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.

Comments

When I see it

[gr8_phk]

I'll believe it when I see it. And BTW, what about Java?

Re:When I see it

[kryonD]

File JAVA and its promise of platform independance away with all those AT&T commercials from the mid 90's that promised you would soon be able to check out and read entire books via the internet, make video phone calls, and perform remote heart surgery with their new technology.

I will give them this though, they did manage to corner the handheld/cell phone market with JAVA. But then again, A JAVA app written for i-Mode phones won't work on a Blackberry, so I guess they fscked that one up too.

Re:When I see it

[ejamie]

I agree. This is lame. The screenshots and all smell to me like someone's PHD thesis.

As shown this has glaring issues:
- reading vertical text on side of windows is uncomfortable.
- how is spinning a window around to look at properties better than opening up a separate properties dialog???
- java?
- i would be suprised if human factors has been involved in project to this point.

If/when this comes to market, it will look and behave much different than shown.

Re:When I see it

[javaxman]

Please tell us,
when Java is Open Source, how will standards compliance be enforced ?

When Sun gets a good answer to that question, I believe they very well may make Java more open than it is, if not make it completely FOSS. Even with it being as 'closed' as it is, it's *still* more difficult to write-once than it should be ( though easily do-able ), just because their compatablility tests don't catch the sometimes subtle bugs that application developers can run into. It's a fine line to walk; Sun doesn't want to force bug-free JVMs before a vendor can release, or they'd never get to market, but the goal of cross-platform compatability requires nearly bug-free or bug-compatable VMs. It's a tough enough task without some independant developer with GPL'd source deciding to release a 'tweaked' version that doesn't support 90% of javax.swing.*, just because they're 'only targeting platform XYZ" or whatever.

It's very well to argue that Java should be open source, but to do so without addressing the issues involved is almost like trolling...

And yes, I agree completely that open source is good, but what exactly does Sun have to gain by your proposal ?

That, and how off-topic is Java from the story at hand? Way, way off-topic.

I mean, c'mon, how frickin' cool would it be to have this kind of 3D desktop running on an Opteron-based Linux machine with a really nice graphics card in it? Damn! You should be singing the praises of Sun right now, what's wrong with you, man, what's it take to get you excited ?!? You get FP and *that* is the best you can do, a tired old "what about Java" bitch ?!? This is about a cool 3D desktop demo going GPL !

Re:When I see it

[FireballFreddy]

Please tell us, when Java is Open Source, how will standards compliance be enforced?

Big fucking sticks.

Re:When I see it

[Dizzle]

File JAVA and its promise of platform independance away with all those AT&T commercials from the mid 90's that promised you would soon be able to check out and read entire books via the internet, make video phone calls, and perform remote heart surgery with their new technology.

All that stuff is possible now, unless you're referring to how long it took to do it.

Re:When I see it

[Short Circuit]

The nicer features don't look too hard to implement. Just give draw windows in texture memory, and map it to any poly you see fit. Heck...you could easily implement geometrically-shaped windows that way. :)

Re:When I see it

[Jim_Maryland]

I don't believe that Sun is pushing this as the next standard desktop. What it does though is show that they are thinking about new ways to approach using a system. Looking Glass probably won't be the next desktop but other projects benefit from some of the concepts either by using parts or analyzing and creating new ideas.

how is spinning a window around to look at properties better than opening up a separate properties dialog???

This seems like they are trying to model the desktop after real world objects. If you have a document sitting on your desk and need to make a comment about it, you likely add a PostIt note with your comments, write in the margins, or write on the back of it. As for comparing it to the "properties' dialog, I'm sure this will be a matter of preference to users (how many users actually populate any of the optional metadata fields?).

reading vertical text on side of windows is uncomfortable.

I agree completely with you on this. Anyone taking a basic Perception and Sensation psychology class would probably have a better approach to presenting the information.

java?

And what language would you expect Sun to develop in?

i would be suprised if human factors has been involved in project to this point.

This seems more like a concept project more than a working environment. Think back to the virtual reality days when all interfaces would be VR. This makes a cool demo, but may not be useful in a real world environment. Example: The CD Jukebox is a cool presentation, but with hundreds of CD's, this is not a practical interface into the repository.

Re:When I see it

[AKAImBatman]

- reading vertical text on side of windows is uncomfortable.

It seems to work for books just fine. Most people are quite adapted to handling vertical text when they're quickly looking for something.

- how is spinning a window around to look at properties better than opening up a separate properties dialog???

For one, it provides a "link" between the action and the result. A common problem in windowing systems is that users perform an action, then have difficulty understanding the response. Anything you can do to eliminate the "magic" of desktop items and make them more like real world objects will be of help to the user.

In addition, the window flip provides a much more natural "mode" than a properties box. Many properties boxes attempt to make up for a lack of modal nature by locking out the underlying application and forcing the properties box on top. This leads to confusion on the part of the user as their application appears to have locked up. Things get particularly bad when popup boxes somehow get hidden in the OS. (e.g. obscured by another window or somehow behind the parent window)

- java?

Why not? Back in the day, OSes were written in ALGOL, Fortran, LISP, and just about everything else. Generally, this would link the OS to its language for a complete development environment. It wasn't until Unix became popular, that C became "standard". It was actually a very poor choice for a language, but the computers of the day really cried out for the performance benefits.

- i would be suprised if human factors has been involved in project to this point.

It strikes me that they already have been involved.

If/when this comes to market, it will look and behave much different than shown.

Who has shown it? In fact, name one company that has succeeded in creating a usable 3D desktop? You probably can't, because all the other implementations are too far out to left field. Sun took the approach of incremental change and appears to have succeeded.

Re:When I see it

[gr8_phk]

"and how off-topic is Java from the story at hand? Way, way off-topic."

I may be mistaken, but doesn't Lookingglass have a lot of Java under the hood?

Also, the issue of getting all those VMs to be compatible might go away if there was an open one that everyone could use.

Re:When I see it

[scrod98]

File JAVA and its promise of platform independance away with all those AT&T commercials from the mid 90's that promised you would soon be able to check out and read entire books via the internet, make video phone calls, and perform remote heart surgery with their new technology.

check out and read entire books via the internet

make video phone calls

perform remote heart surgery

Uh, done

Re:When I see it

[argent]

"when Java is Open Source, how will standards compliance be enforced ?"

Open-source software tends to be more standards-compliant than closed-source software, so I imagine a better question would be "unless java is Open Source, how will standards-compliance be enabled?"

Re:When I see it

[crackshoe]

but people can decide that they don't like the standards, fork, and develop new ones. while this doesn't happen often (certainly not often enough to have this be a real issue), Sun loses control over the standards, which i'm sure they think of as a sticking point.

Re:When I see it

[Just Some Guy]

Please tell us, when Java is Open Source, how will standards compliance be enforced?

I couldn't agree more. The last thing I want to see is a repeat of the gigantic mess caused by the many incompatible Perl and Python forks floating around.

Re:When I see it

[Arker]

I mean, c'mon, how frickin' cool would it be to have this kind of 3D desktop running on an Opteron-based Linux machine with a really nice graphics card in it? Damn!

About as cool burning money, running down the street screaming about how cool you are?

I mean, come on, if you've got the horsepower to run this thing fast enough to be usable, and still get your real work done, you have way more computing power than you have any need for. Cool? *shrug* There are children starving, you know. I never thought that doing things that serve no purpose other than to advertise the fact that you're consuming enough resources to feed a village was particularly cool.

I mean, if it was even a game I could see some point, but this? Conspicuous consumption with no redeeming qualities whatsoever.

As to the whole 'standards' issue, that's a red-herring and nothing more. Open implementations have historically done much more to solidify standards than to undermine them, and Sun would of course keep the trademark and require compatibility testing to use it. Problem solved. Ages ago.

Re:When I see it

[argent]

I've found that people tend more to fork when there's no standard, and they don't like the way the current author is taking the package, rather than for the sake of extending or abandoning standard interfaces... OR when the current author is failing to keep up with standards and they need to fork to remain compatible.

I really suspect Sun's problem is more that they want to retain control over the standard than that they're afraid it will get forked.

Re:When I see it

[kryonD]

"check out and read entire books via the internet"

Searches for Anne McCafferey, R.A. Salvatore and Ray Bradbury all resulted in No results. This is not what AT&T promised, nor would it be classified as "soon".

"make video phone calls"

Nice site with a clearly written disclaimer at the top that as of June 4th, 2004, these phones were still months away. Further reading into the text shows that the site highlited these phones because they could "record more than a few seconds of video". That is not a video phone. I just moved from Japan where phone technology is where it should be and they STILL do not have the video phones AT&T promised in their commercials.

"perform remote heart surgery"

Thanks for the article about the kidney surgury. Also if you actually read it you will see that the surgury WAS NOT done remotely, there was just a doctor on the other end of the line talking someone else through the proceedure. AT&T's commercials showed a doctor wearing computerized gloves guiding the motions of robotic hands holding the scalpal.

The real kicker of it all is that I got modded Troll for making a legitimate comment on failed promises and you got modded Insightful for linking to three articles that did not actually demonstrate anything other than I was right.

gotta love the slashdot mods

ray bradbury

Re:When I see it

[javaxman]

I may be mistaken, but doesn't Lookingglass have a lot of Java under the hood?

Mea culpa. I hadn't realized so much of it was Java3D based.

Of course, that turns out to mean it's a set of routines and API layered on top of whatever 3D libs you have laying around ( typically OpenGL, YEAY OpenGL ) but yea, the parent is nowhere near as off-topic as I had thought. It'll be interesting to see if someone takes the initiative to write a C, C++ or Obective-C version once this goes GPL, or if it'll turn out that doing so doesn't have any real adavantage. The Java3D stuff I've run into so far is pretty well as fast as any other 3D stuff, once the darn JVM is launched, of course...

Re:When I see it

[mandolin]

when Java is Open Source, how will standards compliance be enforced ?

I suppose it's too late to make Java a trademark (wait.. already done) and only allow standards-compliant implementations to call themselves "Java"?

Or make some snazzy certification test called "PureJava" or somesuch, and every vendor gets to certify themselves against it?

Re:When I see it

[c1ay]

When I see it SCO will probably be filing a lawsuit over it since Caldera's GUI was called the Looking Glass Desktop back in version 1.2 or 1.3 of Caldera Linux. Me thinks Sun better watch out...

Re:When I see it

[Anonymous Coward]

This seems like they are trying to model the desktop after real world objects. If you have a document sitting on your desk and need to make a comment about it, you likely add a PostIt note with your comments, write in the margins, or write on the back of it. As for comparing it to the "properties' dialog, I'm sure this will be a matter of preference to users (how many users actually populate any of the optional metadata fields?).

I never write comments about documents on the back. What would be the point of that - I want the comment where I can see it and the thing it's commenting on at the same time, so comments get scrawled in margins. Postits are only useful for little "fax this off today" memos as they come unstuck in a pile of papers. Something more like annotations in acrobat is much nearer the way that everyone I know prefers to work.


This seems more like a concept project more than a working environment. Think back to the virtual reality days when all interfaces would be VR. This makes a cool demo, but may not be useful in a real world environment. Example: The CD Jukebox is a cool presentation, but with hundreds of CD's, this is not a practical interface into the repository.


The problem is that computer displays simply don't have enough resolution, and that you can't use depth preception on a flat screen. See, I can walk into my office, and in a couple of seconds select any one of the 500-ish books on the shelves - I know where they are, and I know that my copy of, say, Jackson, is thick, red and hardback.

Virtual documents don't have the same physical cues - you could represent documents as pictures of thick or thin books etc., but I remember that I saw a plot in a particular book partly by how the book felt in my hands - how thick it was, what size its pages were, whether the pages had yellowed with age etc. You can't do any of that with a screen.

If you had enough resolution, you could have a picture of a bookshelf, with little pictures of books whose titles you could just about read. That might be a useful interface for some people, but you'd need at least a factor of 5 better resolution in each direction for that to be doable.

Re:When I see it

[IANAAC]

The real kicker of it all is that I got modded Troll for making a legitimate comment on failed promises and you got modded Insightful for linking to three articles that did not actually demonstrate anything other than I was right.

As others have pointed out, all those promises are indeed now possible, albeit not in common practice.

Or did you expect AT&T to actually fulfill those promises themselves?

Re:When I see it

[scrod98]

I think the true test is that all the technologies you list from AT&T are cool, but nobody wanted them. The video phone was shown at the 1964 World's Fair, so the technology has been available for a while. Nobody is screaming for it in their home, or it would be there. (The linked article was for video cell phone. Again, the greater point is, will anyone really want it?)

Can we apply the same reasoning to this? Does JAVA platform independance not exist because there really is no great clamor for it? There are things that people don't want or can do without. All the things you list are quite possible and exist, but there isn't a market to support them.

Would you really want some guy 2,000 miles away doing your surgery?

PS: OK, so I'm a shameless karma whore. I was also amazed that I got modded up. Who knew you would RTFA?

Re:When I see it

[PitaBred]

[rant]
Why the hell does everything have to be modelled from some sort of real-world counterpart anymore? People seem to think this is some sort of panacea... I frankly think it's the furthest thing from it. I mean, how do you resolve symlinks in the "real" world? Or these fancy new filesystems like WinFS that categorize things in multiple ways simultaneously? Oh, wait, you CAN'T. People get attached to this desktop 'metaphor' and don't seem to realize that it's not easy to work with. It's easy to catch onto and figure out, but it's a royal pain in the arse to work with
[/rant]
On the other hand, the screenshots do look pretty. Maybe they'll distract everyone else while the rest of us get some work done...

Re:When I see it

[kryonD]

"Or did you expect AT&T to actually fulfill those promises themselves?"

At the time, yes, actually I did expect some form of corporate integrity. After all the scandals US businesses have been through in the past 4 years, I'm not suprised one bit.

And yes, all of those promises have been possible since the day AT&T made them, they just never followed through with the support. If they had taken the money they spent on those commercials and all the law suites they've levelled against the regional bells and put it into R&D and infrastructure, they might have even come through on a few of them, or at least gotten closer.

Re:When I see it

[kryonD]

You're right about the promises from AT&T...for the most part. I'll take the hard copy of a book any day over reading a screen, but when you need access to a book right a way, it would be an amazing thing to just pull it right up off your local library's page rather than having to brave traffic down to your local Barnes and Noble.

As far as the heart surgury goes. If I was going to die anyways, and the nearest surgeon was 2000 miles away, why not give him a crack at it?

I'm a software engineer and beleive me, I'd pay serious money to not have to keep multiple dev trees for 8 different platforms. I'd use JAVA for everything if it truely were platform independant (as well as a few other limitations in the language removed for high performance coding). But until they actually do work it out that way, My projects will continue to be C++ with a ton of compiler directives.

If I wer a moderator and it were a different subject, I probably would have modded you up without reading as well. But again, being from Japan, I knew right away the phone thing was not right. Now if only the SEC and FCC would allow NTT DoCoMo to compete directly in the US market....then we'd have some cool phones.

Re:When I see it

[Kick the Donkey]

Or these fancy new filesystems like WinFS that categorize things in multiple ways simultaneously? Oh, wait, you CAN'T.

Completely agree. Especially with this one. It drives me crazy that I have to have a one to one relationship between files and folders. Why, because a pieace of paper can only be in one folder at a time?

Or the fact that I can only put an email in one folder in outlook (and can't catorgorize!). That's why gmail's so cool. I can but mulitple labels on an email, and view by any label I want...

Next on my hit list is people who think everything should go into an Excel spreadsheet. Gah! The in-humanity!

Re:When I see it

[boodaman]

Thanks for the article about the kidney surgury. Also if you actually read it you will see that the surgury WAS NOT done remotely, there was just a doctor on the other end of the line talking someone else through the proceedure. AT&T's commercials showed a doctor wearing computerized gloves guiding the motions of robotic hands holding the scalpal.

This is pretty close:

http://www.compukiss.com/populartopics/healthhtm/a rticle999.htm

...to three articles that did not actually demonstrate anything other than I was right.

I think "right" is a stretch. Maybe "more accurate".

Re:When I see it

[georgewilliamherbert]

"check out and read entire books via the internet" Searches for Anne McCafferey, R.A. Salvatore and Ray Bradbury all resulted in No results. This is not what AT&T promised, nor would it be classified as "soon". [...] The real kicker of it all is that I got modded Troll for making a legitimate comment on failed promises and you got modded Insightful for linking to three articles that did not actually demonstrate anything other than I was right.

• You cannot fairly blame AT&T for not every technology developing on a predetermined schedule. They have legitimately been working on advancing topics such as the ones in the ad. Cutting into someone's chest with a robot arm because it's 2004 and the ad said this is the year for that isn't a good excuse for killing someone if the arm isn't actually good enough yet.
• You cannot fairly blame AT&T for not every published book being available in ebook format yet. There are significant quantities of electronic books out there, and there are a fair number of books whose authors and publishers have put free copies up for download as well. And have been for years now.

You may not have thought you were trolling, but you are not being entirely reasonable either. You can define arbitrarily narrow versions of the ebooks question in which your answer is correct, but it is not generally true.

It's not particularly insightful to note that not every technology prediction made 5 or 10 years ago has come completely literally true, whether it was made in print or in a televised advertisement. Picking some very narrow interpretations in order to beat up on AT&T for that is, if not trolling, very troll-like.

Re:When I see it

[Jim_Maryland]

I never write comments about documents on the back.

I don't do this often either, at least not recently. Most of what I handle is digital so comments are posted digitally as well. If your dealing with paper documents though, it may not be practical to write on the front side of it (especially if intending to Fax it out again).

you'd need at least a factor of 5 better resolution

Take a look at this monitor for a higher resolution device: IBM T221 Flat Panel. This device has a maximum resolution of 3840x2400. The device is rather expensive and you'll need high-end graphics cards, but they produce nice results. A company produced a solution that used 4 Dell PCs, 3 of these panels (driven by 3 of the Dells), and one plasma screen (driven by 1 Dell and it combined the results of the 3 panels to show an overview) to create a cockpit for fly through scenes. Quite an impressive demo, but very expensive.

I agree though that Looking Glass likely won't be a pratical application in it's current design. I just think that it shows some creativity. Might not be useful, but it shows concepts that may generate others to think differently too.

Re:When I see it

[Just Some Guy]

There are children starving, you know.

No, they're not. I personally fed 'em breakfast and the babysitter got lunch into them. I'll be heading home shortly for supper so they won't be starving tonight, either.

I never thought that doing things that serve no purpose other than to advertise the fact that you're consuming enough resources to feed a village was particularly cool.

Is the term figurative, or are you actually into hugging trees? Good grief, man, we're talking about a freakin' window manager, not an SUV (although those are also OK in my book). Are you really this uptight or do you just play it on Slashdot?

Re:When I see it

[dosius]

I know what you mean. w00t to ln -s

Moll.

Re:When I see it

[Tony Hoyle]

Video cell phone? I can go down to the high street tomorrow and get one off the shelf. Few have them though.. it's no that they're expensive (they're quite cheap actually) it's just that nobody actually wants the technology.

They tried to sell it by piping live football to the handsets (soccer to you colonials) and still didn't shift that many.

Re:When I see it

[Arial Sharon, 10pt.]

Back in the day, OSes were written in ALGOL, Fortran, LISP, and just about everything else. Generally, this would link the OS to its language for a complete development environment. It wasn't until Unix became popular, that C became "standard".

What the fuck are you talking about? From Wikipedia:

By 1973, the C language had become powerful enough that most of the UNIX kernel, originally written in PDP-11/20 assembly language, was rewritten in C. This was one of the first operating system kernels implemented in a language other than assembly, earlier instances being the Multics system (written in PL/I) and TRIPOS (written in BCPL).

There is no way in hell that C is a "very poor choice" compared to PL/I.

Re:When I see it

[AKAImBatman]

What the fuck are you talking about?

I could ask you the same thing. (Hint: Wikipedia sometimes gets things wrong.) Also from Wikipedia, Unisys MCP was written in ALGOL in 1961, a full decade before UNIX. Symbolics LISP OS was admittedly post Unix-invention, but it hit the general market about the same time as Unix.

Re:When I see it

[Coyote]

God, I HATE the way that looks. Spinning the desk top around to back side. Where have I seen that effect before? Oh yeah, 4000 used car dealer commercials. Alt-Fn and a quick switch so I can do what I want will do just fine thanks.

And live video for the desktop background, right. Let's see, got just enough time to pull the browser back up and snipe that ebay auction... oh no! car headlights! I CAN'T SEE THE EYE COONNNNNNNNNNNNN!

Re:When I see it

[sabernet]

"At the time, yes, actually I did expect some form of corporate integrity. After all the scandals US businesses have been through in the past 4 years, I'm not suprised one bit."

That's a trolling statement if I've ever seen one.
First off, you don't think AT&T would have if they could??? And besides, you can blame corporations for many things, but if you're naive, that's your own damn problem....Btw, I do have a nice bridge for sale if you're interested.

And yes, all of those promises have been possible since the day AT&T made them, they just never followed through with the support. If they had taken the money they spent on those commercials and all the law suites they've levelled against the regional bells and put it into R&D and infrastructure, they might have even come through on a few of them, or at least gotten closer.

I want you to build me a flying car in a couple of years. Then I want you to forfeit all your other ventures so you can support that flying car so that one slashdotter, that stares at his computer even longer instead of going to a bookstore or get open heart surgery on his couch while staring at his half-naked, just out of the shower friend, can crash into a building in a fit of aeronautic road rage.

I've said it before

Get a life.....

Re:When I see it

[ronaldb64]

And how about Lewis Caroll's heirs? They will sue them both because of all hist stories about Looking Glasses!!

Oh, I'm sorry, forgot to take the tinfoil hat off. Won't happen again. Promise...

Re:When I see it

[lga]

I have a video phone. My sister has a video phone. I sell them for a living. Hutchison 3G (3) run a 3G network with realtime video calls as well as video clip downloads.

Re:When I see it

[scotozrich]

its out https://lg3d-core.dev.java.net/ 53 megs including java needs a 2ghz chip

Re:When I see it

[dbaigent]

Check out https://lg3d.dev.java.net/ and believe!

Hardware acceleration

[A3thling]

Well, if there is any code for hardware acceleration, that would be very nice to have in a linux GUI, and it could be ported to GNOME and KDE.

Re:Hardware acceleration

[arivanov]

If it is using 3D accel (and I bet a case of Stoli that it is) it may be less CPU intensive then the GnoCPUhog and KCPUHog.

Simply, over the last 4 years 2d and font oriented accel has disappeared from the video cards (check features for CLGD and ATI 128 versus radeon and nvidia - fonts are out, 3d is in). This means that some nifty 3D tricks may have become less CPU intensive then simple 2D animation.

Hmmm...

[TJ_Phazerhacki]

Looks pretty, but wont computers at this level be more concerned with process cycles than spending time on a fancy GUI?

Here's hoping it's as functional as it is good looking, or it is all for naught.

Re:Hmmm...

[AKAImBatman]

Looks pretty, but wont computers at this level be more concerned with process cycles than spending time on a fancy GUI?

I don't know why everyone thinks this will be a problem. All of the 3D work will be pushed down to the 3D card. (This is what Mac OS X does to obtain its "Genie" and other effects.) As long as you have a GeForce2 or better, you should be fine.

On the subject of GPL, I'm not sure I understand why Sun would Open Source this. On the consumer market, it really is a deal-making product for them. The only thing I can see is that they don't have the resources to develop this fast enough and want to leverage the Open Source community. Given that this approach has worked for OpenOffice and Netbeans, it may not be such a bad move by Sun.

Re:Hmmm...

[MoonFog]

Everything doesn't have to be functional. I have a P4 computer running at 3.25 ghz with a lot of RAM and even though I'm a developer and do alot of programming, my CPU rarely goes much above 1 - 2%. I would love to have something like this. I admit, the increase in functionality probably won't be that great at the moment, but it's eye-candy and can perhaps incorporate some cool features.
From the demo it also appears that it can be turned of (He clicks a leaf to start it, so I assume it can go the other way), so it might be just shutting off PLG when you're doing some heavy compiling, playing games or in any other way need some more CPU cycles.

Re:Hmmm...

[Erik Hensema]

Very few applications are purely CPU based. Most applications wait for the user to decide what he/she wants to do.

The speed of interactive applications is mainly limited by the user operating it. So, the application should aid the user in the process of making descisions.

Part of this aid is making the application less suprising. Should a sidebar pop up at the left side of a window as quickly as possible, or should it 'slide' in in a few tens of a second? The slide does grab the user's attention, which could lead to an overall speedup in the work actually done by the user.

This Sun desktop may also aid the user. The user is working more efficiently at the expense of CPU cycles. But hey, isn't that exacly what computing is about?

Re:Hmmm...

[molarmass192]

My guess is that they want widespread adoption. By going the GPL route, they make it palletable for all the distros. Also, I don't think it ranks in the "deal-making" category. It's certainly a determinant, PHBs love that eye candy, but I'd be shocked to see it on any RFIs that they come across.

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? Also, I avoid my mouse as much as possible and LG looks pretty mouse intensive. So it's not a CPU cycle thing that would keep me from using it as my primary WM, it's more of an ergonomics problem. However, I probably would run it when doing a presentation to wow customers and coworkers!

Re:Hmmm...

[AKAImBatman]

I might be in a minority but how many people don't maximize the application that they're working in?

It has an interface much like Mac OS X (except a little more 3Dish). Under OS X, you get used to not maximizing windows. Maximizing does unpredictable things, or just gets in the way when it doesn't.

the application that they're working in? Also, I avoid my mouse as much as possible and LG looks pretty mouse intensive.

That's very difficult to determine without trying it. OS X is pretty mouse intensive, but has hotkeys for most stuff. Granted, many of the OS X ones are rather masochistic combinations of "Apple" and "Option" keys, but it doesn't have to be that way.

Re:Hmmm...

[OYAHHH]

> On the subject of GPL, I'm not sure I understand why Sun would Open Source this

My guess is that it all ties together with the open-sourcing of the Java 3D libraries in the last couple of weeks.

From what I've heard the Looking Glass 3D code is based upon the Java 3D libraries.

Thus, it's sort of a cool project to release along-side the J3D code.

> The only thing I can see is that they don't have the resources to develop this fast enough and want to leverage the Open Source community

Probably true to some extent. The Java 3D development effort always seemed to drag on forever. I gave up on it personally.

But, on the other hand, depending on how it is implemented it really may not require much development at all.

The J3D libraries are pretty mature, but nothing incredibly bleeding edge is my guess. They are fairly well thought out in that they conform to what a lot of other folks do in the 3D graphics world.

They are plenty fast with the right sort of programming. You gotta know what you're doing to really extract good performance out of any 3d library.

From viewing the snapshots provided it appears they are simply capturing the rendered output from windows (images if you like) and then binding those images and their associated listeners (button listeners, keystroke listeners, etc.) to the appropriate hotspots on a 3D window. Possibly similar to a mapping of hotspots on an image imbedded in an html document.

That's certainly all speculation on my part, but if I had to guess how they did it that's what I would guess.

They certainly don't have time to recreate an entire windowing system (ala SWING, AWT, etc.) in J3D.

The 3D window itself is just floating around in the scenegraph. Nothing huge there.

Just some observations.

From the snapshots, to me it's all just eye-candy.

Sorta looks like something you might see on CSI while they are using that miraculous finger-print matching software that seems to need to render every fingerprint in the database to make a match. SO LAME, but hey my mom thinks it's real.

Some may get all hot and bothered over Looking Glass but I'm just fine with the plain vanilla windowing systems we have today.

Re:Hmmm...

[molarmass192]

I work with some pretty hefty code files, maximizing lets me get the biggest "eye view" of what I'm working on. I've only got a 19" monitor so my real estate might be tighter than others. I'm sure there's a point where I wouldn't need to maximize all the time, I just don't know where it is yet ... probably a 23" cinematic would be enough not to maximize. Did the price on these go down? I remember them being a hell of a lot more than $2K.

Good point about key bindings, my mind's a little cluttered this morning ... there are probably key bindings in LG already.

Re:Hmmm...

[Johnny Mnemonic]

I remember them being a hell of a lot more than $2K.

20"=$1,299 as of this morning. fwiw.

Re:Hmmm...

[jabberwocky_rt]

Regarding the "Genie" effect: While yea, osx does use some very spiffy 3d rendering for genie and a couple other features, that rendering is only done when the min/max commands are invoked. The system isn't constantly building a 3d desktop. of course all of this is gunna change coming soon. MS is already doing it with longhorn, and i'm sure everyone else will follow suite. what i don't get is what exactly are REAL advantages of a 3d desktop over a 2d one?

Re:Hmmm...

[freezin fat guy]

On the subject of GPL, I'm not sure I understand why Sun would Open Source this.

At this point free software appears to be the only software which can thrive along side the Microsoft monopoly. I think by now Sun realizes they cannot build a monopoly of their own but I would be surprised if they do not try to leverage open source components in an attempt to make their own offerings more attractive - taking a page from IBM.

Re:Hmmm...

[maximilln]

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.

Re:Hmmm...

[Matheus Villela]

2D is quite slow at my machine, i've tryied everything and find no solution(the only one is using the "nv" driver, but them i lost 3D grafics and won't be able to play enemy-territory, and i don't like to shut X down everytime i want to see a 3D grafics), if you go to NVIDIA Linux Foruns you will see many people with the same problem.

Making a comparison: xmame in .x11 mode runs as a piece of crap, unplayable, in .xgl it runs everygame i play(mostly cps1 and 2 games) at full speed.

To me and to people with the same problem i'm quite sure it will run fast, of course that if you don't use many apps doesn't make much sense, but if are always using > 10 apps will make many diference to have a 3D desktop runing almost nice to a 2D desktop running crap.

Re:Hmmm...

[Sunda666]

looks sweet... does anyone know if there is something similar for KDE?

cheers.

Re:Hmmm...

[linzeal]

Get a second monitor. I have a 27" monitor that does 1280x1024 on a PCI ATI 7500 and aq 20" sony for my main and a 17" backup, sometimes I have the laptop going too when I'm reading a technical book and working on something at the same time.

Re:Hmmm...

[zsau]

I only maximise windows occasionally. Rhythmbox generally lives on its own desktop, sometimes maximised. Galeon is only maximised when I'm looking at large images and when inconsiderate webpage designers didn't use some sort of a liquid design so that the text is slightly wider than my browser window (about as wide as a maximised 800x600 window), but much wider than that and I can't read the text (I get distracted, I randomly jump lines, etc. etc).

(PDF/PS viewer windows are typically at least the full height of my desktop, if not more, but rarely the full width. If my screen were portrait instead of landscape, then I would probably maximise those windows.)

Re:Hmmm...

[shenki]

It dosnt require all that much grunt. I saw keith packard demo the software at linux.conf.au, he had it running on a sloppy old laptop of his, he said it had only 4mb of video memory, if i remember corretly.

He was showing off the freedesktop.org xserver, which chugged along pretty damn slowly, but the lookingglass demo worked fine.

Re:Hmmm...

[Sampizcat]

Looks pretty, but wont computers at this level be more concerned with process cycles than spending time on a fancy GUI?

I think Sun are envisioning this for their new desktop replacement, the Java Desktop System (http://wwws.sun.com/software/javadesktopsystem/), and workstations rather than their servers.

Re:Hmmm...

[Kevin_Peters]

I use the Expocity hack and it's looking pretty cool. It's a little jerky and slow on my system (P III 600 MHz with 1.5 GB RAM and nVidia GeForce 2 w/64 MB RAM), but is usable. It hasn't been updated in a few months, but I'm hoping it will pick up momentum.

Re:Hmmm...

[TJ_Phazerhacki]

Maximizing is a functionality tool for me - I am working multiple displays now, and maximizing on one screen allows me to focus on that object, and i have to look 90 degrees to the left or right if I want to do something else - Mp3 player on the left and internet on the right.

My experience with OS X goes both ways - I like the GUI personally - much more, I dunno, "Fresher" than any MicroSoft objects. But I still Like an object dominating the screen, forcing me to deal with it - I'd never get papers written otherwise.

Re:Hmmm...

[Pius II.]

In OS X, you cannot maximize windows. There's no button for it. The window buttons are, left-to-right, close, minimize, and optimize. Try it once: go to Finder, open a folder with few files in it (say, Macintosh HD), switch to icon view, and click the green button. See how the window resizes to its optimum size (i.e. such that you can see all icons, but the window doesn't take excessive space) ?
Incidently, this is how it always has been in Mac OS (and also in BeOS).
If you want to resize the window, just resize it (although I'd like to know what you'd do with a window that's larger than its optimum size).

Re:Hmmm...

[maximilln]

I use the Expocity hack

It's not a hack. It's python code overlay. :)

No!

[turgid]

No! But Sun is evil! Sun is in league with M$ and SCO to bring about a 1000 year reign in blood! Slashbot brain can't take any more.... timfoil helmet has ruptured... rotary spacewaves have penetrated.....Arrrggghhhh!!!!

Game over. Insert Coin to Play.

Re:No!

[kfg]

Sun is evil!

That is correct, and the fact that they are releasing a 3D desktop that lets you open your documents at unreadable angles and allows unethical vendors to print EULAs on the back of things only proves it even more.

KFG

Re:No!

[jackDuhRipper]

Perhaps they are releasing this seemingly significant chunk of code under the GPL because "licensing SOC's IP" and accepting a few billion from MSFT made them feel dirty.

Re:No!

[zsau]

I, and no doubt others, have been really confused about where Sun is going for some time now. They haven't made their minds up, I don't think: Are they in league with the devil or saint IGNUtius(sp)?

Re:No!

[kaffiene]

Yeah, that's right, they wanted to spend years and millions of dollars fighting a law suit against M$ because they really want to be M$ cronies...

And of course, having won the case they should have said "no thanks" and let M$ keep it's cash.

Give me a fucking break, you are the Slashbot incarnate!

Pretty...

[detritus`]

Yes, it is very nice looking, but how does it improve my interactions with the computer? The whole tilted window thing looks good but i dont think it'll be a huge bonus when it comes time to actually use it... I'd rather use those CPU cycles for something worthwhile i think...

Re:Pretty...

[Anonymous Coward]

Ahhh you miss the obvious:

3D Porn!!!

Re:Pretty...

[Shoeler]

Exactly. Sun has been talking about a 3-D environment for years now. I don't recall what it was called before, but needless to say on their overpriced 3-D cards in the Ultra creator 3-D, etc it worked terribly. Now gaming has upped the ante with 3-D hardware rendering in PCs and they want to capitolize on it to make the environment prettier.

I personally would rather see a much better, more integrated environment with time spent on really tackling the M$ near-monopoly's "features" in the current Java Desktop than release yet another interface for developers to complain about.

BTW - if they use things like OpenGL, etc - it should be less of a burden on the CPU and moreso on the GPU.

Give us out of the box functionality and applications that do all of, and more of, what M$ does and will do and then go play with the UI.

Re:Pretty...

[Paulrothrock]

Apple already solved your problem with Expose. (Pronounced Ex-po-zay). Move the mouse to a corner of the screen or push a function button and all the windows slide into view, which is run by the GPU. click on one and that window moves to the front. And you can do it with windows inside applications by moving to another corner or pushing a different key. Or you could move all windows off of the screen to get at the desktop.

It's revolutionized how I use my Mac. I don't think this will help very much because you have to look closely at the tilted windows instead of just seeing smaller versions of the windows you've seen before.

Re:Pretty...

[Flammon]

Technology is supposed to be fun too. I think that most people who read this site got into technology because they found it interesting and fun. Looking Glass is a technology with a high fun factor and I welcome it. I can't wait to see what kind of cool stuff will come out of it when it is GPLd.

Re:Pretty...

[akorvemaker]

But different people work in different ways. For people who are more visual-oriented, such an environment could be very helpful. It would enable them to move things around on their computer screen similar to the way they might move different items around on their desks. Items that are not needed right away could be set aside, much as a book is placed on a bookshelf. It's still easily available, and is easily seen as such, but it is not longer in the way. Items that are "completed" could be closed as usual, but ones that will be needed again shortly are tucked aside, but still present. Granted, for most programmers, such an environment would probably not be the most efficient, but not everyone in the world is a programmer.

Re:Pretty...

[tabdelgawad]

The problem is not the environment, but the primary human interface to the environment, which is the mouse. Having virtual 3D on a computer is completely intuitive to a human being; it's how we organize everything in real life. But mice were born in a 2D environment and that's what they're good at.

Until they invent and standardize a 3D 'gesturing' interface (think Tom Cruise in Minority Report, for example), the 3D desktop will remain without much practical value.

Re:Pretty...

[krgallagher]

"i dont think it'll be a huge bonus when it comes time to actually use it... "

Well it would be nice to have the instructions on the back of the box...er, I mean window.

Re:Pretty...

[Lordrashmi]

I for one don't want a 3D gesturing interface, atleast not for the majority of my work. Using Minority report as an example, Tom was using his entire up body to do his work, as opposed to the minimal effor I am exerting right now using the KB and mouse. While it might make geeks workout more, after a full day (8+ hrs) it would be a killer.

Re:Pretty...

[h3l1x]

Yes, it is very nice looking, but how does it improve my interactions with the computer?

Answer: It probably won't. There are a couple of things missing, that will prevent '3D' window systems in general from taking off.

First, there is no standard input device for PCs that operates in three dimensions, as the mouse does for two dimensions. If you are lucky, this makes it merely akward to navigate around 3D space, and out-and-out difficult if you are not.

Second, looking at a 2D representation of 3D space leaves you feeling all cramped and claustrophobic, unless you happen to have a giganormous display. I don't see 3D manipulation of windows becoming commonplace until we truly have three-dimensional displays to display them in.

To tell you the truth, I will be relieved when sombody comes up with a way to 'think outside the window', so to speak. We are rapidly approching the point where bigger flashier, and "More 3D!!!!" is no longer going to cut it.

Just my .02

-h3l1x

Re:Pretty...

[sindarin2001]

I tend to agree. The world won't get a good 3d environment until they get a good 3d input device. I can see how they might crudely accomplish this with a mouse-like device, using the X-Y axis controls like a current mouse, but then also have something like a scroll wheel controlling movement in the Z. Then you have that whole problem of rotation...just thinking about the controls boggles the mind (and reminds me of how much I need to replay Descent III :-) ).

Re:Pretty...

[Politicus]

Until they invent and standardize a 3D 'gesturing' interface (think Tom Cruise in Minority Report, for example), the 3D desktop will remain without much practical value.

Minority Report was horrid sci-fi. It simply showcased the most popular "future" technologies without spending any time to actually evaluate them. There's no way that Cruise's character could be flailing his arms about like that for hours on end. And what's up with the gloves? They can do that but not get rid of the gloves? Ridiculous. Talk about a Metropolis like sentence to serve a machine's purpose. Linear extrapolation of technology is pretty mediocre sci-fi.

Looking Glass fares just as poorly. Worst of all, these GUI elements are abstractly tied to physical perceptions without any reason. Why do the windows swing out and leave the user with taco eating syndrome reading the window titles like books on a shelf? Why can't they simply swing up to maintain the text upright? Oh wait, Apple's already done that with windowshades.

This is the wrong application of some possibly useful doodads that is the direct result of programmers who are in desperate need of a vision.

What's with this 3D fetish? Why try to cram another dimension into a 2D screen rather than work within it? The interface should facilitate first and abstract only if it increases utility and not for abstractions sake. We're not talking about art here.

Looking Glass is a cry for help or possibly a recruitment ad for visionaries. I give Sun credit if it's the latter.

Re:Pretty...

[JazzHarper]

The power of a 3D presentation is useless if it is only used to present a window manager, which is basically a 2D concept.

The rotating windows are cute, but notice that the user's POV doesn't change. They haven't even attempted to model a space through which the user can move. Workspaces need to become rooms--places with purpose and organization and distinctive style. Humans can manage huge amounts of complexity if it is arranged in a 3D space; that's what humans are supremely adapted to do. Give us an information landscape that is at least as well-suited to our abilities of spatial organization as our homes, offices, buildings and cities.

Re:Pretty...

[pete-classic]

It will be interesting to see how this plays out. When I saw the shots of the college campus my mind went wild. I'd love to have my computer set up with "spaces" for different sorts of activities. Maybe a "lab" for a programming project, an "office" with "papers" spread out all over the place for a writing project, etc.

Then I remembered that users have already rejected this. MS Bob. If the history of computer interfaces has taught us one thing it is that a shinier veneer on a paradigm that has already proven unacceptable is never suddenly makes it acceptable.

-Peter

Re:Pretty...

[ksaylor]

There is a Russian company working on a 6 DOF (degree of freedom) controller that they have used to control RC cars and some video games (I think Xbox).Once you get past the "history of Siberia" part, there is some (all be it little) information about the sensors they're designing.

Re:Pretty...

[AlfredoLambda]

Well, I imagine (as I have'nt seen the videos, 'cause IRC they were in real format) that you would control the "depth" of your mouse pointer in the desktop just using a standard mouse with a scrollwheel. I mean up-down-left-right with the ball, in-out (configurably) with the wheel. No?

Thats as standard as it gets.

Re:Pretty...

[discstickers]

I believe that's called a "woman". You should look into those.

Re:Pretty...

[h3l1x]

Yes, that is the way that it is usually done. What I was saying is that there is no way to say, click and drag an object/window/whatever through 3D space with a single button. Standard-issue users aren't going to want to navigate around a desktop in that way.

For example: Navigating within this browser window. Which is faster, scrolling from top to bottom with the mouse-wheel? Or grabbing the scroll bar, and dragging it up and down? That kind of quick, reflexive action is not possible in 3D with a mouse alone.

-h3l1x

Re:Pretty...

[The Lynxpro]

"Yes, it is very nice looking, but how does it improve my interactions with the computer? The whole tilted window thing looks good but i dont think it'll be a huge bonus when it comes time to actually use it... I'd rather use those CPU cycles for something worthwhile i think..."

Are you serious? That's like someone sticking with Windows 3.1 (or early editions of KDE) because they claim the GUI in later editions became too complicated. Looking Glass is doing no more than adding to Linux/*NIX environments what the next edition of Mac OS X will probably have, and Longhorn too if Redmond ever ships it. I like what I see.

Re:Pretty...

[XMyth]

3D porn is just too good to be true. It sure would be nice to be able to change some of those retarded camera angles though.

Re:Pretty...

[Bill Quayle]

...control the "depth" of your mouse pointer in the desktop just using a standard mouse with a scrollwheel...

Yeah, I've seen one or two people mention ideas like this. It makes sense, because what else are you going to do? Personally, though, I think the idea of using a mouse's scroll wheel to control the z-position would be hard to get used to. Imagine trying to control the pointer on your ordinary 2-d desktop using an Etch-a-sketch style interface. You can do it, but it's not so intuitive for everybody because spinning a wheel doesn't map very well to moving something in a linear direction. (Granted, it's not hard to use a scroll wheel to scroll down a webpage, but I don't see how this is the same thing. There, you're moving your finger in the y-direction in order to make the page move in the y-direction.)

It's not so obvious to me how a mouse-like device could operate really effectively in a 3-d environment, and I have trouble imagining a world where everybody uses contraptions like nintendo's old "power glove" to interact with their computers. IMHO, before 3-d environments can really offer any meaningful functionality over the usual 2-d desktop (eye candy excluded, of course), some more thought will have to go into input devices.

That having been said, kudos to the Sun people. They seem to have had some reasonably cool ideas and made some nice eye candy.

Re:Pretty...

[mhesseltine]

I believe that's called a "woman". You should look into those.

When I get my practice in Gynecology, I'll do that.

Re:Pretty...

[Bitsy Boffin]

For example: Navigating within this browser window. Which is faster, scrolling from top to bottom with the mouse-wheel? Or grabbing the scroll bar, and dragging it up and down? That kind of quick, reflexive action is not possible in 3D with a mouse alone.

Mouse-wheel, at least since I trimmed the notch-inducing bit of plastic inside it so it will free-wheel. One quick flick to spin the wheel and the page rolls down to the bottom, flick it up and the page rolls to the top.

I dunno why mouse manufacturers remove the spin-ability of thier scroll wheels, forcing the user to manually scroll for each and every movement. It's much more useful having it freewheel with only slight resistance.

Re:Pretty...

[node 3]

But mice were born in a 2D environment and that's what they're good at.

Until they invent and standardize a 3D 'gesturing' interface (think Tom Cruise in Minority Report, for example), the 3D desktop will remain without much practical value.

Why? The screen is still 2D. You don't need to move the mouse on the z-plane (inwards and outwards), to click on a window that is further away, or closer.

We already have 3D window systems, albeit very limited 3D. For example, aren't your windows overlapping, thus some are closer than others? Looking Glass doesn't break that metaphor, it just amplifies it some, utilizes it more fully, and makes it look far more impressive.

It's Java

[Anonymous Coward]

NO ONE will have the cycles to run this. Ever.

Re:It's Java

[AKAImBatman]

I know Mr. AC is trying to be funny, but this crap really pisses me off. For one, JAVA IS NOT SLOW. It gained that reputation back when it lacked a JIT compiler. Sun corrected that problem pretty fast, but the idea just won't go away. Granted, some of the APIs are such that they can appear to be quite slow to those who don't know what the hell they're doing. I'm always hearing from people who say "My game only runs at 10 FPS! Whaa! Java Sucks!" To which I usually reply "Are you using BufferStrategy, the core of the 2D gaming API?" The Deer-in-the-Headlights looks on their faces are priceless. To which they then mumble something about thinking Swing was somehow the way to write games.

Secondly, the Looking Glass project uses OpenGL. I don't care what language you're using, OpenGL performance is limited by the video card and bus, not by the CPU. If your 3D apps are slow, it's because you don't know what the f*** you're doing. That goes for C, C++, Python, Ruby, and yes: JAVA.

Re:It's Java

[Cygnus78]

Have you ever heard of SETI ?

Re:It's Java

[Anonymous Coward]

Uh, have you SEEN Java games that use OpenGL? It's a disgrace. I can't believe people like you bother to defend it.

Java's an OK language for web apps. Not great, but adequate. That's all. Every Java client app I've seen recently, from text editors, to IDEs to multimedia run like I've got a P90 and a 1st gen 3d card. In my experience, C or C++ is faster across the board, regardless how piss-poor the coder is.

Re:It's Java

[AKAImBatman]

Uh, have you SEEN Java games that use OpenGL? It's a disgrace. I can't believe people like you bother to defend it.

I have, but apparently you haven't. Let me introduce you:

Wurm Online
Cosmic Trip
Alien Flux

In my experience, C or C++ is faster across the board, regardless how piss-poor the coder is.

You mean, in your bias C or C++ is faster across the board. From your first paragraph, it seems obvious that you've never used any serious Java apps. OTOH, it may very well be the result of a new syndrome that's been forming. People don't know they're using Java! A perfect example of this is the #1 BitTorrent app, Azureus. It looks and works so good that no one questions what is under the hood!

Re:It's Java

[drinkypoo]

I'd be more impressed with Azureus if, after running for some time, it didn't tell me that it has too many open files and start popping up an endless series of dialog boxes telling me so.

Hopefully that will get fixed at some point...

Re:It's Java

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:It's Java

[AKAImBatman]

fuck you! it is slow, every time i go to a web site that has some kinda java deally on it it takes for ever compared to website without them

Perfect example of an idiot with his mind stuck in 1998. Sad, really.

Re:It's Java

[AKAImBatman]

Are you on crack?

I'm certainly not. Although one might wonder since I'm arguing with a coward.

Azureus:
Redraws slowly when you perform opaque resizes.

Can't really say that I've noticed this. Not that Azureus is the type of application I resize much.

Consumes about 50MB of physical RAM doing nothing.

Nothing? You do realize that Azureus preallocates rather large buffers? That memory isn't going nowhere, it's used to increase performance! Why do you think it downloads faster than the original client? (Actually, early versions would allocate this memory on the fly, but that lead to some memory leakage problems that would eventually require you to restart the program.)

Creates fixed-sized dialogues without concern for viewability of text.

Ok, you've identified a UI issue. Explain to me how this is Java's fault and not the developers'? I've seen many a similar bone-headed mistakes in C programs as well. Or were we just supposed to forget hideous GUIs like GNUTella?

Routinely informs me that I've used it for 90,000+ hours.

Seen that screen once. And I run Azureus fairly often to download multi-gigabyte files. Either way, it's not like it's that annoying, and it certainly has nothing to do with Java.

G2GUI
Sancho

Besides the fact that you've again identified problems of the developers as "Java problems", I really have no friggin' idea what these programs are, nor do I care. Pulling out a random bad program does not demonstrate that a platform sucks. Intelligently explaining the underlying problems of the platform (which you have failed to do) does.

Allow me to point out a few very bad C programs:

XEdit:
The scrollbar is completely non-intuitive and requires the middle mouse button to scroll
It is difficult to understand how the "Search box" functions
Ctrl+C, Ctrl+V don't work
Filenames have to be typed instead of chosen via a GUI
Slow responsiveness
Does not resize without an add-on "Window Manager" program
GUI flashes on every update

FileMatrix:
Uses thousands of highly confusing tabs
Text in many areas does not fit in component
Confusing use of competing colors
Information overload

You can find a whole bunch more C/C++ programs like these on Interface Hall of Shame. I therefore declare that the C language platform is slow and sucks.

Now let's consider IDEA.

How about we take two minutes and consider that IDEA is a developers tool, not an end users program? Visual Studio.NET isn't exactly the smallest and snappiest program either. But both it and IDEA provide a lot of features that DEVELOPERS need. The tradeoff for this power and flexibility is high memory requirements. Since you don't get something for nothing, deal with it.

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.

I think you need a new graphics card or something. I run a PIII 733 w/512MB of RAM and a GeForce2 graphics card and I have NEVER seen GUIs that slow. If you can watch things paint on the screen, then there is a serious problem with your graphics card. Either that or your simply a troll who likes to spread FUD.

HAND.

Re:It's Java

[AKAImBatman]

I'd be more impressed with Azureus if, after running for some time, it didn't tell me that it has too many open files and start popping up an endless series of dialog boxes telling me so.

That's a new one. Have you let them know about it? They're chucking out versions so fast I swear I have to update every time I open the program. :-)

Re:It's Java

[iggymanz]

not so slow anymore, just a resource pig.

Re:It's Java

[AKAImBatman]

Yep. Definitely a troll. At least that answers my question about his video card...

Re:It's Java

[Anonymous Coward (0)]

A perfect example of this is the #1 BitTorrent app, Azureus. It looks and works so good that no one questions what is under the hood!

Doesn't this statement disprove your point? The fact that these types of standouts are notable because they are NOT obviously Java means that there is a more general problem that makes them the exception.

Personally, I can usually spot a Java app from a mile away. Although, to be fair, I have not tried the apps you mentioned other than Azureus, which I agree does not appear to be Java-based at first glance.

Re:It's Java

[AKAImBatman]

Oooo, baiting! Keep up the show Mr. Troll. Perhaps I'll even let on how much work I've actually done so that you can have some cannonfodder. (NOT) You trolls are so amazingly transparent and pathetic. The funny part is that most of you are smart enough to have real jobs, real lives, real friends, and real spouses. But you screw up your lives so badly that you have to berate others to make yourselves feel better. Pathetic.

Re:It's Java

[AKAImBatman]

Doesn't this statement disprove your point? The fact that these types of standouts are notable because they are NOT obviously Java means that there is a more general problem that makes them the exception.

Not really. For every polished app, there are 500 crappy apps that someone has written in their spare time. (Just check shareware sites for examples.) The problem is that in Java's case, the programs are "different" because they're based on Java. Thus people like to blame Java for a signal to noise ratio that is quite common across the industry.

Of course, that crappy metal look and feel doesn't help anything. It was fun when it was first introduced, but too many developers didn't know how to make it look good. Thus "average" apps tend to look like "crappy UIs" in addition to simply being crappy apps. Some of the community (such as the famous Karsten Lentzsch) are trying to change the situation. The results of these "real" GUI designers can be... ahall we say... impressive.

Re:It's Java

[kaffiene]

Here's another good one:

http://www.tribaltrouble.com/index.php

Re:It's Java

[Anonymous Coward (0)]

The results of these "real" GUI designers can be... ahall we say... impressive [jgoodies.com].

Of course, even the "Windows Look & Feel" sample in the example you gave (see this page) does not actually look exactly like what people expect a native Windows app to look like. It is certainly very close, but visibly different. (Although I doubt the differences impact usability at all.)

The is probably the "penalty" for cross-platform compatibility, but it definitely helps advance the argument that Java apps are somehow inferior to native apps, since they can't even get the look and feel right. (I don't agree, but it is certainly arguable.)

Ultimately, poorly written Java apps may have the same general distribution of speed and usability issues that typical (also poorly written) VB or C++ apps have (which I do not actually concede), but since Java apps are visibly distinct (more so even than VB) they will continue to get a bad rap simply because they stand out. Every way that they stand out (in a non-native way) is another nail in the coffin.

Azureus, on the other hand, is a good example of an app that uses slight deviations from typical UI to its' advantage. The configuration UI for Azureus should be an example to other apps (at least, any app with a multi-page configuration), while its' ridiculous memory footprint should not. :) As I said in an earlier post, Azureus does not at first glance appear to be a Java app. It does eventually become apparent, not just due to UI, that it is a Java app after all.

Re:It's Java

[AKAImBatman]

Of course, even the "Windows Look & Feel" sample in the example you gave (see this page) does not actually look exactly like what people expect a native Windows app to look like. It is certainly very close, but visibly different. (Although I doubt the differences impact usability at all.)

The only two issues I see with the UI is the icons (not very windows like) and the splitpane has the arrow buttons. Both of these are remnants to the fact that it was created for Karsten's Plastic Look and Feel, an more embellished Windows-like L&F. He only converted it to a Windows look after he went into business as a GUI consultant. I pointed to JDiskReport because you can actually run it. You may find screenshots of his Metamorphasis application more appealing.

Ultimately, poorly written Java apps may have the same general distribution of speed and usability issues that typical (also poorly written) VB or C++ apps have (which I do not actually concede), but since Java apps are visibly distinct (more so even than VB) they will continue to get a bad rap simply because they stand out. Every way that they stand out (in a non-native way) is another nail in the coffin.

To be perfectly honest, I'm not too worried about it. Microsoft has already helped us out by convincing people to like different UIs. (2000, XP, Office components, etc.) Linux is also helping in this area. This gives professional Java developers two options:

1. Look like platform specific apps.

2. Wow the world with "more" beautiful screenshots.

In the end, I don't think users will really care either way. As long as it looks good and does the job, they'll be happy.

Can someone please tell me

[afidel]

How having multiple Mozilla windows open and at 90 degrees horizontal is somehow more efficient than having multiple tabs open?!? I mean I really don't see how this is supposed to improve efficiency at all.

Re:Can someone please tell me

[TheRaven64]

From a pure UI point of view, it is better than multiple desktops and multiple tabs, since they are both examples of modes (which are bad). This is conditional, however, on it being easy for the user to control. If you had a 3D haptic input device, then I would say it is a superior model for human interaction. With a mouse, I remain to be convinced.

Re:Can someone please tell me

[Enrico Pulatzo]

This way, the Mozilla people don't have to program tabs into their program. Apply this to any program you'd wish use tabs, and now you've got a better picture of how useful this becomes.

Re:Can someone please tell me

[Dan Ost]

From a pure UI point of view, it is better than multiple desktops and multiple tabs, since they are both examples of modes (which are bad).

Can you elaborate why desktops and tabs are bad from a UI point of view?

Re:Can someone please tell me

[TheRaven64]

I could, but I'm much too lazy. I suggest you take a look at The Humane Interface, which contains a very good overview of the principles of good UI design (although Raskin's attitude can be quite wearing at times, and he does have something of a text-fixation).

Re:Can someone please tell me

[node 3]

From a pure UI point of view, it is better than multiple desktops and multiple tabs, since they are both examples of modes (which are bad).

I don't think what you are calling a mode is really a mode. Modes are when the same window/app acts entirely differently, for example in vi where you have two modes in which the hjkl keys do different things, and you can't be in both modes at the same time. Tabs are just different documents, and virtual desktops is just an example of the desktop being dynamic (each virtual desktop does not generally act differently, it merely has different windows).

Even if we ignore (or cede) the question of whether those things are modes, modes aren't dogmatically bad, they are really just generally to be avoided. Modes do have their place. For example, in the real world the pencil has the mode of writing or erasing. In the virtual world, in the Gimp/Photoshop you have all sorts of modes the mouse takes on. Modes aren't bad, they are a valid UI ingredient. What's bad is using modes when they make things unnecessarily complex. They are good when they make complex/difficult things that you wish to do simpler/easier.

Looking Glass

[Aexia]

Is this some sort of high-concept System Shock 3?

Where's SHODAN? Where are my cybernetic zombies?

Looks like they dumbed down the interface so they could an X-Box port as well.

Shame shame.

Yay!

[thenextpresident]

I guess my subject pretty much expresses my enthusiasm. It's nice to see this coming from Sun. Looking Glass looked really cool, but I was always concerned that they wouldn't open it. Now with this news, it should allow desktop developers to try new things.

Pretty cool stuff.

Re:Yay!

[thenextpresident]

Yes, I am responding to my own post...but how is it moderated so high? I mean, seriously, even I don't think what I just said is insightful.

Jurassic technology

[daeley]

"This is a UNIX system! I know this..."

Re:Jurassic technology

[Pii]

This is exactly the post I was going to make... Glad I read the comments first.

Re:Jurassic technology

[daeley]

BTW, on a slightly more serious note, there is a spiffy freeware 3D Mac OS X file browser called, appropriately, 3DOSX (screenshots page).

Re:Jurassic technology

[node 3]

BTW, on a slightly more serious note, there is a spiffy freeware 3D Mac OS X file browser called, appropriately, 3DOSX (screenshots page).

Well duh. Of course there's a 3D file browser. OS X is Unix, after all.

Reasons for non-gamers to upgrade their GPU's

[Space cowboy]

I mean, come on, everyone *want's* the latest and greatest, it's just those of us who can't justify it that don't actually go out and buy them :-)

Personally I've stuck with a Matrox G450 for what seems like the longest time simply because it was the one of the first (and the best) at dual monitor display, and I *like* that - 3200x1600 displays are really nice when you've lots of editor windows open :-)

Ah well, if it does take off, guess I'll be getting an nVidea or ATI card, which means a PCI-X motherboard, might as well throw in an Athlon-64 (maybe FX), and I'll want PC3200 RAM. Damn that's an expensive desktop :-(

Simon

Re:Reasons for non-gamers to upgrade their GPU's

[jstultz]

3200x1600 on dual-monitors? Now, my math might be a little fuzzy here, but that's telling me you've got two 1600x1600 displays. I'm curious, where'd you get these square monitors? It sounds intriguing.

Re:Reasons for non-gamers to upgrade their GPU's

[Space cowboy]

Ahh dammit, I meant 3200x1280 :-(

Simon

Re:Reasons for non-gamers to upgrade their GPU's

[aliens]

Make sure you get a PCIe board, for PCI-Express. PCI-X is just 64-bit PCI, good for servers, not really for desktops.

Re:Hypocrites

[mahdi13]

No, it still sucks and is useless no matter what platform it's for

It will suck even more if MS does it

Spare cpu cycles

[gmuslera]

.. maybe is not good at all to use it on a server, but for i.e. a gaming desktop i bet most current games will take a lot more cpu cycles that this environment.

And think in the nice animations and graphic effect of MacOSX, if they are happy with it, maybe will not be so bad under Linux.

Re:Spare cpu cycles

[TheRaven64]

And think in the nice animations and graphic effect of MacOSX, if they are happy with it, maybe will not be so bad under Linux.

Be careful with this line of thought. Every piece of eye candy on OS X has a real purpose (well, some are gratuitous, but most aren't). The genie effect when minimising allows the user to see exactly where a window is minimised to. The shadows let you see at a glance at any edge of a window whether it is active (the shadow of the active window is deeper). The dock magnification allows the dock to take up small amounts of screen space when not in use. Expose makes such a huge difference to productivity that I feel crippled when I have to use a system that doesn't have it.

It is very easy to copy the eye candy without improving the usability of the desktop.

Re:Spare cpu cycles

[gmuslera]

I'm not saying that animations and graphic effects are not useful, if they are well used, make a system far better from the usability side. The "eye candy" of Looking Glass looked also very useful as far i remember the presentation video.

The point was simply that the looking heavy cpu use animations in MacOSX didn't raised a lot of complains about "spare cpu cycles", so could not be a big problem in this one.

Re:Spare cpu cycles

[drinkypoo]

Most of the leg work done by MacOSX can be done by Quartz Extreme, meaning the GPU is doing the processing, and it doesn't load the CPU. Transparency and rotation, for example...

Re:Spare cpu cycles

[AKAImBatman]

Plus Microsoft has had a similar "minimise animation" thing since way back in Windows 95. Except nobody ever gushed about how wonderful it was, because it wasn't from Apple.

Microsoft *was* praised for it when Windows 95 came out. The only part they were nailed over was that it didn't always work right. The "animation" would sometime point to the wrong point on the screen, thus confusing the user. The Genie effect builds on this by moving the actual window itself. (Isn't OpenGL great?) Since you can see the actual window at all times, you're less likely to lose track of it.

This is, of course, a huge advantage over having to look at the top of the window, because it's much easier to gauge the depth of a shadow than to notice an OBVIOUS CHANGE OF COLOUR.

The obvious change of color was a hack that people have been indoctrinated to understand. There is nothing intuitive about it. The shadow OTOH, is a natural cue that humans use in everyday life. You don't have to gage the depth of the shadow, because you tend to intuitively understand it. i.e. The window on top *looks* like it's on top.

Typical Cynic

[Anonymous Coward]

You can't see past the status quo, much like the rest of the Great Unwashed. That's why the world is stuck on cruft like Windows. Think for a minute, if you dare, about what might be possible with this if it were to be adopted and developed by a small community of people.

Re:Typical Cynic

[Anonymous Coward]

How about this, instead? *You* think about it for a minute, if you dare, and enlighten the rest of us with some actual content in your post, rather than drivel.

The OP has a great point, and it was the one I was going to post (multiple tabs, or multiple desktops) as well.

Re:Typical Cynic

[GrassMunk]

The answer is easy: Because you can. Why have tabs in a browser when windows has them in the task bar? Etc etc. I like having multiple tabs because it keeps my task bar uncluttered but to joe user they AT MOST have 2 or 3 websites open at a time and use the same window for all their browsing. Yes i think all applications should have tabs. Secretaries heads would explode if Word had tabs ( excel kinda has them ). We, as in humans, think better spacially. We think better using 3d environments that we can see and interact with. Butting notes on the back of a website is genius and intuitive.

Anyway, im way off topic here and rambling. The point is, Tabs are different than the 3d environment. Tabs are used when one application has multiple 'things' its viewing. Like 4 word documents in one word window. Whereas the applications are seperate windows in the 3d world.

Re:Typical Cynic

[Trolling4Dollars]

Here are some of the problems I see with this environment. Much like any other advanced technology, this may be a little too early to actually debut to the so-called "unwashed". The main reason being that there aren't any applications (other than their neat little CD player/db thingie and that's really a stretch since it could be pulled off in 2D) that will take advantage of a real 3D desktop. Until those applications are out there and do things that you CAN'T do on a 2D desktop, this is just going to be a neato-cool factor kind of thing. But the hubbub will die down quickly.

The other problem is that input devices aren't there yet. Using a mouse and kb for a 3D desktop is going to be a pain in the ass. How often do you do things in real life that you could do with a 2D controller? Think about how much of a pain in the ass it would be to pick up a glass of water if your only interface was a 2D mouse and a kb. The 3D desktop is going to need a new kind of interface.

Back in the 80s I was working on the design of a personal project that was meant to take advantage of 3D space for clay modeling. The basic idea was to have a table with an LCD embedded in it's surface for display. This was to be a 3D display that could display paralax images to the viewer at a range of about 1-3 feet. Under the table there would be three planes that form half of a gapped cube (vertices of each plane don't meet) and would contain grids of lasers in a 256x256 matrix. (these days lser LEDs are cheap) Directly opposite of each of those laser grid planes would be three more 256x256 receiver planes also spaced so that there is a pretty good gap between each plane. This would have been the 3D controller for the virtual clay modeling environment. Finally, within in the software, tools could be created virtually that would take away any need for any other controller. The only think missing in the system was tactile feedback.

Once input devices, displays and applications come to parity with this kind of environment, then and only then will you see a mass shift to 3D desktops. For now, it's still a fun toy that adds only a little extra functionality (and probably a lot more confusion) to the desktop. It's a good thing it's released under the GPL because anyone worth their salt will take the code and begin figuring out how to start designing these new input devices. As I've said in the past to my followers (hehehe), never forget the input devices when designing a new desktop environment otherwise you will have a non-starter.

Stop the Madness!!!

[toupsie]

Instead of wasting time of super cool, awesome 3D spinning, rotating and flipping translucent windows with shadows, how about establishing some GUI standards for Linux to make it easier to use for the grandmas and grandpas of the world. No amount of Linux screen real estate bling bling is going to make it a better OS for the common user.

Re:Stop the Madness!!!

[eclectus]

There are plenty of standards for GUI's under linux. Standards aren't the problem. Too many standards are the problem. That is the joy and the curse of open source. You can't force people to do it your way, even when it's for the betterment of all mankind.

Re:Stop the Madness!!!

[AKAImBatman]

But how many apps/desktop environments *really* follow the newly born standards!?!?

Every version of GNOME that Sun has released has followed the standards. Talk to RedHat about releasing crap like RedHat 8.0 which "invent" things to replace incomplete implementations of the standards. There's nothing more frustrating than building an installer than works fine on Solaris/GNOME, but deletes all the system level icons from the "Hat" menu on RedHat/GNOME. That's right folks, in RedHat 8, you could have user specific icons, or you could have system-wide icons. Apparently RedHat didn't think you'd want both.

Re:Stop the Madness!!!

[ianezz]

...how about establishing some GUI standards for Linux to make it easier...

Well, the GNOME Human Interface gudelines and the KDE User Interface Guidelines are there exactly for this. GNUStep probably uses the OpenStep ones, since it is an OpenStep replica.

Hint: in absence of a single authority having the power to dictate how thing should be done "OR ELSE", this is the only sane way to do it: define reasonable guidelines and tell developers about them: many will follow.

Re:Stop the Madness!!!

[Zigg]

GNOME is religious about the standards.

As for the apps, well, a decade-plus of Windows use has quite adequately proved to me you can't count on app developers to follow any sort of standards.

Re:Stop the Madness!!!

[maximilln]

Actually, since I don't bother playing video games anymore (really, they're all the same) I've been waiting for something like Looking Glass to show up and make use of the $200 I paid for a video card.

The unfortunate part is that Looking Glass will probably eat into my CPU cycles more than harness the vid card. I think most vid card acceleration routines are tailored for gaming and not for productivity.

Hurray for Sun!

[Anonymous Coward]

We should all give Sun a big round of applause for this one!

Doesn't really seem useful

[Anonymous Coward]

...Well, the ability to annotate arbitrary windows might be useful, as long as the sesison management was good enough, but the "rotate the window away" thing seems just as useful as shading windows on any current window manager - not very useful, as you always end up with a bunch of shaded title bars underneath some new windows.

I don't have enough screen real estate to devote half of it to things I'm not currently using.

hmmm...

[Nexcet]

good way to get attention aye :)

Re:Hypocrites

[AnomalyConcept]

Very true. I was going to post about whether eyecandy was really what the Linux Desktop needs right now. I mean, I embrace it as another choice that you can use, and sure, it's nice to have something that looks different, but will it actually change any ways in terms of usability? The reason why I minimize windows is so that I have more desktop real estate; if it becomes a nice 3d-ed perspective window, it's not really doing much. I applaud Sun for GPLing this. I wonder where this project will go.

spare CPU cycles

[anandpur]

I'm not sure if I have the spare CPU cycles to power such an environment, but it's sure nice to drool over.

Borrow some from neighbor.

It all makes sense

[gunix]

Looking glass and Nvidia SLI dual GF6800 video cards...I can see where this is heading!

If I get to use it...

[Zorilla]

...I'll be waiting for psyonic monkeys that sound like chimps to start throwing brainwaves at me from behind the browser window.

Re:Not to be confused...

[k4_pacific]

Or for that matter, the band Looking Glass, which scored a single hit in the early 1970s with "Brandy"

The sailors say Brandy, you're a fine girl, what a good wife you would be...

Neat Gimmic, but...

[Serapth]

Just from looking at the screenshots, I see zero reasons why this would be better then a traditional 2d desktop. In alot of ways, its inferior to a normal desktop, not to mention the wasted cycles spent rendering the damned thing.

Really, to take advantage of 3d desktops, we either need full immersive 3d ( alah, the 3d headsets, or perhaps holographic displays ), or the need to take a different perspective on computing then todays window'd concept. Really, what is the value of rotating a windowed view ... does it really help you know what your document is, be seeing some strangely distorted side view of it? Perhaps things like 3d navigation could be handy... the ability to not only scroll up and down, but in and out... or to link relevant data not only in a tree based structure ( like the start menu ), but also group information based on relationships to other information, with perspective aswell.

But as it stands, just texturing an existing window onto a 3d billboard... really, whats the point? It will be interesting to see how microsoft exploits the 3rd dimension, given that avalon requires a 3d gpu to run. Hopefully, they do it better then SUN does. If I recall, there was an alternate windows manager called the Cube, that worked similar to this... what ever happenned to it?

Re:Neat Gimmic, but...

[afidel]

If you want to do something like that then the best solution I can think of would be a 3D implementation of the hyper tree like this example from inxight. THAT would actually change the way that we interact with the system, as you point out looking glass is just a fancy fake 3D window dressing on the same old concepts.

Re:Neat Gimmic, but...

[hackstraw]

Wasted cycles, who cares? But, more importantly, these wasted cycles also take _my time_ for them to render. I find window management more of a chore than necessary already, now I'm supposed to be entertained or something while things flip around in a 2d representation of 3d space?

Why can't companies like Sun focus on things that are important to computing that are real problems. What problem is this 3d stuff solving?

Here is a small list of things people:

- Uniform cut and paste and drag and drop in a windowing environment.
- A way to install software (yes, its 2004 and there is no sane way to install 3rd party software)
- Common APIs for common "desktop" tasks. Wanna "rule the desktop"? How about providing something new? Like a uniform spell checker that you can embed in all apps. Its annoying that I can't spell check this post. I have spell checkers, but I cant just do it. Why is it that I do a search in a web page, and then I spend more time searching the screen for the little highlighted word than it took me to initiate the search? This is broken that it take me more time to find something that the computer has already found. How about a "file centric" GUI instead of a GUI centric GUI? I prefer the commandline, why? Because it allows me to do anything I want to my files that are sitting in front of me. I can say "vi file", or "cp file somewhere", or "cmp file1 file2", "cc file", "ispell file", or even create a new file! etc. In a gui, I have a list of my files, but I can't do anything with them. If I'm in a file browser, what are my options? I can click on something, sort it differently, thats about it. How about something away from the "Apple or Start menu"? Take a look at LaunchBar for the Mac. At any time, all I have to do is hit "applethingy-space" and then start typing what I want to launch. I can launch any app faster than hunting it down and double clicking on it, or meandering through some menu. What about revision management in docs? Why can I find any document on the web in less than 30 secs, but it takes forever, if not impossible to find something on my computer or our LAN? I could go on and on.
- How about software that instead of saying "No such file or directory", or "ls -M
ls: illegal option -- M
usage: ls [-ABCFGHLPRTWabcdfghiklnoqrstu1] [file ...]" I didn't make that up, that is what I cut and pasted from a FreeBSD box. But instead gives the user hints as to what to do. Perl does this to some extend. With its help in finding a runaway bracket or quote instead of saying "parse error".

I find my computing experience lacking day to day, but I never thought, "You know what? I need more eye candy to solve these problems". The WIMP/Desktop interface has pretty much not changed since the Xerox Star came out with it in what 1979.

Look at the iPod for inspiration. No its not perfect, but its significantly different from a slew of other devices that do the same thing, but for some reason people like the iPod better. Look at Apple with Expose and Rendezvous. Again, not perfect, but at least different.

Oh, and btw, Microsoft is actually getting it right with Longhorn. This appears to be a step towards a filecentric OS. Also, Microsoft has added many things to the file manager window such as "common tasks" or whatnot (I'm not a M$ customer, but I've seen these things).

EOR

Re:Neat Gimmic, but...

[maximilln]

Why is everyone giving Looking Glass such horrible reviews? Did all of you have a suck weekend?

I switch windows 2-3 times/minute when I'm holding conferences, compiling multiple items, writing new scripts, working on reports, listening to tunes, ripping CDs, and browsing the web. I have two Mozilla windows with 4+ tabs in each when I'm mangling entries for OSVDB. No, it wouldn't be more productive to have all 8+ tabs in one Moz window because there's a grouping scheme for ordering the information that I need at any given time. I also spent $200 on this fancy-dancy video card... for what? Xterm sure doesn't need 128mb of vid ram and 3D routines to run gcc. Why would I want to resurrect a window (click, select, click) just to type "dir" and then send it back (click) when a simple mouseover could bring the window to the front and then loss of focus could send the window back to an icon sized scaled down version? How about watching network monitors? Maybe I like watching "tcpdump" but have it tailored to only catch stray unwanted packets. I need the window around at all times but not full-sized. All I want is a scaled down xterm so that, when the lines shift, I can bring it up, have a look at it, decide if it's bad, and then send it back. How about "watch -n 2 netstat"? I like to know when someone's knocking on my ftp server but I don't need that window taking up maximum real estate at all times. Sure there are gkrellm plugins for these easy examples but there are dozens of custom considerations that can be accomplished with grep in an xterm. How about tailing daemon.log? That's another window which doesn't need to be full size all the time but you'll want to know instantly when it changes.

Looking glass and Expocity are just what I need to help me organize my screen to quickly flip back and forth between different windows or to keep the xterms running so that I can see when the scroll stops and compiling is done.

Guess you're all low-end, non-multitasking users. As long as my CPU can keep up with the demands of the WM I find a 3D WM to be just what the doctor ordered.

Re:Neat Gimmic, but...

[Serapth]

Actually, day to day usage wise, im a developer who works mostly on the windows platform, and occasionally Linux or Novell, either on a remote machine or within a VM. Its very regular for me to have multiple IE windows open, a FireFox session with 4 or more tabs running, atleast one instance of Visual Studio running, often more, plus ofcourse outlook, a couple explorer windows, a few instances of MSDN, etc... multitasking isnt exactly foreign to me.

Thats the kicker though... it isnt exactly difficult for me either. Managing all of the above applications using an existing 2d window manager is by no means difficult for me. One caveat I need to be fair about though, I do run dual monitors. IMHO, dual monitors is a power user requirement for complete efficency... and no, I dont believe a 3d desktop would change that one iota.

Really... what advantage does looking glass give you over a tradional desktop? Are you ever going to hit a situation where viewing your documents, at say, a 45 degree angle has any actual value?

Like I said before... the only area I see 3d helping is perhaps in UI for task switching, or if new input devices are used. I can forsee the value in 3d, for say... making a task switcher that by having depth along the Z axis, orders your applications based of the priority or frequency of use... so say, for example, and initial alt tab shows at the front most layer, the most used applications, then in the depths, the apps you use less frequently. But, simply redirecting 2d output onto a 3d surface, I mean really... whats the point?!?!

Re:Neat Gimmic, but...

[maximilln]

I'm not so big on the 45 degree angle. I don't want a 3D circular desktop. I just want a 2D desktop with DEPTH. A 3D box.

I run my monitor at 1600x1200 and it gets cluttered in no time. If I had dual monitors, well, I'd still want the depth because I'd clutter them up just as quickly.

Depth means I can prioritize the windows based upon their activity. Xterms which are compiling go down but are still visible so that I know when they're done. Also my examples of terms which are watching network traffic. And windows which are holding IM conferences. They don't need to take up their full usual space but I do want to know the moment that a new line comes in.

Re:Neat Gimmic, but...

[Anonymous Coward]

"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.

Re:Neat Gimmic, but...

[node 3]

Really, to take advantage of 3d desktops, we either need full immersive 3d ( alah, the 3d headsets, or perhaps holographic displays ),

Why? Your desktop *already* is 3D without any of those things. You have windows that overlap in a 3D hierarchy. Some OS's (such as OS X) make that 3D metaphor more explicit.

or the need to take a different perspective on computing then todays window'd concept. Really, what is the value of rotating a windowed view ... does it really help you know what your document is, be seeing some strangely distorted side view of it?

It'll give you a better idea of which window it is than when you windowshade a window.

Often, when you aren't using a window, you want it out of the way, but you also want to be able to easily return to it when you want it. The Windows taskbar helps with this. The OS X dock helps with this. X11 WM's that have window lists help with this. Titlebars in windowshaded windows help with this. OS X's Exposé really helps a lot with this. Sun's 3D angled windows seem to fit in between windowshading and Exposé.

Also, Looking Glass is more than just angled windows. The goal is increased usability, and 3D is just another tool to that effect.

Preview tabs

[nuggz]

They aren't quite rotated 90 degrees.

I think the slight preview is kinda neat. It only takes a small amount of screen real estate, but looks like the window.
This should make it easier for someone to remember what these half minimized windows are.

Myself I'll stick to shading windows, but I think this could be useful.

Re:Looks "pretty"...

[Adnans]

It looks like a "pretty" big waste of time and screen real estate. The last screenshot labelled "organize" is pretty damn ugly. It reminds me of CDE turned on its side.

Here's your chance to improve upon it! Go forth and code!

I have a feeling that this project will do neither.

How pessimistic..

-adnans

more then a GUI

[Anonymous Coward]

Which everybody seems to forget its more then a GUI, but a framework to develop 3D aplications as well.
So yes, it's a waste of cycles as a just another desktop, but plenty apps can benefit from a common 3D interface.
That is what is interesting about looking glass.

Talk about waste-management...

[_14k4]

What's the difference between this and using a task bar? I mean, why waste the CPU to tilt a window?

Probably still has issues with true-window-transparency.. ;)

Agreed...

[sterno]

It seems that most of the value in this windowing is the wya you can move stuff out of the way. How is this technique more effective than say minimizing? It looks really neat, but I'm not convinced that it's actually an improvement.

Re:Agreed...

[Jason Earl]

Exactly. None of the examples show what happens to all of these "sideways" applications when I want the application I am currently using to fill the whole screen. I don't see how Looking Glass is any better than minimizing, and I definitely don't see how it is better than minimizing plus virtual desktops.

Besides which, what happens to sticky notes on the back of an application when the application gets closed (or crashes)? And what happens to their nifty CD Spinner GUI when you are browsing through hundreds of CDs?

Re:Agreed...

[platos_beard]

The "sideways" applications give you a view of what's in the window. Because it's distorted in a way that the human eye/mind is used to processing from the real world, it should be much easier to look at a number (lets say 20) of 3d slanted windows with app/document names on their spines and pick out the one your looking for.

I haven't seen any other way of presenting a large number of windows that is as easily scanned. Conventionally you've got to (semi-)consciously match an icon to an application, read a document title/filename, and/or scan a thumbnail (a distortion of a document which is much less natural to process than looking at a panel from an angle) in order to find what you're looking for.

Sure, while I'm working on a single project, I want that taking up all the screen I've got (minus a small amount of space I'll allocate to things I want to monitor), but if I could hold down a key to show me a 3D view for switching to something else, that would be genuinely useful.

Re:Agreed...

[Jason Earl]

OK, I can sort of buy that. However, if you want to see enough of the actual contents of the document then the application is still going to take up a non-trivial amount of space. If anything the "illusion" of spinning the application on an axis wastes some space at the top and bottom of the app.

it seems to me that precisely the same functional effect could be had by simply arranging your applications in a 2D grid. The major differences would be that A) text in the applications in the 2D grid would be easier to read, and B) Your applications would make better use of the screen real estate.

If you take a look at Sun's final "Organize Your Screen" example, you can see what I mean. The mini icons on the task bar at the bottom are far more useful for seeing what applications you have running than the sideways full-sized windows, and they take up a good deal less space too. They would take up even less space if the designer hadn't insisted on making them look 3D. It seems to me that the only potentially useful bit of this Window Manager would be the panel.

Re:Hypocrites

[Anonymous Coward]

I find it funny that this was modded offtopic. Microsoft is continually bashed for the enhancements it makes to its GUI. I'm always hearing complaining about sliding/fading windows etc making the code bloated, or slowing things down, or soaking up CPU cycles.

Now something comes out for linux that is seriously just eye candy and it's suddenly the next big thing. For god sakes people at least TRY to be objective.

Transparent windows...

[mikael]

The use of transparent windows seems to be standard now, but would it be possible to create an OpenGL context which allowed the application to specify a transparent background color, which allow the current desktop to be seen underneath?Combine this with the "no window frames" option of X-windows, and some really cool visualisations could be written.

Re:Transparent windows...

[marmite]

The whole environment is in a single X window with a GLXContext & GLXWindow associated.

Other X windows appear in there because (AFAIK) sun have written an OpenGL output driver for the Kdrive DDX (in English: sun wrote a device driver for a small X server which draws using OpenGL, rather than writing to registers on a graphics chip). They then used this to draw X windows into the 3D environment.

So sure, you could write some 3D user interfaces if you didn't go through X (using whatever API they've written to do 3D stuff in lookingglass instead).

I'd be suprised if OpenGL in X windows which existed in the 3d environment existed at all (given that GLX doesn't yet work on kdrive, and given the poor OpenGL pbuffer support on Linux systems).

--ralpht

Re:Transparent windows...

[argent]

In Cocoa you can do this as easily as specifying the color 'clear'.

Re:Transparent windows...

[mikael]

You can do transparent windows in Windows XP as well. It's possible to set a global alpha on a window, and to specify transparency using a bitmap.

However, once you start using OpenGL or Direct3D, these will create custom contexts which are rectangular only. What I'd like to do is use the alpha channel of each pixel in the OpenGL framebuffer to control the transparency of that corresponding pixel. This would allow mouse clicks to pass straight through the window, onto the desktop below.

Re:Transparent windows...

[argent]

In Cocoa "clear" is just another color. You can paint with it, make it the backdrop color for a widget, make it the text color, and so on. Same for any other combination of RGBA.

If you're using Quartz Extreme, the OS uses OpenGL to render the windows, so it knows what pixels are clear or not. If your app is using OpenGL directly, you would have to either ask the GPU what areas are transparent or independently calculate the transparent areas.. better to just use Cocoa and let the OS worry about taking advantage of OpenGL.

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Whats all the whining about CPU cycles?

[curtisk]

What are PC's up to currently? ~4Ghz? Has the low RAM prices been off-putting since they cracked down on the RAM price gouging years and years ago? Seriously, what the hell are you using all your CPU cycles for then, that you can't spare any?

Running a render farm? Calculating protein in DNA strands? If you are, you are already most likely running a streamlined optomized setup, so you wouldn't even consider this....but for the average schmuck....?

Re:Whats all the whining about CPU cycles?

[Dolda2000]

It happens to be so that, although 4GHz CPUs exist and RAM prices are fairly low, not everyone actually takes advantage of that.

I for one haven't upgraded my computer since 2001, and all my servers are pre-2000 productions. I've never needed to upgrade them, and I'm happy for that. I'd hate seeing myself being forced to upgrade my hardware just to be able to run the base system.

In particular, all the "ordinary" computer users I know (grandparents, parents and the ordinary classes) - not a single one of them have a CPU running at above 1 GHz and all of them have pre-geforce3 video cards. I think they want to upgrade even less than I do just to upgrade their operating system.

Like What?

[siskbc]

I'd rather use those CPU cycles for something worthwhile i think...

First, people say this every damned time an improvement is made to a GUI. If anybody listened, we'd all still be using CLI exclusively. Second, most people using their 3 GHz machine for office work most certainly DO have the spare cycles.

Additionally, it looks like the improvements will really make a usability difference in how we interact with the UI. Keeping notes on an application window, tilting the windows to keep most of the perceptual information (btw, using foreshortening to effectively compress windows is a great idea), making multiple desktops more perceptual, etc are all good ideas that will help people interact more intelligently with their programs.

I think this is a great start, and with some tightening and more well-implemented ideas, I can't wait to see this in a mainstream OS.

Re:Like What?

[maryjanecapri]

well said. for some of us - the UI is very important. i spend a lot of time tweaking the way my desktop looks. in fact i enjoy doing this. and i think it's one aspect of Linux that some people forget is a real selling point. being able to configure your desktop to look really cool has actually swayed some people i know over to linux. no matter how you feel you can't deny that it's a plus. and if Linux were to step up again and develop a 3D UI (before MS does) there would be even more people going "cool i want that!"

Re:Like What?

[roman_mir]

Maybe some GUI improvements are good but this looks useless to me (my opinion of-course.) Note that the tilted windows have application names on their edges, but unless you have a real 3D screen this is a waste, I at-least, won't be able to use these tilted windows in a normal way. I think (again my opinion) that people will use these '3D' windows without thinking, simply to hide the fact that they still do not have a good understanding of what a good GUI is. You do not need 3D GUI to have a well designed functional interface. Everything that these 3D desktops do, 2D desktops can do easier. You can have your tilted windows, but there are already menues that will show you the titles of running applications organized in menues. There are hierarchical data representation techniques (we call them data trees or tables.)

This is worthless to me, but maybe you can use it.

Re:Like What?

[Sven Tuerpe]

Additionally, it looks like the improvements will really make a usability difference in how we interact with the UI. Keeping notes on an application window, tilting the windows to keep most of the perceptual information (btw, using foreshortening to effectively compress windows is a great idea), making multiple desktops more perceptual, etc are all good ideas that will help people interact more intelligently with their programs.

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.

Re:Like What?

[Prior Restraint]

I'd rather use those CPU cycles for something worthwhile i think...

First, people say this every damned time an improvement is made to a GUI. If anybody listened, we'd all still be using CLI exclusively. Second, most people using their 3 GHz machine for office work most certainly DO have the spare cycles.

Okay, let me first state that I agree with the sentiment expressed; too many people seem to assume that we're all still running 486s, and that CPU cycles are so valuable that spending a man-month tweaking some C or Assembly to save a dozen cycles is still a reasonable trade-off.

That said, I don't think most people are using 3GHz machines for office work. I'll admit I don't have any evidence for this beyond the fact that developers where I work use 1.8GHz machines. There's no way my workstation could handle this interface, especially since it doesn't have a 3D card. My home PC has a 3D card, but the CPU is even slower, so I don't know how that affects the equation.

Personally, the screenshots don't thrill me all that much. Sweeping through a cityscape is pretty cool in the movies, but I don't fancy having to be the pilot on such a trip every single day.

Re:Like What?

[happyfrogcow]

i'll tell ya what: POV-Ray. i'm a renderwhore.

Re:Like What?

[jedidiah]

These people are rightfully asking "what just got easier" rather than blindly going along with the consumption of yet more completely wasted cycles. It only takes the hardware present in an old palm pilot to deploy a basic GUI.

That begs the question: where's the rest of it going?

:o

[1337baloni]

i think its pretty cool. I probably wouldnt use it, but i think gnome takes too many cpu cycles. still wicked cool though.

Sometimes it hurds to read slashdot

[Anonymous Coward]

To all this people blaring that it is pretty useless at the moment: Yes it is, but that doesn't mean that nothing usefull can come from it. This is a technology that allows some awsome stuff and Sun is putting it under the gpl. Now all the Open Source developers can take this and build something usefull with this thechnology.

This is great news and I'm really looking forward to the things to come.

3D is Dead, Long Live SVG

[Tarantolato]

Looking Glass screenshots are fun to drool over and all I guess, but IMHO the way forward is not adding further complexity to the binary-graphics desktop.

Rather, it's SVG. XML-based vector graphics allow developers to parse and manipulate graphics the way you would a web page or a config file. They also make remoting applications even easier than with a binary protocol like X. What does this mean for end users? Not a whole terrible lot on the surface. But it does make it easier for developers to apply consistent look and feel with widely-known text munging tools and also make rich networked applications; so in the end there's a significant but non-apparent user benefit.

Of course the nature of SVG is such that although it looks extremely crisp and neat, it's basically 2D. I think the tradeoff is worth it.

If you're going to go for the extra overhead anyways, SVG is a much bigger win than 2D any day.

Re:3D is Dead, Long Live SVG

[kermit6306]

There are people working on 3D SVG too.

Re:3D is Dead, Long Live SVG

[Tarantolato]

It's definitely possible to do; at the moment the overhead involved is high, and will almost certainly remain too high to be used for an entire desktop in the foreseeable future. But yeah, it'll come eventually.

Re:3D is Dead, Long Live SVG

[LDoggg_]

huh?

Aren't all the 3d models already scalable vector graphics in a sense?

When you move about in 3d space, you are rendering the models with relation to a camera. The actual 2d pixels being displayed are scaled based on the distance and angle of the camera. If the overhead was too high there would never be any OpenGL or DirectX based games.
The trick is to only render what's actually viewable to the camera. Also you can use less complex models(lower polygon count) when they are far away enough to not need the detail.

As far as the textures on the models being SVGs... kinda seems redunant when the model could just use the extra memory for that data in a more detailed model. Then again I'm sure someone's found a reason to do such.

Re:3D is Dead, Long Live SVG

[Tarantolato]

Aren't all the 3d models already scalable vector graphics in a sense?

In a general sense. But in the specific sense of the XML-based WW3C SVG spec, no. There's a processor overhead in parsing XML and rendering it graphically. There's another overhead in rendering 3d graphics. Put those together in something as complex as a desktop environment (or for that matter a game) and you've got big processor/memory churn. We'll probably see it in our lifetime, but at the moment it's not feasible

Re:3D is Dead, Long Live SVG

[LDoggg_]

true enough.
I'm just not sure you'd SVG if you have 3D models for everthing.
Most of the SVG stuff I've seen on desktops, while cool, doesn't compare the amount of data in say a player model in Unreal Tournament 2004.

Let's say you have twenty quick-launch icons on your 3D desktop. At most what would those have in terms of polygon count? 100? 200?
Now add to that 50 items floating on your desktop. For the sake of argument, none of these should need texture mapping, just colored polys. It wouldn't be apples-to-apples to introduce any raster graphics where SVGs are being used on some desktops currently.
Anything better that a TNT2 should have no problem.

I honestly think the processing of the XML for SVGs is probably one of the smaller CPU intesive parts of the process. As bulky and overly verbose as XML can be, most of the icon xml files would be relatively small and the ojbect representations in memory would probably invoke some sort of caching mechanism. Heck, even in Java you can breeze through several megs of xml parsing with something like xerces almost instantly.

Combine with Sharp 3D laptop

[Anonymous Coward]

Now think about that. Picture being able to have email in the background and front windows go opaque when and email arrives. You would not have to change windows to see the subject line and no desktop space is used.

Adding 3D would make this even more pronounced.

Cool idea, if you have the spare power and time to setup.

useability question

[jd142]

So just how hard is it to manipulate a 3D environment on a 2D display with a 2D input device? I've had minor problems rotating objects in apps like Poser. I can only imagine how difficult some of this could be for people with impaired movement.

Not having had the opportunity to actually try this interface, I was wondering if it take a lot of practice to get good at rotating windows and moving the object around the environment.

How does the os know that I want to move an object up along the y axis instead of "back" along the z axis?

Re:useability question

[nacturation]

How does the os know that I want to move an object up along the y axis instead of "back" along the z axis?

How about the use of a modifier key? No SHIFT key = move along Y axis. Hold down SHIFT key, and it moves along Z axis.

Or whatever. Really, this is a tech demo of a framework meant to inspire people to come up with their own concepts for how to manipulate windows. Don't consider what Sun has shown to be the one and only way of doing things. Just like the original Mac GUI isn't the only way to present an interface.

Re:useability question

[drinkypoo]

If you want to get an idea just how easy moving around can be, try playing Lionheart Studios' Black & White. While the game has plenty of shortcomings it makes it very easy to rotate around and zoom in and out. Presumably something similar could be done here. It'll be interesting to see what it looks like once they get it compiling on gentoo.

Re:useability question

[argent]

What you need to do is make the Z axis something with semantic information, or for providing thumbnail views of objects out of focus. For example, those icons on the bottom of the desktop in Looking Glass? They'd be a prime candidate for something that should be bobbing around in the distance instead of obscuring part of real applications.

Re:useability question

[jd142]

Actually, I had a hard time playing Black and White and the difference between moving up and down and moving back and forth was part of it. I found some of the moves that needed to be made cumbersome and got frustrated. The game just didn't seem worth the effort of learning the interface.

I never claimed to have good eye/hand coordination. I'm probably around average for someone who didn't grow up playing fps games. Which means there are a lot people that will have the same manipulation problems I do.

Re:useability question

[drinkypoo]

I've played basically every kind of game there is (except for the "dancing" games) and it certainly has worked wonders on my coordination. Mostly though navigation is just a matter of forgetting you have hands and that you're not really standing where the computer wants you to think you're standing. Well, or, sitting.

Re:Looks "pretty"...

[MightyYar]

Yeah, I agree. Organize is kind of weird. I mean, why bother showing the "depth" of a window if it does not convey any information?

Now, if the depth of the window varied based on the size of the document or the time since it was last active, that might be cooler.

Typo in parent

[Tarantolato]

Among a few other minor infelicities:

SVG is a much bigger win than 2D any day.

should read "...than 3D..."

movies ...

[ciupman]

.. this might not be usefull to the majority of us but at least it will ease the interface design of the operative systems used in movies ... they seem to like that 3d stuff (ex: 3d hacking, 3d viruses, 3d Halle Berry... etc etc)

ChromeEffects v2?

[__aaitqo8496]

why is it that this reminds me of the MSIE project ChromeEffects?

if you haven't heard of it, that's because it was shelved in alpha

Re:Hypocrites

[Viperlin]

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.

+5 insightfull???

[advocate_one]

mods on crack again... serious outbreak of the old "if microsoft windows doesn't have it then there's no point in it" type of comment to anything positively different in the way of UIs. The only reason we're not seeing any posts berating the use of multiple desktops with pagers these days is because Microsoft is bringing them finally to the market in the form of Longhorn... after having had them hidden away for a long time now as an unnofficial tweakUI app. The moaners have got to go with the flow now as it's been decided for them that multiple desktops are now in... and I've just wasted my ability to moderate any posts in this topic...

Re:+5 insightfull???

[garcia]

You're on fucking crack. Regardless of what OS I am using I do not use anything but the most simplistic setup as it is CPU intensive, graphics intensive, and unnecessary.

I have posted about this MANY times before including references to Enlightenment setups that only have a single menu on left-mouse click.

I don't see how your references to "multiple desktops" is all that Insightful. They are useful, they have been available (as you have said) through the extra packages, but I fail to see how they have been called useless because they aren't apart of Windows.

Are they taking over for the Navy?

[wcrowe]

Looking Glass was a pretty serious project, before the Air Force passed it on to the Navy. I hope Sun doesn't screw it up...

touchscreens

[jmrobinson]

Does anyone think that a window manager like this could revive the touchscreen market?

Re:touchscreens

[Petronius]

maybe... but it sure would revive the video card market.

Re:Hypocrites

[spectecjr]

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.

Still using the same basic interface

[phranque]

I'm still using the same basic UI I was using 20 years ago. Ten years ago I started using a task bar, but beyond that it hasn't really changed. The basic elements of the GUI's I've seen (which I know is rather limited) has been desktops icons and mixes of one or more taskbar, or taskbar menus. 3d is nice eye candy, but when I'm working its all about real estate and end up with most windows maximized or tiled (for terminal window editing) It'd be nice to see a revolutionary way of organizing my information and work besides 5 workspaces and my treed file systems, but I don't think this is it.

Why use Looking Glass?

[joelparker]

People said "why would you need tabbed browsing of the web?" and are now saying "why would you need 3D windows?"

Both are very useful for displaying more information. WIth Looking Glass, you see more than a tab: you get to see what's happening in the windows.

Try it with dashboard reporting screens, shared whiteboards, even video streams. You'll be impressed.

Not bad for SGI's 10 year old technology ...

[quarkscat]

when "Jurassic Park" first came out the
company I worked for at the time had a
spike in interest in the SGI systems we
were selling ...
until they saw the price tag ...

SGI still makes some of the finest unix
boxes/racks around. But like the Jurassic
creatures, they are dying off. Their
management kept making big mistakes: spinning
off MIPS for small change, buying and then
selling Cray Research, etc. For a company
that was at the bleeding edge of the internet,
their market timing has since then been fsckd.

Too bad, really.

People need to stop complaining

[r_benchley]

Look, I don't know if anything useful will ever come of Looking Glass, but I think it's great that it exists and that Sun is opening the source under the GPL. They're trying to do something a little bit different. It might be too CPU intensive to be useful right now, but it might offer some cool code to bolster another open source project or act as the foundation for a better implementation of a 3D desktop. The important thing is that they're being creaive and they're sharing their work with the rest of us.

Re:People need to stop complaining

[kaffiene]

Apparantly Slashbots cant figure that out.

Sun bad...
Java evil...
Sun bad...
Java evil...
Sun bad...
Java evil...

The night of the living C programmer.

Re:Looks "pretty"...

[FuzzyBad-Mofo]

I find Sun's choice of pretty background pictures very distracting when attempting to evaluate the merits of this desktop system, and I'm sure this was intended as a marketing trick. I would have preferred shots with a plain background to really see the features of the desktop.

In fact, this shot is nothing more than the background! (and the 3d version of a standard 2d taskbar) They say, "Just imagine what is possible if it were live video." -- It's more like, "Imagine a pratical use for this '3D' desktop".

Thank God...

[Supp0rtLinux]

Project Looking Glass appears to be one of the best things to come out of Sun since Java. And opening it up to more Linux support is the only way its going to get to a stable release anytime soon. I've been looking forward to a beta of it for some time now. I think its one of those things that will make Linux on the desktop "as kewl as OS X" instead of just a Windows replacement. But with Sun's wishy-washy Linux/GPL embracings, open-sourcing it is the only way it will take off. At least this is likely to mean CVS build alphas/betas soon. I can only hope that its Window Manager agnostic since their demo of it was Gnome based. Hopefully opensourcing it will make equally powerful for Gnome and KDE. Then again, if its Gnome only, I might actually switch from KDE. :)

*Really* 3D Windowing

[Zorilla]

An Annonymous Coward wrote this earlier: ...sorry those screen shots look like windows 3.1 texture maps on simple 3D polygons and then beat with the fugly stick.

I would have nested this, but then nobody would see it because of the AC factor :)

It does need to be mentioned that this looks like a quite effort to apply 2D windows to a flat plane rendered in 3D. 3D could possibly look quite nice on the desktop. Hopefully soon, graphical artists will figure out how to make widgets that look good in 3D (while being 3D themselves). If it's 3D, it only makes sense that the things you click on have some dimension to them.

Good for Sun

[Starji]

I'm liking this. I don't know why everyone is being so critical of something they don't have to use. Sure, it's eye-candy. Big deal. I'd imagine that the first graphical interface was put down by a lot of people simply because "You don't need it." *remembers a scene from Pirates of Silicon Valley where a bunch of Xerox execs put down the mouse*

Well sure, we don't *need* it, but who knows. There may be some applications where it actually comes in handy. Like a Rubik's Cube application for instance. There are probably dozens of applications this could be used for and noone has thought of them yet.

Ok, so it's a little pointless now, but who knows what it could develop into. Plus, being GPL'd, the OSS community can tinker with it and see what they can get out of it.

sparkly things

[blooba]

looks pretty. can't imagine it being any better than a good ole 2-D desktop.

Task Gallery from Microsoft

[vijaya_chandra]

You can find a similar one named Task Gallery that MS Research has been working on

They atleast have done a good job saying
NOTE: This web site is only meant to support the video. Watching the video is the best way to get a feel for this novel user-interface.
You can't do justice to something in 3d with screenshots.
Sun seems to have lost the point and placed just screenshots in their site ( you can find the links for the videos a few posts above this though )

Inspite of all the efforts going into such things, how effective do you think would such technologies be with our current input devices like the keyboard and mice and output devices like the monitors?
However these I guess would be the standard interfaces once we jump into the *real* 3d world in the future. (Proof: The Virtual Control room of Zion in the Matrix Reloaded ;) )

I'll stay with my windowmaker till that time

missing the point

[chronos2266]

Reading through the posts I see numerous people complaining about how this is pointless and a waste of cpu cycles and has no benefits over a traditional 2D desktop.

You are failing to realize that by open sourcing this project, sun can harness the creativity of the open source community to improve this project and make it into something you would actually want to use on a daily basis instead of just a gimmick to show off to your friends.

This is a step in the right direction and I am excited that they are releasing this.

Re:Looks "pretty"...

[boomgopher]

I prefer to keep my desktop a clean slate. The taskbar and a single row of icons. The second I need more than one row I have to clean up. This would make my desktop a disaster area.

Geez, dream a little... While I agree it's probably of marginal usefulness a current desktop computer, I think it's a nice mix of 3D and 2D interfaces, that may be really useful in the future.
We'll have to move on sometime, for some tasks. WIMP interfaces won't reign king forever.

Command line 4ever

[astellar]

Because one cmd line a much better than 15 mouse clicks !

From the website

[nizo]

Commenting on the desktop background image This is a still photo of the Stanford University campus. Just imagine what is possible if it were live video.

Heck yeah! Depending on how many people have this "dynamic desktop" one could break the world record for most people mooned at once! Also what if you saw someone getting mugged on your desktop and calling 911? "Well, I am not sure exactly where the mugging is happening, but I can see it on my computer desktop...."

Re:Looks "pretty"...

[Panaflex]

I'd disagree completely.. it's very difficult to manipulate a 2d environment mapped into a 3D environment on a 2D screen.. and IMHO nobody's gotten it right.

Apple is far and away better off having found good uses for 3d in Quartz. Looking glass should look at those examples.

I'd say something more useful would be something akin to an X server for 3D objects, instead of an X->texture transformation. Not discounting textures here, but merely saying we could do much better with using arbitrary managed 3D objects.

Pan

Get a Mac...

[mratitude]

As eye candy goes, this one has appeal but it still smacks of the "build it and they will come" methodology. Many mainstream vendors didn't survive during the 90's with that gimmick and I'm not certain that this will either.

Besides, it's an improvement on OS X or a direct rip-off, can't tell which yet. I'd prefer that *nix GUI innovate rather than compete for share, IMHO. The market will decide one way or the other.

The Display Is Flat

[RAMMS EIN]

I don't know what to make of all the hype surrounding this 3D desktop. Others have gone before it and died, e.g. the 3dwm project.

Rotating (flat) windows mainly just shrinks them, which I think is a good idea, but we don't need 3D for that. Just put all the shrunk windows at the edge of the screen, and let the user bring them forward by clicking (incidentally, this closesly resembles how the OS X window manager works).

As for their example of the CDs, yeah, nice, but can it beat a straight, sorted list? With a search facility?

The problem with 3D on the desktop is very simple: the display is flat. Therefore, objects that are to the front will occlude objects that are more in the back. I manage to avoid that problem by having a display large enough to avoid overlapping windows. Bringing 3D to the desktop is going to introduce the problems of the Real World into computers. I think it's a Bad Thing.

Re:The Display Is Flat

[maximilln]

(incidentally, this closesly resembles how the OS X window manager works)

On Linux there is Expocity which scales the windows as you desire.

It's a smart move, really

[MarkEst1973]

Joe Sixpack doesn't know what a CPU cycle is, but he knows that he likes the 3D window when he browses this computer at Wal-Mart. Bells and whistles draw a customer in.

I can see how this could have the potential to boost their desktop sales. Any desktop sold based on Linux is a good thing./P

anyone remember the first Sony VIAO desktop?

[uid100]

I bought a P-I 200Mhz (without MMX) Sony "90" desktop. It had an add-on desktop called "Viao" I think - layed on top of Win95. It had "tilt-away" windows similar to what I'm conceptulizing this GUI to have.

Similarities? Did Sun take someone elses idea and improve it?

Then take a look...

[zeitgeist_chaser]

Looking Glass demonstration.

This ain't just someone's Ph.D project.

Re:Hypocrites

[Tongo]

Try to remain within the scope of the discussion. It may not be less bloated, but it's not soaking up CPU cycles if the code isn't being ran.

What's good about it?

[johannesg]

Not a flame, but is there anything useful you can actually do with it? Or is it only meant to be eye candy?

Re:What's good about it?

[KnightStalker]

It's highly useful to keep supplicants in line. Eye candy is intended to send the message: "I have a computer that looks really complicated -- just like the ones YOU see hackers using in movies -- and therefore I'm important and far too busy to handle your pathetic request." This is particularly fulfilling if you're playing a game or reading a website that looks complicated (and therefore important and work related) to the laity.

Panoramic Backdrops

[spoonboy42]

Looking Glass is, obviously, going to require panoramic backgrounds. The screenshots show a forest, some mountains, and what appears to be the campus of Stanford. Something is seriously amiss here, as both Scott McNealy and Bill Joy went to Berkeley. They did just cut a high profile deal with Microsoft, though, and there is a William H. Gates computer science building at Stanford. Coincidence? What about the fact that they have a backdrop of a private university in a product whose source code they are about to make public, in the meantime excluding Sun's public (both in the sense of Berkeley itself and the BSD, back when Sun's OS was SunOS) roots. Something strange is definately afoot.

Re:Panoramic Backdrops

[David Byers]

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.

Re:Panoramic Backdrops

[Doctor_D]

As for the backgrounds in Project Looking Glass, most were donated images by various Sun Employees, I personally donated one of "The Garden of the Gods" that I took in Colorado Springs, Colorado. I'm also intending on taking panoramic pictures to donate on my various travels.

So, there's no conspiracy. You can take the tin foil hat off now. Besides if you have heard of the founding of Sun, and how Sun got it's name, you would know it was a take-off of "Stanford University Network" aka SUN. Besides my picture that I donated was of a National Natual Landmark, as designated by the US Dept of the Interior's National Park Service

Looking Glass doesn't require panoramic backgrounds, but they definatley help with the idea of 3D space.

Re:Looks "pretty"...

[GrassMunk]

I think he was talking about the picture in the background. If that was live video of a scenic view then it might be nice. You know imagine your background is a HD quality shot out of some office building that has a view of the ocean. Or of a fire burning ( yes, they have those DVDs ) then id would be pretty cool. Imagine a desktop like DVDs are ( maybe not quiet do flashy ) but the idea is really cool.

Finally a better Solitaire

[FerretFrottage]

...with the 3rd dimension, now solitaire cards will feel much better when I play with them. The 2d cards just didn't feel right, especially when shuffling. Of course this will result in me wasting more of the 4th dimension (if that's what you consider time to be anyway)

My only hope...

[qucmd]

... is this don't turn out into something like a 3D Windows BOB

Very pretty and flashy and all...

[bani]

...but really, I dont see how it improves usability at all.

The video just confirmed my suspicions.

I mean really, rotating your windows upside down does anything for usability?

How does sticking notes to the back of windows help usability at all, when you can't see them without flipping each window around? How is this better than normal sticky/postitnotes applications?

There's still as much clutter as normal desktops -- actually more, the minimized windows take up more screen real estate than traditional minimized windows and they dont really convey any more information.

If there's anything truly practical and innovative about Sun's LG, its the use of opengl in the UI. Now that has some serious applications. The rest is just fluff.

Anyway, LG is very cute and all, but I think i'll pass.

Re:Very pretty and flashy and all...

[nacturation]

I mean really, rotating your windows upside down does anything for usability?

How does sticking notes to the back of windows help usability at all, when you can't see them without flipping each window around? How is this better than normal sticky/postitnotes applications?

I'm sure people said the same thing for color displays way back when. Color really doesn't do anything for usability. If you have to differentiate things with color then your interface is broken.

Or, perhaps as with color, people will eventually take these ideas and find a better way to present information. Now that the 2D barriers aren't there anymore, this will serve as inspiration for the uses which truly *do* affect usability. Calling this impractical because it's a technology demo is shortsighted.

This is the closest so far to my "real" desktop...

[MadRocketScientist]

In my cube, I am surrounded by a ring of desktop surfaces, filing cabinets, bookcases, drawers, and bulletin/white-boards. I have learned to use them to great efficiency to display things that are critical right in front of me, push less critical things to the side, but not out of site, and index the rest in files for easy access. Although there will likely be a mix of useful features and eye-candy, I'm sure there will be some aspects that will be a great fit to my organizational scheme.

Here she is:

[T-Kir]

Frickin Laser beams... at least with that clip, do you think Shodan is really SCOdan? I guess Darl likes to dress up as a psycotic AI on the weekends.

Link for SS1 audio files front page is here. Enjoy!

P.S. It's a pity that SS3 isn't on the horizon, but we can dream though! (Unless Eidos wants to give Warren a whole load of cash to do it).

More 3d UI's

[phranque]

It contains applications that are mostly file system representations but interesting nonetheless.

Nooface - 3D UIs

3D windowing questions+concerns

[LincolnQ]

Transparency. We can do it today with various 2d windowing environments. But I was trying to figure out today what it allows you to do. I have no idea.

I agree that transparent windows look cool -- but how does this translate into usability? It doesn't seem to; at least, not that I can think of.

When I have a transparent window, it enables me to place it over another window and see both at once. Except that, from experience, you can't really see both at once -- if there's information on both of the windows, they are confused together, and you can't really read either one. The only way you get transparency to be useful is if one of the windows has a significant amount of open space in a section of it so that the other window can be read with a bland background. But if this is true then the application has been designed incorrectly -- it wastes a lot of space. Any situation I can think of where transparent windows would be useful, I realize that one application or another had a misdesigned UI instead. I challenge a counterexample.

Okay, what else do you get from a 3D desktop? Fast and precise scaling of individual windows and other widgets. Well, Mac OS X does this already, and it looks really great, in 2d with hardware. This isn't really a 3d thing, but it is incredibly useful, and a convenient side benefit.

Window flipping, rotating, etc.: It depends on how many things you can do with this. I doubt that most people will actually want/need to rotate their windows under normal circumstances. Rotating something to minimize it by its title is pretty much exactly the same as simply minimizing it to a taskbar or shading it, in whatever WM you are using. I don't know about taking notes on the back of a window, considering that you just hid the information you wanted to take notes about! But putting a "sticky" on a window, writing on it, and having it actually MOVE with the window would be a great feature -- if you shrink the window, the sticky shrinks with it, and if you rotate it, you can see that it has a note hanging off it - in 3D, so you can more easily identify windows when their sides are facing you. Also, the thickness of the windows in the screenshots bugs me -- I always visualized windows as paper-thin. :-)

Perspective -- if the user is simply a camera in a world, should there be "sticky" icons that rotate and move with you? What about window maximization? I think Tog and the Mac people have made it sufficiently clear that the edges and corners of a screen are extremely easy to acquire for mouse users. Simply taking the "camera in a world" perspective is probably wrong, then. IMO, it is very important to have some sort of sticky widgets around the edges. Where do you draw the line? Do you have maximization? What happens when you try to pan while a window is maximized? Does a user have to learn about the fact that the environment is 3D to be able to use it? (can you still be a 2d environment). Is it possible to get "lost" in a 3d world?

I think people often have trouble visualizing a 3d interface. Can you interact with something which is "behind" the frontmost window? Is it a regular mouse cursor or some other "manipulator"? If you can move the cursor in threespace, how do you do that (maybe a different hardware sensor on the mouse)? How do you indicate to the user what "layer" his cursor is at?

I have more concerns right now but I should get back to work. :-) I get the feeling that the threedee interface is a marketing tool rather than a tool to improve productivity. But maybe I just haven't thought of it yet -- what's the killer app for an interface like this?

Bring it on,
Lincoln

Re:3D windowing questions+concerns

[bheerssen]

what's the killer app for an interface like this?

Porn. Definitely porn.

Re:Hypocrites

[Karn]

I don't see too many posts praising this move.. I like the GPL, and am glad they would GPL another piece of software, but I personally don't care too much about it. I'm sure many other people like myself feel the same way.

It's becoming quite common for some people like yourself to scream "LOOK A THE HYPOCRACY!" as soon as two Linux people say something that contradicts something two totally different Linux people said a month ago.

The "Linux Community" is a diverse lot. Don't be so fast to call them hypocrites.

And if you don't know why some people would denounce Microsoft for creating anything less than stellar, innovative software with their market dominance and bank account, you may want to find another site to post at..

Pale imItation of expose?

[Lulu of the Lotus-Ea]

It really looks like Sun is trying to solve the same problem Apple recognized when developing Expose. But Sun's version is less elegant and harder to use (and way too caught up in physical metaphors). Expose does such a great job of letting you see exactly what apps are runnings, and easily navigating among them. Sun's Looking Glass is similar to a degree, but generally less easy to figure out at a glance, and probably harder to work with in terms of keystrokes/mouse gestures.

Re:Pale imItation of expose?

[argent]

Exposé has some good ideas, but Apple really needs to take advantage of the 3d hardware and make Exposé full-time, with windows automatically moving into the background or offscreen until you need them, so that more frequently used applications will tend to end up close to the user, in the immediate field of view. Then you could "glance to the side" to shift into virtual desktop space and look at the stuff at the bottom of the stack...

Re:Pale imItation of expose?

[Lulu of the Lotus-Ea]

I'm not sure what argent means here. When I move my mouse to a corner (or press a function key, though I rarely do that since the mouse is quicker), *all* the non-hidden windows are shown in small version. Exactly how small they are depends on how many windows I have, but passing the mouse over a reduced version also shows the title in a largish font (a bunch of Terminals tend to look similar, for example, when shrunk).

I'm not sure where those minimized windows might go "full-time". I tend to make most of my application windows the full height of my 15" Powerbook screen (maybe a few pixels less), and 2/3 the screen width (leaving some room for a dock at left, and with my HDD icon poking through at top right). There's really no extra room where reduced version might live. Well... except for on the Dock, in a very reduced form... where all the open apps indeed have icons (and often a useful variation on the icon to incidate the state of the application, like iCal showing today's date, or Mail.app showing the number of new messages).

Re:Pale imItation of expose?

[argent]

What I'm saying is that the 'decluttering' effect you get from Exposé would be useful all the time. I was skeptical about Expose to begin with and I still think Apple would benefit from providing a user interface to the virtual desktop support they have in the OS, but after binding it to my middle mouse button I'm getting some actual use out of it... and I've changed my behaviour somewhat as a result.

So don't just look at your desktop as it is and think about how it gets in the way of new features. If they're useful, you might find you change the way you work, and if your desktop's too cluttered for decluttering to help, they won't hurt...

What I'm thinking is that the windows would fade back into the distance, slightly, as they move back in the stack... and they would slide sideways until at least part of the window was visible. When you clicked on that, they'd pop back to where you'd left them and the window(s) that had been in front of them would shuffle back. If nothing obscured them, they wouldn't go anywhere. And if the screen got too full or the stack go too deep, they'd auto minimise to the expanded all-sides dock.

The disk icons could also move to the dock from the desktop, showing up in the corner you specified as they were mounted and shuffling things out of the way if necessary. New applications would do the same thing from a corner or side you select. And you'd probably end up with more rather than less usable space for big windows.

It's still just a window manager for 2D content

[Anonymous Writer]

It's a 3D window managing system

I think most of it looks nice, but it is still just a window manager, with windows that have 2D content. The windows themselves don't have any GUI improvements over older window managers. I think it would be more interesting if it somehow managed 3D content; for example, somehow representing filesystem navigation in 3D. Or if there's a window containing 3D rendering, the objects within that window would also rotate along with the window. It seems like overkill to to have such a fancy window manager. It would require significant hardware resources, depriving running programs of their use. A simpler window manager on a simpler hardware setup could run programs just as well. What I'd like to see is an actual 3D GUI.

There's a reason why paper is 2D...

[Bifster]

I fail to understand why there's suddenly this big kick to move desktops into 3D. (Microsoft's Avalon project is an effort along the same lines as LookingGlass, isn't it?) As far as I can tell, this is all just some kind of ill-thought-out attempt to invent the newest revolution in computing or something. But really, it just seems like a glitzy gimmick with no functional benefit that I can imagine. There's a reason why 2D paper has been useful for thousands of years. It's space efficient and the vast bulk of information encoding schemes that we have devised are 2D in nature... The written word and the painted image convey the great bulk of information we need to exchange with one another in a concise and easily reviewable manner. Audio-visual info is easily conveyed on a 2D screen as well. We don't write books on layered cubes because that's just an unecessarily complex form. Virtual 3D immersion might be useful in "face-to-face" social interactions perhaps, but that added socio-emotional dimension is completely unecessary most of the time when the goal is simply the concise transfer of information. Hyperlinking is all the extra dimensionality we need really to convey topic forking between nuggets of 2D information. Hyperlinking works just fine in a 2D GUI. Looking at the screenshots I wonder what kind of functionality do you get out of having a page that swivels like a stone tablet or something? You get a REALLY BIG icon, that's what. You can't really read the page while it's tilted and it takes up a heck of a lot more space than a plain old condensed 2D icon. You could use a zoomed-out image for a 2D icon if you wanted to keep that preview function that those tilted tablets have and you'd save a lot of screenspace that way too. It all just seems like silly gimmickery to me. Can anyone point out any good functional reasons for trying to force a paradigm shift to a 3D user interface? bif

Useless for now, because...

[IGnatius T Foobar]

It's great that Sun has GPL'ed this desktop, but it has absolutely zero chance of mainstream Linux adoption. Why? Because it requires Java to run, and the Java environment itself is not open source. 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.

Re:Useless for now, because...

[advocate_one]

at the moment maybe... but just might be the kick in the pants to spur a mass influx of developers to get the Kaffe project up to speed and the get the GNU Classpath expanded, cos Stallman was certainly on target with his "Java trap" article... and there's an awfull lot of people who will not want something as special as this Looking Glass to have to rely on non-free java runtimes.

Re:Useless for now, because...

[/dev/trash]

Not everyone runs Debian.

Re:Useless for now, because...

[zev1983]

If they GPL'ed it then you can migrate the code to C. This might be helpfull http://www.cs.arizona.edu/sumatra/toba/ , I found it in 3 seconds. I know nothing about programming.

Re:Useless for now, because...

[sparkz]

And RedHat is pointless because it requires a proprietary CPU.

Everything runs on something, it's just a question of how far down the stack you take it.

Re:Useless for now, because...

[nathanh]

It's great that Sun has GPL'ed this desktop, but it has absolutely zero chance of mainstream Linux adoption. Why? Because it requires Java to run, and the Java environment itself is not open source. 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.

Ok, 2 points to consider.

When KDE was released it was fully GPL but the underlying widget set QT was not "free as in RMS". Did this hinder KDE becoming mainstream? Hell no! Even before the QT was GPLd, KDE was very popular and mainstream (at least in Linux circles). After some time, Trolltech decided to release QT under the GPL and even RMS was happy. I foresee similar futures for Looking Glass and Sun's J2SE.

Second point, Java *from Sun* is not "free as in RMS". It is "free as in beer". It is also "free as in specification". The specification explicitly allows *anybody* to reimplement Java and even get the Java nametag (as long as you pass the testing) and even grants you ROYALTY-FREE USAGE of any Sun patents used in Java. There are several "free as in RMS" implementations of Java. I have no doubt they are not as good as Sun's, but how long will it take somebody to hack something like GCJ just enough to run Looking Glass? I'll wager less than a week. Especially considering that Java3D is now open source... anybody spotting the pattern yet?

Sun's obviously committed to Open Source. They have made the same realisation that IBM did; there is no future in proprietary software for desktops. Release it all for "free as in RMS", collaborate with your competitors *and* your customers, and make your profits from professional services and hardware. That's my opinion, anyway.

Re:Useless for now, because...

[polyp2000]

I'd like to add to that, that the "because it is written in java" issue is also negated; its not a massive issue to port the Java to chosen language, eg C/C++ and having the source code available is going to make it considerably easier.

Re:Useless for now, because...

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Formatted this time...

[Bifster]

I fail to understand why there's suddenly this big kick to move desktops into 3D. (Microsoft's Avalon project is an effort along the same lines as LookingGlass, isn't it?) As far as I can tell, this is all just some kind of ill-thought-out attempt to invent the newest revolution in computing or something. But really, it just seems like a glitzy gimmick with no functional benefit that I can imagine.

There's a reason why 2D paper has been useful for thousands of years. It's space efficient and the vast bulk of information encoding schemes that we have devised are 2D in nature... The written word and the painted image convey the great bulk of information we need to exchange with one another in a concise and easily reviewable manner. Audio-visual info is easily conveyed on a 2D screen as well.

We don't write books on layered cubes because that's just an unecessarily complex form. Virtual 3D immersion might be useful in "face-to-face" social interactions perhaps, but that added socio-emotional dimension is completely unecessary most of the time when the goal is simply the concise transfer of information.

Hyperlinking is all the extra dimensionality we need really to convey topic forking between nuggets of 2D information. Hyperlinking works just fine in a 2D GUI.

Looking at the screenshots I wonder what kind of functionality do you get out of having a page that swivels like a stone tablet or something? You get a REALLY BIG icon, that's what. You can't really read the page while it's tilted and it takes up a heck of a lot more space than a plain old condensed 2D icon. You could use a zoomed-out image for a 2D icon if you wanted to keep that preview function that those tilted tablets have and you'd save a lot of screenspace that way too.

It all just seems like silly gimmickery to me.

Can anyone point out any good functional reasons for trying to force a paradigm shift to a 3D user interface?

bif

OSX

[minus_273]

the Dock and the animations, the video running on the dock as well as the the GL reminds me a lot of the Aqua GUI on OSX. It looks really nice. I'm looking forward to using it on my Linux box :)

Re:OSX

[rm_monterey]

In a previous Post, there was mention of Apple submitting a patent on transparent windows.

I wonder when OS X will have this in the window manager?

OTOH

[hummassa]

with a big screen like that, we would not have to stop to stretch... :-) Really, my main problem in my last physical evaluation in the gym was not muscle tonus, but muscle *shortening* due to lack of stretch...

MOD parent UP

[Anonymous Writer]

That's what a real 3D window manager should look like!

Re:Hypocrites

[sindarin2001]

But can you remove (not just turn off) the effects of the GUI to make a completely minimialistic system? Can you replace the windowing system of XP to something that would run well on a Pentium 90? Linux has the ability to work with the most mimimalist setup you can think of, yet it also has the ability to do some pretty useless and cpu-sucking eye-candy effects. The whole point of linux is choice (and choice is both linux's best friend and worst enemy). Sure, windows has some choice, but windows can hardly be modified and customized compared to linux.

Come on, nobody's using their imagination

[DeadVulcan]

I almost joined the ranks of people criticizing this project as a waste of time. Putting 2-D windows into a 3-D environment doesn't give you any advantages, especially if you just project it back onto a 2-D viewing screen.

But let's have some imagination. The idea is obviously to eventually make this environment immersive. This would allow you to place windows all around yourself. And instead of separate virtual (2-D) desktops, you would have separate virtual "rooms." Our current input device (mouse) is also 2-D, and we would need to move to something more practical in a 3-D environment.

Of course, it goes further. Windows are currently 2-D because the viewing screen is 2-D. If you have a 3-D viewing system, then your windows can be 3-D, too. Applications don't have to fit into rectangles; they could be cones, spheres, or dodecahedrons. They could even be irregularly shaped and have qualities like malleability and ductability.

Also, our widget sets are limited by the fact they're displayed on 2-D screens now. What kind of control widgets could we create when things can be moved in three dimensions? It opens up lots of possibilities.

It's just unfortunate that the screenshots they are showing don't actually take advantage of the fact that there are three dimensions. But this is only because application writers haven't caught up to the new "windowing system." It's not because the idea doesn't have merit.

Re:Come on, nobody's using their imagination

[argent]

Putting 2d windows in a 3d environment is useful, but they need to get some artists and videogame developers (really) in there, and some real information presentation wonks like Tufte involved.

See how you can apply a touch of real-world physics to the behaviour of windows, open a new window and have it gently repel its neigbors so it makes room for itself as the windows realistically settle into place like puppies in a basket.

Windows you interact with should shuffle towards the front, others should gradually drift back, and they should use fog effects to shade them like a "full time" Exposé.

But I'm not convinced that most applications would benefit from 3d user interfaces. In fact I'm not convinced that most applications that use them benefit at all from shaped windows. And I'm afraid of the horrible possibilities of 3d skinnable applications (see Jamie Zawinsky's rant and the infamous 'audio-cock technology').

Re:Come on, nobody's using their imagination

[DeadVulcan]

But I'm not convinced that most applications would benefit from 3d user interfaces.

I suspect it would be more a case of wholly new kinds of applications being developed thanks to the new capabilities of the interface. Can't think of any really good examples, though, I admit.

In fact I'm not convinced that most applications that use them benefit at all from shaped windows. And I'm afraid of the horrible possibilities of 3d skinnable applications.

Yeah, I agree. In fact, this thought tugged at my subconscious as I wrote my original post, but I pushed it roughly out of my way, lest I weaken my argument. :-)

JAVA IS SLOW

[love2hateMS]

Sorry, but Java is SLOW. Waiting for a Java program to start up is like listening to paint dry in a thunderstorm.

Re:JAVA IS SLOW

[AKAImBatman]

Sorry, but Java is SLOW. Waiting for a Java program to start up is like listening to paint dry in a thunderstorm.

Ok, should I even *ask* why you are comparing startup time to execution speed? Mozilla and OpenOffice take a long time to load as well, and you don't hear people calling them "slow" do you? NO! People say, "it takes a lot of time to start up". Yeash.

FWIW, Sun has been improving the startup time, just as Mozilla and OOo have been improving theirs. Right now you tend to see about a 10 second startup time for the first Java app, and 2 second startup times for all future apps. Sun has added some code to the upcoming 1.5 VM which should significantly improve this situation.

Real improvements

[fsterman]

Going from 2d to 3d is like saying everyone should draw on cubes for their ideas. It might help in some situations but not most. Want real watershed new interface paradigms? Read The Humane Interface by Jef Raskin. You can take a sneak peak by downloading THI/THE from the Jef Raskin website.

Re:OSX ... aqua extreme vs looking glass

[argent]

It goes a lot further in the 3d direction than OS X. I kind of wish Apple would make the next logical step and really take advantage of the 3d hardware in modern video cards and use real 3d instead of fake 3d, with raycast shadows instead of gradient patterns around windows, and making Exposé "full time" so more distant windows gradually slide to the side and fade into the background and finally turn into dock-style icons wherever they hit the edge.

The dock itself would do the same thing... it would just be part of the community of icons on the edge, and you'd minimize windows just by dragging them off any side...

That's my fantasy, anyway. I think it would be more useful than scribbling on the back of windows...

Looking Gross

[kermit6306]

I'm billing Sun for my lunch that just came up, out and onto the floor.
Seems like a good idea, but these new screenshots look nasty. Maybe with insanely high resolutions their tricks might look decent. With Openlook, NeWS and CDE, sun has a history of putting craptastic UI's on their user's desks. My guess is Sun realized they were going nowhere with this one too and decided to foist it on the public. Nice try, Sun. Shortly after the hype dies down this monster will be relegated to the annals of the failed UI's museum.

Looking Glass not released!

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Looking Glass not released!

[matosinho]

It's a shame... but a few days ago they said they were going to release a looking glass sdk...

what about Mead's project? ...

[sloptaco]

If you think that's sweet, wait till you see when Mead's Project Looking Paper gets unveiled.

Yes, the renowed stationary maker MeadWestwaco Coorporation currently is in the skunk work phases of development of a new line of 3-dimesional paper products, including note books and memo pads.

Utlizing advanced nanotechnology (mostly bucky-tube fibers), they are able to make paper expand in width so the paper user can rotate a sheet of paper on its side, expand it and write an extra memo on its side! Yes we've all be annoyed by the limitations of two dimensional paper where we're given only a front and back to scribble on - but be annoyed no more - in the future, thanks to research at Mead, we'll be able to write on an additional four sides - top, bottom, left, and right!!!

I work for a paper mill in N.C. and was fortunate enough to get an advanced peek at this amazing new technology MeadWestwaco Coorp. dmonstratied in a select-suppliers meeting last month. This demonstration blew me away - absolutely mind boggling. Other stationary makers have tried to harness the new technology, but so far haven't gotten past experimental prototypes - wooden blocks that require felt tip pens to write on.

Geez, and people are so worked up about Sun's 3D desktop... I'm telling you, if you buy stocks, don't count out Mead folks.

-sloptaco

Not slow, just APPEARS slow?

[mgkimsal2]

So, it's not slow, it just appears slow? That's a great defense.

Take gaming out of it, Java apps are still slow, especially ones that use GUIs. Server-side web apps in Java tend to be slow, or at least not noticeable *faster* than other languages. That's, at best, a dead heat, but it's pain to develop in relative to those other languages. And on the GUI app side, people using 2ghz+ computers are still having to defend (rightfully so) that 'Java is just as fast as other stuff' (when it's noticeably not). The fact that you can tell a Java app by how slow the menus redraw in an app even in 2004 is sad.

For anyone that bothers to defend Java in this respect with "well, it's the coders' fault! just use API XYZ123!", why on earth does Sun make a language that is SO EASY to make slow stuff in? Why isn't the default way of making Java stuff FAST? MS VB basically defaults to apps that run (and APPEAR to run) quickly. You can work at messing up a VB app to make it run slow, but it's not easy to do.

Re:Not slow, just APPEARS slow?

[mmusson]

Java does have its performance issues but I don't think looking at the GUI is completely fair.

Most apps are written using a combination of AWT and Swing and these have embaressing performance. However if you look at an app written in SWT (the classes behind Eclipse) you could easily forget you are running a Java app at all. So, conventional Java apps have bad GUI performance because Sun did a poor job two times (AWT then Swing) in a row writing GUI classes.

Unfortunately most new Java developers aren't aware that there are much better alternatives for most of the standard SUN implemented classes.

Re:Not slow, just APPEARS slow?

[AKAImBatman]

So, it's not slow, it just appears slow? That's a great defense.

I do believe sir, that you are placing words in my mouth. As I recall, my exact words were: "JAVA IS NOT SLOW!" Where this idea that I claimed it "appeared" slow came from is beyond me.

Take gaming out of it, Java apps are still slow, especially ones that use GUIs. Server-side web apps in Java tend to be slow, or at least not noticeable *faster* than other languages. That's, at best, a dead heat, but it's pain to develop in relative to those other languages. And on the GUI app side, people using 2ghz+ computers are still having to defend (rightfully so) that 'Java is just as fast as other stuff' (when it's noticeably not).

You do realize that this is a set of unsubstantiated claims? You have listed no benchmarks other than to say that "Java is slow". Benchmarks showing that Java is just as fast (sometimes faster) than C/C++/C# have been available for quite a while. Would you care to show the benchmarks that show otherwise?

For anyone that bothers to defend Java in this respect with "well, it's the coders' fault! just use API XYZ123!", why on earth does Sun make a language that is SO EASY to make slow stuff in? Why isn't the default way of making Java stuff FAST?

Good point. Why does Microsoft make it so easy for developers to write games in the GDI instead of DirectX? Microsoft should really fix this so that programmers can't use the GDI. From now on, all Windows Desktop programs should be written in DirectX so that they are "fast" as specified by "mgkimsal2".

Or perhaps developers could learn to use the right tool for the right job? I wouldn't write a game for the GDI, so I certainly wouldn't write a game for Swing. I'd write games for DirectX and BufferStrategy APIs, respectively.

MS VB basically defaults to apps that run (and APPEAR to run) quickly. You can work at messing up a VB app to make it run slow, but it's not easy to do.

That's because VB is a RAD tool while Java is not. You have to work at making C/C++ programs run quickly and effectively. Same with Java. Someone could create a VB for Java, but that would effectively kill the whole point of ditching VB for a more powerful language.

Re:Not slow, just APPEARS slow?

[mgkimsal2]

You also have simply put out a list of unsubstantiated claims by saying "JAVA IS NOT SLOW". The fact that people have to try to fight this in 2004 would seem to indicate that the popular notion is that Java is slow (whether or not it is). By not providing any real evidence to substantiate your claim that Java is NOT slow, you're no better (or worse) than I am with my posting that it IS slow.

The fact that 'slow' is a subjective observation doesn't help the case, either. :)

Re:Not slow, just APPEARS slow?

[AKAImBatman]

You also have simply put out a list of unsubstantiated claims by saying "JAVA IS NOT SLOW". ... By not providing any real evidence to substantiate your claim that Java is NOT slow, you're no better (or worse) than I am with my posting that it IS slow.

I shouldn't need to provide this evidence. It is inherent in the forum of discussion we are currently using. Or do you wish to claim that you have been ignoring the various benchmark results that have appeared in this forum?

Thus I say again, you are making unsubstantiated claims. Please back up your claims or back off your claims. Hyperboles involving a meta-argument ("The fact that people have to try to fight this in 2004 would seem to indicate that the popular notion is that Java is slow") may provide amusment, but it does not provide evidence.

Re:Not slow, just APPEARS slow?

[AKAImBatman]

Are you really so stupid that you're going to link to a bunch of discredited microbenchmarks that use different algorithms for implementation, as well as superfluous and broken techniques for writing C and C++?

Pardon me, but didn't someone state that C/C++ was inherently *faster* than Java? Can it be? Is it possible that you can write bad code IN ANY LANGUAGE? Does that even mean that you can write good code IN ANY LANGUAGE?! The HORROR!!!

On a more serious note Mr. Troll, welcome to the wild and wooly world of Benchmarks. There is simply no way of giving an "accurate" measurment of language performance since either side can always argue that something was done incorrectly. However, there is one thing we can glean from these benchmarks (in a very general sense): Java and C are evenly matched competitors. Sometimes C will appear a bit faster, sometimes Java. So use what gets the job done right.

Some more benchmarks for you:

OS News
Older Benchmark on Ace's Hardware


Now, most of these benchmarks have been mentioned on Slashdot at one time or another. To date, I have not seen a *single* benchmark that displays results different to those in the above benchmarks. As I troll, I release you'd never want to reveal your secret identity (*snigger*), but perhaps you'd like to be the first to bring forward a viable benchmark showing the MASSIVE (i.e. non-existant) performance difference between Java and C? Or perhaps you'd like to continue this and get yourself pummeled that much harder?

Re:Not slow, just APPEARS slow?

[kaffiene]

For anyone that bothers to defend Java in this respect with "well, it's the coders' fault! just use API XYZ123!", why on earth does Sun make a language that is SO EASY to make slow stuff in? Why isn't the default way of making Java stuff FAST?

So if a PC programmer writes a 3d game using the GDI rather than DirectX, and it *sucks* then it's M$'s fault that the GDI was slow?????

You choose the right tool for the job! Swing is roughly equivallent to MFC - it's not *intended* for writing games in, it's *intended* to be easy to write consistant and secure GUIs in.

You don't need CPU cycles...

[illumin8]

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.

I like the NEW desktop metaphor.

[Jeremiah Cornelius]

This looks JUST like the piles of junk I have on every available horizontal surface!

Much easier to use than the unrealistic "desktops" of yopre, wher I can only make a huge mess of things on two axes!

Re:Watch the video

[Petronius]

raaaaghhhht... before you could just make screenshots to explain someone how to use an app, now we need full motion video. vive le progres!

Usability...

[bani]

I'm sure people said the same thing for color displays way back when.

Actually no, they didn't.

Re:Usability...

[nacturation]

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.

Looks a lot like longhorn to me

[Psymunn]

Yeah, of course it's lame. So are all the silly animations that the Mac OS does by default. But silly rotating things is by and large the direction things are going to be heading. Afterall, Microsoft isn't the only one who realises that the average user only needs a word processor, web browser, media player and possibly a messenger program. So why would they get a newer computer if they can run all those features more then adequatly on an old computer with a large hard drive. Because it wouldn't be 3D accelerated.
The problem with computers is, for the average user, they are more or less fast enough to do everything a person who isn't a gamer, or graphic artist needs. So now people need to make them unnessecarly obsolete. It's all part of the big bad (intentional) bloat.

Re:Looks a lot like longhorn to me

[ben_white]

You know, I disagree. One of the things I think that personal computers need to do better is the organization of information. I know that is exactly what personal computers do best; sorting info into logical blocks and discrete quanta of information. However, that is not the way humans work. We pile things, hide things, tie strings around our fingers to remind of us things! Our minds remember differnet discrete facts not as individual pieces of data the way a computer does but as part of multiple ideas. One quanta of information may be an integral part of several differnet thought processes! Some of these thought may even be mutualy exclusive! Attempts at helping computers display information in a more "human" way are not lame. They may be primative at this point, but at the lowest level these ideas are not just about a pretty screen, they are about connecting people with the unbelievalble amount of data computers put at our fingertips. I applaud the effort. Eventually computers will present data to humans the way we use it! That is what the "user interface" is. Refining the interface is not silly or trivial. 3D spinning windows may not be the end all of information presentation, but dismissing it as "lame" shows a poor understanding of what computers are to most people.

Cheers,

Ben

The project page at java.net

[matosinho]

this, http://lg3d.dev.java.net/ seems to be the project page at java.net.

I can't access the project pages, it tells me i don't have the right permissions. Anyone?

Re:New SUN mantra?

[bl8n8r]

I see Scott McNealy stopped by to moderate.

I've seen it and it's REAL!

[tadelste]

For all the well-deserved skepticism, Project Looking Glass breaks the vaporware mold. It's the real thing. I saw it running on Peder Ulander's laptop at Linux world in January and on Curtis Sasaki's in May 27th in Dallas. It's real and it adds startling capabilities to the X11 platform. I expect it to propel the Linux desktop. It may also have developers working on Java instead of dot net. Here's the thing. Until it's out and everybody sees it, you'll live in your concepts of reality and not reality itself. So, stay there if you must.

Don't need to....

[MosesJones]

Looking Glass runs on Java 3D (also open sourced today) which basically goes straight to the wire on Linux, Windows and Solaris. This may come as a suprise to folks out here in Slashdot land, but actually Java is pretty damned fast when implemented well.

Looking Glass will run on a decent (1.8 Ghz+) laptop with a decent laptop graphics card.

Looks fantastic, its also great to use and the funniest bit is all of the Windows and Mac people looking at a GUI which looks cooler than the best efforts of MS and Apple.

So you don't need to upgrade to a top of the line machine with a top of the line GPU. You need a decent machine with a decent card.

Java... its faster than you think.

Re:Don't need to....

[abhi_beckert]

Looking Glass will run on a decent (1.8 Ghz+) laptop with a decent laptop graphics card.

MacOS X runs fine on a 400Mhz G3 iMac. A 400Mhz G3 PowerMac with upgraded GPU would be able to handle the graphics side of this easily under OS X.

Looks fantastic, its also great to use and the funniest bit is all of the Windows and Mac people looking at a GUI which looks cooler than the best efforts of MS and Apple.

Cool yes, but good looking? What are you on?!? It's even worse than XP!

Have a look at this: Tiger
and this: Ripple
and this: 3D sticky note

Re:Don't need to....

[Moredhel]

I'm running it on a 790Mhz Dell box with an original GeForce 256 in it. This is well below the expected minimum specs, but I'm getting very usable performance out of it.

Since most of the hard 3D work happens in OpenGL, the card takes the strain - and this isn't UT2004.

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

My Gosh, that looks trashy!

[Qbertino]

Why does everything from Sun look so Über-ugly? Take Java for instance. Did you see the JMF demos? The whole setup was so dull. No wonder nobody noticed it. Same with the Java Desktop which is even crappier than some really haphazard themes I've seen on freshmeat.
And now this. This looky extremely crappy by even the most modest standards in design and aestetics.
It also work the other way, of course: How come everything from Macromedia looks cool, but has the operatability of some cheapo shareware app?
Weird.

Re:3D Desktops = old news

[Adnans]

The two projects you mentioned are actually toys. They are nowhere near the magnitude of what Looking Glass offers, namely an infrastructure for building 3D desktop enviroments. The 3D window manager is not the important parts, it's the actual technology that enables it;

What most folks seem to overlook is that this Looking Glass is actually built on top of Keith Packards Composite and Damage X extensions. Coupled with something like Cairo you actually have a pretty kick-ass infrastructure which is able to compete with the big boys.

-adnans

Its cute, but what is its true value?

[nurb432]

Its only adding a 3D component to the *current* state of the desktop metaphor. ( it looks more cluttered/noisy from the screenshots )

I dont see it as being really revolutionary for the user.. same old stuff in new clothes..

Not that i have the answer to the desktop problem, but i personally dont see more window-dressings as it.. ( though perhaps something more like the newton interface is what is needed.. it was designed 'function-centric', not 'computer-centric')

Finally, a virtual desktop like my physical one

[tstoneman]

I don't know about you guys, but my desk at work is a mess, with papers, books, cds, and stuff all over the place.

Based on some of the screenshots, it looks like I can finally emulate my own physical desktop with my virtual desktop... and with it all the benefits of "security through obscurity". For example, I leave my paycheck stubs all over my desk but I'll be damned if someone would bother to put the effort to try to find it!!

I can see the spam headlines now...

[SlowMovingTarget]

"Need more thickness in your Windows?"

Re:3D Mouse

[dustinbarbour]

Scrolling for in/out movement doesn't seem natural. I say to hell with the interface all together. When I can strap something on my head, think about what I want to happen and then it happens, I'll be impressed. It is this point that I think computing will become intuitive for most people.

Some thoughts

[darkpurpleblob]

This is a still photo of the Stanford University campus. Just imagine what is possible if it were live video.

Um, wouldn't a live video in the background be distracting? If I want to watch a video, I'll do it in a media player.

What if your CD or movie database became a 3D jukebox, where titles were joined with images to make finding what you want easier than ever? CDs spin in 3D space to bring the title you want to see to the front.

How exactly is it going to be easier to find a specific CD out of the 300 odd I own by this mechanism?

You can tack a note to yourself right on the Web page you're viewing so that ideas and thoughts don't get lost in a myriad of yellow stickies on your screen but are stored where they most useful.

So I need to flip the webpage to remember if I had a note. What if I forget the URL of the webpage I made a note on?

Apple has been paying attention...

[argent]

http://www.apple.com/macosx/tiger/dashboard.html

Of course this isn't a general part of the user interface, it's got potential security concerns if it's using Javascriptthrough Webcore, and it's competing with Konfabulator... but you do flip these little widgets over to configure them.

Ba!

[vandan]

It's hardly more than 3ddesktop.
I run it all the time as a desktop switcher for Gnome.
The difference with 3ddesktop is that it doesn't use all your CPU just sitting there, and it doesn't look like a sad attempt at making the whole desktop 'experience' 3-dimensional. Some things are better in 2D. Desktops are one of them. There's nothing to be gained from having a window slant into the background. It certainly doesn't aid in getting work done. Yeah maybe it looks cool. So does 3ddesktop, and it's actually functional.

Personally, I'm waiting for Enlightenment to fulfill my need for eye candy. And yes I realise I'll be waiting a while. At least it have the word 'Java' smacked at the front of it in some sad, desperate attempt at building mindshare for their slow-arse POS flagship product. Jesus - imagine if this thing were actually written in Java ( put up your hands everyone who likes playing those First Person Shooters that are written in Java, you know the ones, the .... um .... the .... well .... the .... Oh, I've forgotten the names ).

Plus Sun sux. Their attitude towards Microsoft is displayed in a new light next to their attitude towards Linux ( specifically RedHat ).

Re:Hypocrites

[Sunda666]

remove the binary perhaps? worked for me on nautilus.

Watch it in action!

[ShadeARG]

You can see a working demonstration here.

Note: You might want to tie a scarf around your head to keep your jaw from smacking your keyboard.

Also: In the future, you might want to consider shoving a roll of mints up your butt so that when your foot comes out your mouth your breath won't reek of so much ass.

Re:Watch it in action!

[areve]

I'm so exicied I can have 2 or more movies running at once viewable from any angle. Nothing impressed me here. Scalable windows would be nice in windows but I'm happy with shift- in xterm and mozilla. Writing notes on the back of windows is a bad idea! As long as the guys realise that it's good to experiment, there are good new ways of working that we don't use now, and that these arn't them! I just hope they don't patent it all...

Ooooh... pretty colors...

[ElectricRook]

And how is this better than fvwm2?

With the exception of rotating things, which is about as cool as having a flash ad on my workspace.

Having many windows open with explicit focus?

Panning work spaces?

Verticle icons blocking my pretty wallpaper? I keep mine hidden in the root window, I can call them with a right mouse button.

I fall into the "one big window, cause I only have one focus group". I have function keys to change windows/navigate work spaces, thought path.

Sun, please get a clue...

[Bifster]

Ok, as other people have touched on, the demos so far don't actually add anything in terms of actually useful functionality. There is no paradigm shift here... it's just empty glitz. Once people get tired of the clunky, inefficient use of desktop space, they'll just dump it.

The problem is, the data we manipulate on computers is all fundamentally 2D in nature. Furthermore the screen is 2D. What in the world do they think they are going to add in terms of human factors benefit by faking 3D elements on a 2D screen to represent 2D data??

I mean, as far as I can tell, the 3D crap is just a clunky layer of indirection between the data and the display that actually impedes access and cognition efficiency.

2D page -> 3D lookingglass -> 2D monitor -> eyeball

Hyperlinking is one means of adding a kind of "depth" dimension to data navigation... The pages are 2D and the pages underlying each link represent a sort of z-axis of 2D data "slices". Hyperlinking is a nice way to enhance data organization so that access to related pieces is smoothed.

But why bother with graphical 3D when handling 2D data? There has got to be some rational reason to mess with this extra layer of complexity if you want your project to be adopted! The feature has got to buy you something real... not just "wow-whee". The wow-whee factor just doesn't last much longer than 30 seconds in the real world. From what I've seen of the demos, the looking glass stuff introduces no new fundamental efficiencies in terms of the access or cognition of data.

However, there is one kind of 3D mechanism I can think of that might actually improve computer interfaces... Have you guys seen the GUI interfaces in the movies Minority Report and Matrix Reloaded? The interfaces envisioned there used the space around the user as a kind of giant screen. THAT kind of 3D desktop would actually buy you something useful. Simply, the wide area enables better organization of windows! You can use your 3D spatial situation awareness to keep different kinds of data windows in different places around you. In essence, the extra "screen" real-estate with the added 3rd dimension enables you to organize your windows so that you can have more information right at hand at all times.

Of course, we don't have holographic displays yet, but we do have VR glasses.

If the quality of VR glasses were to improve dramatically, it might actually be feasible to implement something like a holographic desktop GUI.

Of course, the RSI issues here would become very serious. The neck and shoulder area is some of the most complicated and strain-vulnerable musculature on the human body. A lot of work would have to go into adapting a good chair and a minimum-motion 3D pointing device so that people could manipulate a holographic GUI for long hours in a day, many days in a week without repetative strain problems. And who knows what kind of headaches, eye strain, or motion sickness people might get from using VR glasses for so many hours in a day?

bif

Re:Sun, please get a clue...

[cr0sh]

One possible solution would be similar to the Flogiston Flowstation approach, except slightly larger: position a lounge-style chair so that it (the headrest area) is "enclosed" by a large (1 meter diameter?) hemispherical rear-projection "dome". The user wears shutter goggles (for the 3D), the projection is done using a high-frequency (100 Hz+) XGA projector, back projecting on the dome.

Spatial warping would be accomplished either by lenses or software (to "flatten" the image back out, caused by distortion of the curved surface of the projection screen).

You could probably build such a workstation for under $10,000 (the projector will be the expensive part, not to mention the custom back projection screen).

Re:Sun, please get a clue...

[Bifster]

I really like your idea of having the projection system in the headrest, minimizing neck motion!

However, I don't think you can get high resolution, high contrast image quality with a projector and shutter-glasses kind of setup. One thing you really need in your projected windows is a crisp opacity.

Incidentally, the holographic systems in the movies I mentioned would fail this condition too... the windows were all translucent which would impede resolution and ease of reading.

But then the interface in the Matrix wouldn't have caused RSI since the operator's limbs were all virtual!

Anyway, the direct-emission displays in VR goggles I think could pass the contrast and clarity problem, but they have the afore-mentioned physiological strain issues associated with them.

How about a compromise between the two ideas?: a chair with 3-5 LCD screens mounted in front of the headrest. As you swivel the chair about, the image on the LCD's pans as if they were windows on the virtual desktop surrounding your chair!

Now you have to worry about RSI problems in the feet, ankles and knees as the user strains them all the time just to swivel the chair about... LOL!

bif

Re:Sun, please get a clue...

[cr0sh]

Actually, if you read up on the Flostation (I misspelled it, I think, in my original post), you will find that it actually worked very, very well. The chair was designed to minimise pressure points on the user, to mimic "weightlessness" (it was designed and built under a grant from NASA as a system to train astronauts) - thus you became a "head" floating through space (as closely as possible). The hemisphere screen was big enough that focussing of the user wasn't as big of an issue as it is with an HMD (which causes eyestrain). Plus, while the flicker-glasses weren't used in the Flostation, they wouldn't be an issue on contrast or resolution (such a system is used all over in CAVEs - they have fantastic resolution and brightness, its just a rear-projected image).

However, I will say your compromise solution is interesting (kinda like a stripped-down Poetic Tech workstation) - and it is one that could be built (prototyped) damn cheap - three or four el-cheapo Ben-Q LCD monitors, a lounge chair mounted on a lazy-susan bearing, an IR-based encoder wheel system for the rotation, a motor, some switches (or software control)...

freedesktop.org Xserver required

[thanasakis]

From what I've gathered, the looking glass project will probably be not able to function under the "normal" xserver which was until recently xfree86 and now is x.org. I think that the engineers at Sun are utilising the damage and the composite extensions which are available in the new xserver which by the way is based on kdrive which was primarily developed by Keith Packard. It is possible though that eventualy these extensions will be reimplemented for the x.org server.

Re:freedesktop.org Xserver required

[polyp2000]

From what I've gathered, the looking glass project will probably be not able to function under the "normal" xserver

Maybe not ...
But that really is not an issue when the GPL comes into play.

Re:freedesktop.org Xserver required

[margal]

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.

I think Java's stink slow. So there, too.

[Monkius]

Stinky stinky slow.

TLA

[slapout]

So..PLG is GPL?

Look a little farther in the future...

[Manzanita]

... and consider this GUI with the hardware that will be available then. Technology for head mounted displays is being refined as well as alternate input devices. Once the price and usability of these interfaces has improved we will really see a need for a 3D GUI such as this. Now is the time to be refining the technology to deliver it too. Sun is positioning themselves well, I think.

Imagine this in an enhanced reality context. The background is what you see around you. Instead of using a mouse you use your hands and fingers. This type of 3D GUI definitely figures into the future.

-Dan

Re:Looks "pretty"...

[FuzzyBad-Mofo]

Well sure, having background pictures on the desktop is nice but it's not exactly groundbreaking technology. And by the sound of it, this desktop environment does not feature live video, Sun's just saying it would be a neat feature to have.

Way To Go!

[polyp2000]

That is awesome; see i was taken aback .. Shortly after Sun announced this Microsoft and Sun got in-bed together. I thought perhaps naively that Microsoft wanted the looking glass technology and this was their way of getting it. Now this has happened I can be little else but pleased!

Croquet anyone?

[bwbadger]

The sun work looks impressive.

But then, so is the work being done on the Croquet project.

Re:When I see it - slashdot bleat

[kaffiene]

I mean, c'mon, how frickin' cool would it be to have this kind of 3D desktop running on an Opteron-based Linux machine with a really nice graphics card in it? Damn! You should be singing the praises of Sun right now, what's wrong with you, man, what's it take to get you excited ?!? You get FP and *that* is the best you can do, a tired old "what about Java" bitch ?!? This is about a cool 3D desktop demo going GPL !

Because a number of posters to /. have a bee in their bonnet about Sun and Java and have a knee-jerk java == bad response to any topic regarding Java and anything to do with Sun.

I accept that there are valid reasons to critice Sun (I've emailed them entreating them to be more open source and Linux friendly on several occassions myself), but they also do lots of good things.

They opensourced Open Office - the /. crowd moans that Java is not OS.

They opensourced Java 3D - the /. crowd moans that Java is not OS.

They opensource Looking glass, they announced that they will be open sourcing Solaris, they announced that Java will be open sourced once they've figured out exactly how they want to go about it and what it means for their business. And *still* the bleating /. crowd moans about Sun.

They've done a lot more for OS than most traditional IT companies, especially considering that they are much smaller and have less resources than IBM.

Jesus, Sourceforge is stuffed with great Open Source Java code and still the /. drone bleat about how Java is evil. It makes me sick.

To those people: grow up. C and C++ are not the answer to all programming problems, Java is better for a lot of tasks than those languages. Sun is not the Devil and Java is not the fourth rider of the apocolypse.

This is fantastic news! Thank you SUN!

[Radical Rad]

I was a little worried recently when Sun made up with Microsoft and signed a cross-licensing agreement. I said at the time that if Sun wasn't just rolling over and giving up then the thing for them to do would be to open source much of their technology. After all, if your enemy now has access to everything you've got, shouldn't your enemy's competitors also? My faith in Sun's management is somewhat restored. I still think they have a difficult road to travel but at least they are trodding it with their eyes open and brains engaged.

Wow

[WxHerris]

Looks awfully familiar... Almost a ripoff. I used this for awhile: http://www.ksky.ne.jp/~seahorse/

Re:Ooooh... pretty colors... Yay for fvwm!!

[fvwmfan]

Everytime I read an article about the latest, greatest ideas in window management, I just go through the list and think 'you can already do that with fvwm, .. that too .. and that .. ho hum'

It really bugs me. I think the real problem with fvwm (apart from the default theme) is it's name. Try saying 'Looking Glass, Looking Glass, Looking Glass' a few times. Now try saying 'fvwm2, fvwm2, fvwm2'. See what I mean? Is this a name to grab market share? I think not.

I guess the bottom line is - a few of us know about fvwm, most of us don't. Oooooh... 3D windows.

Re:Looks "pretty"...

[node 3]

In fact, this shot is nothing more than the background!

Oh, sweet! Where can I download Looking Glass?!!! I NEED IT NOW!!!

Umm... so?

[dot_borg]

Perhaps I'm missing something, but the ability to rotate windows to make them illegible is usefull how?

Re:Umm... so?

[dbaigent]

Keep in mind that there are two aspects of Project Looking Glass at the moment. The first is the "proof of concept" demo (you can see a video of this demo here) and the second is the "developer's release" on java.net. Not all the features in the proof of concept are currently implemented in the developer's release.

Also, remember that this is an early access, open development project. Questions about to usefulness of these concepts can and should be openly debated. I discuss some of Sun's thinking in my blog.

Re:posting as AC since i modded already

[LDoggg_]

Absolutely.
But for things like application icons, no raster graphics would be necessary. Just colored polygons.
Lighting effects and smoothed surfaces can be caculated. Things can be anti-aliased mathematically.
This is no different than SVGs.

maybe (Re:Pretty...)

[cascadingstylesheet]

The problem is not the environment, but the primary human interface to the environment, which is the mouse. Having virtual 3D on a computer is completely intuitive to a human being; it's how we organize everything in real life.

Well ... yeah, but I use the computer to do some tasks better than I can do them in real life. The computer is way better at organizing and retrieving information than my paper, er, "system" (that's not the word my wife uses). I don't think duplicating a 3D pile of papers would improve this; it is actually the constraints of the filesystem and the 2D interface to it that make it simpler to use.

I'm starting a sourceforge project

[chegosaurus]

to make a *FOUR* dimensional desktop. Who's with me?

Whoa, there -

[jackDuhRipper]

Think you should reconsider all the caffiene, Kaffiene:

My post was an attempt at humor; while, arguably, I failed, your (over)reaction is a bit more than was warranted.

Chill out, man -

Re:Whoa, there -

[kaffiene]

Okay, appologies if that was a joke. I've just got *really* sick of the Sun-bad Java-bad mantra that seems to be unthinkingly churned out at /.

My bad.

Buffering...

[golgotha007]

Would you really want some guy 2,000 miles away doing your surgery?

can you imagine if it ends up that Real writes the transmission protocols for this technology?

THAT would be scary...