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Sun to GPL Project Looking Glass
elleomea writes "According to The Register, Sun is releasing Project Looking Glass, their new GNU/Linux based 3D window managing system, under the GPL during their JavaOne conference (beginning today)." The screenshots of Looking Glass make it out to be very pretty. I'm not sure if I have the spare CPU cycles to power such an environment, but it's sure nice to drool over.
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theres a massive difference, with MS you would have no choice , with *nix systems you wouldn't be forced into using it, it would just be a cool show off go faster stripe thats removed after a few days.
Actually, you're lying through your teeth about that - or are just plain ignorant.
You can turn off ALL of the flashy effects on Windows. See this web page for details.
Coming soon - pyrogyra
Sun was originally an acronym for "Stanford University Network" several of the founders were graduate students at Stanford.
You can take off that shiny hat now.
check out and read entire books via the internet
make video phone calls
perform remote heart surgery
Uh, done
LETS DECOMPOSE & ENJOY ASSEMBLING
Unfortunately, none of these good ideas justifies 3D. Consider this layered model of human-computer interaction. What do we change when moving from a 2D desktop environment to a 3D desktop environment? It's the lower layers: physical, alphabetic, lexical, syntax. The system gains new capabilities to arrange information on screen, and the users gain new operations to perform with their mice and keyboards. What does not change are the higher layers. A 3D desktop does not change the way we interact with the World Wide Web and its search engines, with our word processors and file systems, or with each other using e-mail and instant messaging. Even through a 3D looking glass, the Web is hypertext, and in your word processor you handle letters consisting of paragraphs and other elements. Your files are still organized in the same hierarchical model as before. Your buddy list does not change. (You will receive the same amount of spam and spim, too.) Nothing of importance does change.
The 3D desktop changes the way you interact with your operating system. Which is something the user shouldn't have to care about. Human-computer interaction is about interacting with your information to accomplish tasks, rather than interacting with systems to flip windows, and about making the system disappear so the user can focus on taks and information. 3D does not achieve this. It requires you to interact in more sophisticated ways with systems, and adds nothing to the way you interact with information or people.
The features you mention might be useful, but the are not really new, and don't require 3D. You can attach notes to documents or objects without 3D in quite a useful way; have a look at MS Word. There, notes are not simply attached to documents but to specific parts of a document, e.g. a heading or a paragraph, which is even more useful and usable than notes on the backside of a window.
Tabbed browsing has been invented quite a while ago. It does effectively compress windows, takes not much screen real estate, and provides for logical grouping of tabs within windows according to the user's needs. A key idea of tabbed browsing is to not simply make the representation of a window smaller, but also more abstract by stripping off everything except the title. 3D lacks such abstraction, trying to replace it with magic.
Multiple desktops work just fine the way they do in 2D. There we do need a map already to find out way around. Having some 3D thing and needing a map to find your way around is inlinkely to make interaction any easier.
3D desktops are misplaced innovation. They make basic interaction harder -- mind that mice and screens are 2D --, and they do not add anything to higher levels. Have a look at nooface.com for more examples of failing 3D interfaces.
http://erichsieht.wordpress.com/category/english/
I'm at JavaOne now. They Open Sourced Java 3D, but they announced that they're not quite ready yet to release Project Looking Glass. They said to expect it soon.
I'm not sure if I have the spare CPU cycles to power such an environment, but it's sure nice to drool over.
The whole point of looking glass is that the 3d environment rendering is offloaded onto the GPU, leaving your CPU to handle tasks that it was originally designed for, rather than drawing all the windows and other stuff it was not designed for.
"When the president does it, that means it's not illegal." - Richard M. Nixon
Are you on crack?
Azureus:
Redraws slowly when you perform opaque resizes.
Consumes about 50MB of physical RAM doing nothing.
Creates fixed-sized dialogues without concern for viewability of text.
Routinely informs me that I've used it for 90,000+ hours.
Azureus is outdone by G3 Torrent, which is written in Python. It uses less memory, and wxWidgets unlike SWT doesn't add absurd speed degradation to Gtk+. Neither is especially impressive from a resource perspective, but Azureus loses.
G2GUI:
Redraws slowly when performing opaque resizes.
Consumes 30MB of physical RAM doing nothing.
Doesn't size items so that text is readable.
Sancho:
Redraws slowly when performing opaque resizes.
Consumes 20MB of physical RAM doing nothing.
Doesn't size items so that text is readable.
Resets manual resizes when you change preferences.
Rapidly pops up tooltips when casually looking through search results that cause scroll actions to not be sent to Sancho.
So even when you jettison using Java for your widgets, you end up with programs that stick out like sore thumbs and use vast amounts of resources.
Now let's consider IDEA.
IDEA uses 38MB of physical memory doing nothing. (It rapidly increases when you actually use it to write software.)
I can, on a 2.1GHz Thoroughbred B, watch it draw menus, all widgets on resize, paint text when scrolling, and construct dialogues when you load them. It takes a long time to load even the most trivial projects. But whatever, it's not like I don't use it all of the time for work or anything, I'm surely a zealot that's can't recognize Java!
No, wait, it always sticks out, and any non-trivial toy has massive heap usage. It's not slow!
When a Python program beats out a compiled, mostly statically typed language with a JIT compiling VM, at a task neither does admirably given the simplicity of the functionality, I have to laugh at your religion.
Actually no, they didn't.
Wow, thank you for such stunning insight. From The Macintosh Bible, 1987:
"Color does make for a sexier-looking screen, but the quality on text on color monitors isn't good enough for extended word processing. In addition scrolling takes significantly longer on a color monitor than on a black-and-white monitor of the same size, and gray-scale slows things down just as much (assuming you have the same number of color and/or grays selected. So unless you are editing photographs in Adobe Photoshop or doing some other high-end graphics task, few users need color or gray-scale capabilities."
The translation here: for word processing applications, color doesn't add to usability. I'm sure I could come up with a better reference than that, if I had more time and interest.
Want to improve your Karma? Instead of "Post Anonymously", try the "Post Humously" option.
Personally, I use all my screen real estate for my current app. I might be in a minority but how many people don't maximize the application that they're working in?
My operating mode is quite the opposite. I multitask my workload and find myself switching windows 2-3 times/minute when I'm compiling multiple packages, working on new bash scripts, holding IM conferences, and writing a report. You could say that I need to lay off the caffeine but, oddly, I don't drink much coffee. A 3D desktop like this would be a blessing for me. No longer do I need to worry about my screen becoming cluttered with windows constantly reshuffling their order. I can send them back slightly to make them smaller or just turn them sideways.
Unfortunately my two systems probably don't have the horsepower for something like Looking Glass. I have a K6-3/400 w/ a Radeon 7500 and a PII/400 w/ a Viper 550.
I've recently learned about Expocity. Expocity is a python patch for metacity.
Screenshot here and here and here.
Hopefully it will be a little less resource hungry for what I want to do.
+++ATHZ 99:5:80
"If I recall, there was an alternate windows manager called the Cube, that worked similar to this... what ever happenned to it?"
There's the 3D-CUBE project which includes 3Dwm (site appears to be down at the mo).
Personally, I agree with you - a 3d window manager won't work very well on a 2d screen. The is some real innovation in 2d window managers however, look at WindowLab and Ion.
Well, not exactly. The reason is because the the XServer doesn't and can't use the same DRI API, and so 3d acceleration plus the composite manager (the extension for the new server) wont work on any existing XFree86 fork. What needs to be done has very little todo with Sun, as it's all already under the X11 license.
According to the GNU website if Debian wanted looking glass they could have it.
Remember the whole KDE debacle about Qt not being free enough? Multiply that by a few million times and you'll see why Looking Glass won't make it past "gee, that's cool" in the Linux world.
The fact that YOU mentioned this, not knowing ANYTHING about Java on Linux and it got moderated +4 by uninformed ZEALOTS that were too lazy to search google for "java gnu" and "qt gpl" is WHY its an issue, not because it really IS an issue.
Qt is GPL'd btw, has been for years, so there is NO issue. Just keep spreading the FUD buddy....
According to RMS,
THERE IS NO PROBLEM WITH JAVA ON GNU/LINUX.
THERE IS NO PROBLEM WITH JAVA ON GNU/LINUX.
THERE IS NO PROBLEM WITH JAVA ON GNU/LINUX.
THERE IS NO PROBLEM WITH JAVA ON GNU/LINUX.
Get it? Can we not spread FUD now? Thanks.