as you may think it.
First of all, a LOT of any given KDE app's functionality resides in the libs. Heck, you can write a simple Web browser in 10 lines of code... This means that to start that app you'll need to load all sorts of libs, which accounts for some of the ~25% more memory a full KDE desktop takes over WindowMaker, as the parent post points out.
Only, and there's the tasty part, once the lib is loaded, it's loaded for all the apps that will ever use it. Ergo: the more code is shared by apps, the less bloat you get down the road.
While this -does- mean you get a bit of an overhead at startup, any additional KDE app running takes up considerably less additional memory than a similar app re-coded from scratch.
I routinely have 10 to 20 browser windows (tabbed and not tabbed) open at a given time, with a mail client, newsreader, IM app, music app, a variety of applets, an IDE and countless terms, and the system doesn't even flinch. Try doing that with as many GUI apps all reinventing their own wheel.
Oh, and as for speed, turn off the eye candy and KDE runs all sweet on a simple Pentium (yes, I did try it).
Note, I name KDE here because that's what I use most, but the same can be said for Gnome (to a lesser extent maybe; last time examined the Gnome architecture it encouraged custom code somewhat more, which is not a bad thing either, mind).
-- B.
This sig does in fact not have the property it claims not to have.
Have you even bothered to check Tim Berners-Lee web browser page? He distinctly identifies the WorldWideWeb as was programmed on the NeXT machine as the first web browser in his *first* sentence. Where in the heck are you getting this text web browser thing? Or are you making this up as you go along?
It actually took into account the stacking of windows, and would draw a shadow that represented the window's "height above desktop" - so a window that was on top of a large stack of windows would have a severely offset shadow, and one on the bottom of the stack would have a minimally offset shadow.
Also - the shadow-casting onto windows beneath also took into account the relative height differences.
The end result was an *amazing* feel of 3d, on a crappy old 7.14MHz 68000. We should definitely be able to do better on today's marvels.
if the programming specs for the hardware were published ... oh that's right, they aren't available.
The Internet's nature is peer to peer - 20050301_cs_profs.pdf
And George W. Bush is a great human being who got to where he is today through hard work, dedication, and an endearing air of confidence.
BWAHAHAHAHA! When you realize that everyone is lying to you about everything happening in the world today, maybe you'll drop the attitude. Americans are just as propogandized as the Iraqis, it's just you're too ignorant to realize it. Admittedly, it's not your fault you're ignorant, since no reputable news organization exists in the US, despite rumors to the contrary.
It's been a long time.
There were other web-like systems at the time, of course, the notable one being Gopher, but this wasn't the "web" by a long shot.
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
And using "transparency" lacks the ambiguity of "translucency", so if we in the field can use "transparency" consistently, then the ambiguity of "translucency" is lessened.
We must be precise when instructing our machines. When describing what our machines do to others, should we not also be precise? Especially to others in our field? (I know when I was trying to acquire some plastics for a project, I had to specify transparent red material or else I would end up with translucent(1b) material which was not suitable for the project.)
As to user interface, it could be something as simple as the last n windows (on a desktop) brought into focus remain in focus, provided they are still visible, and that unobscured windows remain in focus. An Expose'-like feature could allow for them to remain unobscured without affecting their preferred dimensions.
Oh, say does that Star-Spangled Banner entwine / The myrtle of Venus with Bacchus's vine?
Heh, what you really want then is a depth-of-field and focal plane setting to coordinate the "translucency" resampling of all the windows.
And while picking this apart, it would be nicer to have 3-channel alpha so you could get real color filtering effects. (Just takes 3 passes with channel masks during the accumulation).
NPR.
Last time I loaded Knoppix I got transluscent windows too.
So why couldn't GNOME-folks use DCOP?
Lesbian Nazi Hookers Abducted by UFOs and Forced Into Weight Loss Programs - -all next week on Town Talk.
I can't get Aqua for free, as in anything. Take your Mac-turfing trolls elsewhere.
>> *much* more important is that the same facilities are useful for thumbnailing, screen magnifiers, and arbitrary transforms of applications on their way to the screen, just to name a few of the potential applications.
What about 3D? Or layer animation?
But all the trolls responded and some of us even logged and posted at 2 by default because they are right bastards like the Jihad clan. And eventually there was nothing anyone could do to keep people from paying attention to the trolls while Jessica's ass took a pounding.
Where in the heck are you getting this text web browser thing? Or are you making this up as you go along?
r y/ All.html
The way most people were able to access the web initially was through a line mode browser from CERN. Turns out, it was developed almost concurrently with the NeXT-based one. I thought the NeXT browser was actually a few months later. Certainly, very few people would have been able to run the NeXT-based browser.
A timeline is here:
http://cern.web.cern.ch/CERN/WorldWideWeb/Histo
In any case, I suspect the point of that claim that it was "first" was probably that NeXT was a good platform to develop innovative GUI apps on, which is quite true. But that was in 1989. Today, there are better choices available than Objective-C and DisplayPostscript.
Sounds great!...NO
My karma is getting better everyday.
Get your story straight you fucking worthless pile of shit cuntflap. You claim that there are holes all over Linux like Windows yet the site you point to is an overall security site that deals with MANY open source and free software projects. Not just Linux. So... before you start calling the kettle black you should take a look at all the bugs and security holes in every commercial product for the Windows platform as well as the Windows OS and I think you'll find that the total is much much higher. Stupid fucking jackhole. Go back under your fucking bridge you laughable box of jizzrag.
Americans are suffering from the delusion that they live in a free country and that they rule the world. The truth is that if the US disappeared off the face of the earth tomorrow, the rest of the world would keep on going after a collective gasp. We don't have a democracy. We have goddamned auction.
Overly Critical Guy, you are permanently on my shit list. As in you are just one smelly festering piece of bolus.
I always understood transparency as being 100% translucent. In other words, if something is translucent you can sort of make out what's behind it, if something is transparent you see only what's behind it.
How does someone "pope" out? Do they dress up like that squirrely old bag of nuts and break dance or something? I don't get it? Ohhhh... English isn't your primary language! I get it now. BWAHAHAHAHAHAHA!
Well, not exactly. Here is the scoop as far as I can tell. The line mode browser and the NeXT browser apparently were developed simultaneously. The line mode browser seems to have been released a little earlier, and in any case, was the only browser most people would see until Mosaic came out. See here for a timeline.
Both POC and GCC can be made to use a garbage collector with Objective-C. That doesn't do anything to fix the incredibly nasty reference counting the ugly OpenStep API has, though.
That said there are a lot of stupid things about Objective-C because of it being little more than a message-passing preprocessor for C. There are no modules or namespaces, so you end up with stupid prefixing conventions. Because the object system is essentially bolted on, you can't program generically except with message passing. Since it only offers message passing, you can't extend operators to work over user types. Selector signatures are supposed to match through the class hierarchy. Objective-C is not type safe.
In fact the only interesting thing about Objective-C is actually not part of the language, but rather an Apple extension. Categories offer a very nice, pragmatic way of modifying existing classes.
There's rather little reason to promote or continue Objective-C as a language. If anything embracing Smalltalk would probably have been better for a productivity perspective. Instead of a half-assed inconsistent Smalltalk on top of C, you can just have Smalltalk. If you need high-performance extensions that's what FFIs are for.
Troll, indeed, but, I'll bite.
RedHat hasn't said Linux is an impossibility on the desktop. They've said it isn't ready now. Of course, that's a judgement call, and presumably RedHat's judgement is strongly influenced by the fact that they haven't been making a profit selling shrink-wrapped RedHat in the consumer channels. (My totally insubstantiated guess is that no one, including Microsoft, makes money selling shrinkwrapped operating systems to consumers. Apple might clear a profit on their annual $129 OS X upgrade, but it's an exception because it is wedded to their hardware market.)
Lots of folks apparently believe RedHat owes something to the Linux community and that they've done a nasty by dropping consumer sales. Well, I suppose they do owe something -- they didn't write all that code themselves. But, that's in the nature of the GPL, which stipulates that RedHat gets to pay off its GPL debt with source code, not by stubbornly staying with a profit-less product.
RedHat is a business. Their obligation to make a profit and pay dividends to their stockholders takes precedence over any alleged loyalty to the Linux community.
What they do with Fedora bears watching. I've been using it since Fedora Core was released and it really is "not bad". If Fedora turns into a really innovative kind of Linux, rather than an easily installed Linux with legible fonts, Good Things may happen.
-- Slashdot: When Public Access TV Says "No"
> Today, there are better choices available than Objective-C
That's your opinion stated as if it were fact. Today, as then, there was a C++ as well as an Objective-C to choose from, so I hope that's not the new improved language of which you might be thinking. I see most of the GUI innovation coming from Apple nowadays. And their GUI innovation seemed dead in the water until Steve Jobs put them on the Objective-C/NextStep/Cocoa track. And by the way, from the time line you gave, the prototype of the graphical browser still came out before the line mode thing you mentioned.
Holy...You know what...I'm going home. I don't think I can be productive at work today. That's just messed up.
Warning: Opinions known to be heavily biased.
Am I the only one who sees alpha-blending as the least important feature to have for a gui ? It makes screen reading harder, not easier.
Yeah, that isn't anything new. But I would like to have truly transparent windows - not just ones that show the background, but show what is REALLY behind the window. Like I'll have an xterm up and it covers gkrellm. If it was semi-transparent, I could see if I have an email waiting, or whatever else I might want to check at a glance, without having to move the window.
Yeah, I know there are other solutions, but I think I would use transparent windows. But the transparency would have to be adjustable.
My beliefs do not require that you agree with them.
One cool thing to see - but would surely require more horsepower - is to take the underlying windows' z-indices into account, adjusting the alpha blending / spread accordingly. Sure, I know this is probably just a waste of computing, but (in some regard) what eyecandy isn't?
Your personal, subjective views on Objective-C without supporting materials does not add weight to your proclaiming your stance is fact.
The syntax to Objective-C that draws from Smalltalk-80 flows grammatically and is quite self documenting.
C++ on the other hand isn't designed to be self documenting and doesn't discourage poor grammar practices.
The biggest caveat with Objective-C since the days @NeXT is folks implementing a poorly designed autorelease pool mechanism.
Java and C# give one the sense that they don't need to do anything because garbage collection will automagically account for poor memory management in your design.
The dynamic run-time doesn't call for run-time safety checks because that would lean it away from its purpose.
What would set Objective-C/Cocoa apart from Java and C# would be a revamped object release pool mechanism that would best determine from a set of optimizations the best approach to object memory allocation. To then take the results of analysis and develop a finely tuned autorelease pool mechanism best suited for the application at hand, not in general.
Be careful if your in the US and you want to do the 3-channel alpha thingy, if I remember correctly a company (maybe Apple?) has a patent on having a per-color alpha channel..
Yes, it seems stupid, but stupid patents are quite common..
Does anyone know how X Server handles multiple monitors? Does it support this internally or is it a XFree86 + Xinerama type hack?
Wait, I see it now, Radiosty Window System. ;)
Something like that does exist in picogui, see screenshot although this is blurring, not the scatter you write about. This way the background doesn't distract, but you can still see what's there.
I always understood transparency as being 100% translucent. In other words, if something is translucent you can sort of make out what's behind it, if something is transparent you see only what's behind it.
I think that's what's techically known as "invisible".
Nice. If only picogui hadn't just died...
Come join us at the Southern California Linux Expo on November 22nd at the Los Angeles Convention Center in Los Angeles, California. Exhibitors include Real Networks, Novell, and Pogo Linux. Some of the speakers include Seth Nickell, Chris Dibona, Patrick Mochel and John Terpstra. Full and student tickets are still available for this event as well as free exhibition only passes using the FREE promotional code.
Well, according to that timeline, the first beta of WorldWideWeb was released before the "line mode browser" even started development. Both were "demonstrable" at the same time in December, but I'm going to go with Tim here (who is, after all, the expert...) and say I stand by my comment that WorldWideWeb was first...
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
I see most of the GUI innovation coming from Apple nowadays
I see no GUI innovation coming out of Apple. What "innovative" things do you think Apple has done with the GUI?
[Today, there are better choices available than Objective-C] That's your opinion stated as if it were fact. Today, as then, there was a C++ as well as an Objective-C to choose from, so I hope that's not the new improved language of which you might be thinking.
Well, first of all, let's be clear: even when it came out, Objective-C was only a simplistic engineering compromise--an attempt to bring Smalltalk-style OOP to UNIX workstations without too much effort. Technically, even back then, Smalltalk was a far better language. So, we are really just asking: among the commercially accepted languages and frameworks, which is technically the least bad for applications and GUI development. And I think that honor goes to Java and C# these days.
And by the way, from the time line you gave, the prototype of the graphical browser still came out before the line mode thing you mentioned.
Look at it more carefully...
The syntax of Objective-C is barely related to Smalltalk-80 at all. It borrows mostly concepts more than syntax, with little more than using colons to delineate messages and arguments and items such as self and super being shared. As far as concepts go, it borrows relatively few. It borrows single-inheritance message-passing objects. There are no blocks (though POC supports blocks, it's not part of Cox's language), it does not follow the "everything is an object" paradigm, the syntax does not follow the "everything is a message" paradigm, and the syntax is fairly convoluted in comparison.
: and initWithReceivePort:sendPort:components: for just the selector name and beam with joy. Of course that is mostly an API issue more than anything else. Of course the signature limitations for selectors does result in some amusingly convoluted messages, but that's really neither here nor there. There's a slight possibility for an increase in literacy of the code for those that find intermixing the name and the arguments of a method upon invocation beneficial. It doesn't make anything necessarily self-documenting. What's the difference between makeObjectsPerform and makeObjectsPerformSelector? I can't tell from just looking at the method name. Luckily there's documentation. What about naming a method cat::::? Not very understandable, is it? I'm not being discouraged by the language, though.
So I assume that by calling Objective-C "self documenting," you're mostly referring to the means by which messages and arguments are intermixed while being sent to an object. I suppose that there are those that would certainly look upon connectionWithRegisteredName:host:usingNameServer
Smalltalk is pretty simple in comparison to Objective-C. It follows a handful of conceptually simple design ideas, and remains consistent. It doesn't suffer from messages that look like C type casts took a crap on them, it doesn't fill code with globs of brackets to try to work around being strapped to C. If method naming in Objective-C seems appealing to someone, there's nothing about Smalltalk that isn't less readable.
C++ on the other hand has its own advantages. It doesn't have to contend with three parallel type systems, it only has to deal with two, and it can do so much more seamlessly because it offers parametric polymorphism. It also doesn't need to deal with obnoxious method naming for user types that perform similar conceptual operations over unrelated types.
C++ is certainly better at being a statically-typed type-safe programming language that offers object-oriented and generic programming. Smalltalk is certainly better at being a simple, high-productivity, dynamically-typed object-oriented programming language. I'm not going to try to convince you, though, since you probably left orbit a long time ago and frankly I don't have the patience.
there's nothing about Smalltalk that isn't less readable.
That should read "more readable"
So we expect all X users to be software developers with free time to spare?
I never believed the stories of developers' contempt for users until getting around the Linux community. Luckily, for every such sub-group, there are other sub-groups that have the right, user-centric focus. I still cringe, though, especially when such groups are responsible for the bad experiences of far too many first time users.
Yet another person trying to justify the basher. You just don't get it do you?
The *ONLY* thing those people do is bashing, complaining and whining, and nothing more! The X server is being maintained by VOLUNTEERS.
1) It's rude to keep on complaing over and over and over and over about voluntary work.
2) Not only that, most complaints are either outdated, ignorant, or just wrong.
3) Most complaints ARE NOT constructive criticism, but plain whining! They provide NOTHING constructive and are only meant to insult developers personally.
You are seriously overestimating the value of complaints. If you get 200 complaints every day, about a thing that you've fixed a year ago, *and* all those complaints insult you personally, how would you feel?
If you want to complain, at least do it RIGHT instead of mindlessly whining!
helloworld.cpp
Revision: 1.2.14
Last modified: fbwdgt
++#include
++int main() { std::cout "HELLO, WORLD!!\n"; return 0; }
Stop mindlessly whining about whiners.
This eye candy just looks like crap slapped on an outdated and inefficient code base. Everyone bashes Microsoft for doing this to their GUI. Everyone applauds Apple for constantly reshaping their GUI making it look beautiful and work seamlessly. Now you see screenshots all around of people trying to copy OSX features. I really don't see the point in this.
If the linux community's "goal" is to get more people over to its side, then they need to attract them with something that they will use. They normal computer user doesn't care about the underlying code of Linux that makes it more stable than windows, they care about how it looks. Just look at all the people who installed Windows XP because it looked pretty, although it is a lot more stable than the 9X shit they peddled for years.
All this choice of window managers leads to every program looking different. Just about every program running in windows xp looks very similar if not the same. This is good. It gives people comfort. This is why apple and Microsoft do this.
But I am repeating what everyone is saying, that a major problem with window managers for linux is that they aren't compatible in that they don't look the same. We all know this already. What linux needs is a window manager that will get people to say "wow, this looks fucking awesome." Because what people don't realize is that most people have already paid for their copy of windows on their computer, so linux being free doesn't mean much. And since people don't care that the kernel is more stable, that's not going to mean shit.
I'm not saying a new window manager should resemble a first person shooter, but it should just look beautiful. That is why people switched to OSX, it's fucking gorgeous. But that's not to say linux should just copy it, because each time I see these stupid OSX or aqua eye candies for linux, I just slap my self in the head and wonder why they didn't just save all their time and buy a Mac if they want that so badly.
Maybe you're thinking I'm missing the point, yeah yeah, choice. I saw the matrix, I know all about the divines of choice, but people won't bother making that choice if the don't give a shit about how computers work.