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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."
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.
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.
X11 2003 = Windows '99 = Mac OS X '98
Old news on the Windows and OS X platforms.
they dont even use Gnomecompliant Software
Who gives a rat's ass? I mean seriously. Get a life!
Don't blame me, I didn't vote for either of them!