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Metisse - New Looking Glass Alternative
Interested in a 3D desktop? zoso submitted news about about a project called Metisse, writing "There is working and freely available alternative to the (soon to be released under GPL) Sun Looking Glass 3D desktop ( Slashdot story here)
If you have spare CPU/GPU cycles just go download and compile the first publicly available version of this X Desktop. Everything looks nice (screenshots here), has OpenGL support, transparency and all other whistles...."
It's also the name of a cool Irish-French musical duo
Alison
"It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education." - Albert Einstein
is how this is going to make me more productive. I can barely read the text when the windows are put into those weird angles.
HOW'S MY POSTING? CALL 1-800-POSTING
tell me why I would want to look at my document while it's twisted sideways?
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
I was very skeptical when I saw the Looking Glass' screenshots, but this definitely looks like it could be usable in Real Life. Maybe 3D window managers actually are something for me, will have to try out.
Konfabulator is $25, so take that off the top first.
Ah! Much better screenshots than on the Sun web site. The background images in Sun's screenshots just made the page far too busy to easily see what was going on.
Xwnc is a mix of Xvnc and XDarwin. It draws nothing on your screen, every things is drawn into pixmaps.
Does this mean its not-updated in realtime, just static pictures?
The whole thing about 3d desktops, the windows need to be still functioning, so you the monitor windows are still functioning. Most seem to only use pictures, just snapshots, a very cheap and completly useless.
ask yourself, "What problem does this solve?"
I can just imagine using this 3D desktop with a Sharp 3D display.
Would mouse pointer movement include depth perception with this setup?
If reality was like Slashdot, most people would be (-1) Redundant.
Where are the 3D Apps? Why 3D desktop always have to be like 2D desktop, except for some 3D change..
;)
Its not a evolution..
I'll stick with the command line..
why is it programmers have absolutely no idea about GUI design ?, why not speak to graphic designers or IA, a little intuition could go a long way, but as long as the desktop looks like something out of 1980's no amount of 3D or alpha blending will make it look good
you never could polish a turd
Because I know that's the first thing I clicked on, and it was slow then. Here's the mirror.
|/usr/games/fortune
Right now these folks would prefer a spare webserver and some bandwidth. :-)
tell me why I would want to look at my document while it's twisted sideways?
So you can read your document while you are behind the monitor, duh!
Bryan R.
The price of freedom is eternal vigilance, or $12.50 as seen on eBay.....
I think there are other assumptions that need to be challenged prior to this sort of thing being built. Namely, that "applications" are the best way to segment functionality within an OS. This sort of system really seems to address the problem of moving between windows to access and work with different information from different applications. I think the problem of having to move between applications ought to be addressed first.
Finally, is anybody aware of any studies of this type of interface that prove me dead wrong? That prove that people are fantastically more efficient using a mechanism like this?
I'm all for whistles, don't get me wrong, but without the bells, I'm just not convinced.
Steven N. Severinghaus
That's why we have distrobutions. If you don't want to pick package-by-package, then just install Mandrake on default, or Suse and use KDE, or Fedora and use Gnome. If you want 3D Desktops, you're going to want your choice!
Kleedrac
Sure we wang, can.
3D computing environments won't be quite useful until we get a 3d input. A mouse is meant to move around a 2d desktop, not a 3d environment.
We need a 3d input device, perhaps like the ones used in Minority report? That's how I see 3d displays becoming useful.
It's not supposed to make you more productive. The meaning of life, for some of us at least, is not to become more and more productive until we die. There is something about mankind, something inside of us, that wants to be entertained and amused, and this includes being in an asthetically pleasing environment (like a well decorated home, or in this case, a futuristic desktop that no one else on their block has).
1) If you are standing to one side of your monitor, it would appear perfectly straight.
2) Writing code in a microgravity environment, you would need your windows to match your attitude relative the monitor.
3) Twisted? At least it's not doing the hokey-pokey.
4) Or *is* it?
5) If your document were Medusa, you would not want to look directly at it.
6) If you combine two sideways documents and a Clippy, you can make an airplane and fly it around your desktop.
7) 2D is teh L4M3.
8) You get more points per kill because it's harder to shoot them.
9) Extreme coding challengers are bored and want new horizons.
10) Anybody can type in a straight line.
I watched C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhauser gate.
I thought this might be be something for use with 3-D monitors/glasses. Disappointing. I don't have the slightest idea why this might be useful for anything more than the novelty value.
Mathematics is not a crime.
But what about the bells!?!
http://ipod.fresh27.net/
I can finally use emacs in three dimensions!
Will this work with AAlib? I want to be able to use this on my cell phone over SSH.
dont forget http://www.3dwm.org and http://www.fresco.org which have been arond for a while in the 3d desktop arena
I'd have to agree.
The screenshots are very interesting to look at, but I can't imagine working like this all day long. This looks like it would work really well in a Hollywood movie, where the super geek at the high tech company is reading his e-mail, or improbably cracking the the password for the missles, or "hacking" into the evil corporation that is after him.
Hey, Windows users, there is no such thing as "forward" slash, there is only slash and backslash.
I'm running kde 3.2.2 on a p4 1.8 ghz with 512 mb of ram and it's sluggish compared to windows xp. I don't think time should be spent trying to make cool looking 3d wm's but trying to improve xfree (alright, now xorg) or kde.
I mean I think what they're doing is cool in terms of "hey let's try this" but I don't see this as where window managers are headed. People still want fast and colorful icons and a nice file browser that's well integrated with apps. If you're unsure what I meant, compare the "save as" dialogs in mozilla and kedit.
Sorry for the rant, I was just a little annoyed I had to reboot after having an uptime of only 8 days.
this 3d stuff is all lame without some video-integration and image registration to make is seemless check out some of my thesis screencaps http://roscohill.com/skool/index.html
Famous last words:
"Screenshots here."
1. scaled windows - it's one thing to resize your windows and tile them. That's very old news. Scaled windows are another beast. Scale your firefox window everything shrinks, you don't get a bunch of "A..." "B..." tabs. Instead you get "Apples" "Boxes" etc.. in what amounts to a smaller font. Not always better or worse than resizing, but a nice new tool.
2. Skewed windows - Yeap, I can't read em' either. What is the point? It _may_ be easier to browse multiple windows and forefront the one you want using skewed/rotated effects (instead of an alt-tab ring or taskbar).
3. Window peeling - this is kinda nifty. Instead of minimizing, resizing or moving your current window to see what is underneath you 'peel back' part of the parent.
Earthshattering breakthrough in UI? Nope. A reliable and consistant cut-n-paste would be of more immediate value. But as an experiment into improving the GUI it is fun stuff.
Metisse (or métisse) means 'mixture' in French.
Good thing you posted that- I thought from the article that it meant "MacOS"!
Please help metamoderate.
Keep in mind that 3d desktops have the ability to increase system performance because of rendering into pixmaps instead of rendering into the framebuffer...
Why does rendering into pixmaps possibly increase performance?
If you're rendering into a pixmap, having something occlude it onscreen (i.e. in the framebuffer) will -not- be a destructive operation, and you won't have to repaint..
In otherwords, sliding windows across the screen, animating some huge mouse cursor (larger than HW mouse accel would allow, for some strange and uncouth reason), or otherwise putting stuff up in front of windows would not cause them to redraw because their pixels would not be damaged by the operation.
This is good.
There is a negative-- You use more memory on your graphics card/AGP memory, but even this can be alleviated by switching what windows/buffers you render into offscreen pixmaps.
One could, for instance, render all but one window into the framebuffer, save the colorbuffer and depth buffer, then render things in the 'active' window into an offscreen pixmap, and render that into the scene. This would require less memory than a full-off every-window-gets-its-own-pixmap approach, and would still likely perform better than our window managers today (only one repaint of windows is needed when you switch contexts, as opposed to one every frame with the current method)
I'm really not trying to flame or anything, but it always seems to me that while open source geeks have great technical skill, they completely lack any sense of art.
This window system is cool. It's cool in the same way that Aero Glass will be cool and how the Java3D desktop is cool. But what really turns me off about those screen shots is that horrible window manager. It's like whoever designed it has absolutely no sense of aesthetics.
Here's the thing... if you want a minimalist system, then fvwm2 is great. It's not a really attractive look, but it's small and fast. But if you're going to require a lot of horsepower so that you can rotate windows in 3-space and all the other cool stuff, then it's not asking much to want a window manager with some textures and lighting and curves and some other stuff that looks halfway attractive.
</rant>
"I know this, this is UNIX!"
"has OpenGL support, transparency and all other whistles...."
Sorry, but if it doesn't have bells, I'm not interested.
Are there alternatives for windows? Using OGL or DirectX perhaps?
I saw the Looking Glass shots, very nice way of arranging the windows!
That tilted window...
Seriously, they should learn more about human nature or cognitive science when designing UI.
I guess this is pretty technically cool, but as a user of a desktop system (aren't we all?) I'm not actually sure of how this would benefit me. Would I, for example, be more efficient in my job using this?
Have you checked out the video demo of using Looking Glass? It looks pretty slick, and while it's hard to say whether in its present form it would make a better desktop, it certainly shows that a 3D desktop could potentially be in many ways better than the modern 2D desktops.
The current projects like Looking Glass and Metisse aren't meant for large-scale use immediately. They are experiments in what a 3D desktop could offer, and whether it could provide a better user experience. In the future typical desktop computers will have more and more CPU/GPU power to spare, so speding it on the user interface is only beneficial.
After seeing the Looking Glass demo above, I'd say that anybody claiming straight out that a 3D desktop is of no use whatsoever is pretty short-sighted. Who knows, maybe Looking Glass will become the next killer desktop? Maybe a 3D desktop is a bad idea and counter-productive? These projects are made specifically to find that out.
I doubt, therefore I may be.
Well, some parts of this are nice. I have reservations about the actual 3D parts, but window scaling would come in handy.
Having another X server to mediate this stuff isn't very clean though; I understand that they went that way for early development, since there isn't really anything finished that would be better, and they apparently wanted to get to the effects stuff. On the long run, however, it seems that this stuff should be done by a Compositing Manager. Of course, this also requires that the X Composite Extension be implemented in mainstream X servers (read: X.org).
when I saw the screenshots, I thought I'd died and gone to hell, what with seeing CDE in use in 2004.
Isn't anyone who is trying to, asymptotically, reach peak productivness, really just calling for an end to slash dot? I mean... that'd increase productivity quite a lot.
This WM actually doesn't look too bad. Whenever I hear 3D desktop I assume garish arrangment of spinning browsers on cubes. This looks more akin to a *box with some neat ways of organising files on screen (the shrinking inactive files). Personally, I prefer my fluxbox tabbing, but I like the sensable 3D approach (not just some glitzy graphics demo).
The Neo-Bohemian Techno-Socialist
why is this only modded +1 insightful, and now apparently 0, flamebait. it isnt flamebait, it is insightful. it's the reason many many people i know, including me, havent switched to linux. it's too damn complicated trying to figure out exactly what i want. customization is good, yes, but linux currently has TOO much up front and that scares people. there needs to be a standard install, and then, once it's there, you find everything is customizable. goddamnit why won't slashdot or anyone else admit that, instead they mod things like this flamebait.
Only if it's an idiotic action! :)
Thanks for giving the world one choice!!!
Sorry, just kidding. SuSE for people jsut starting out (who don't mind paying money). Gentoo if you want to feel hardcore but really aren't (yay, me).
The Neo-Bohemian Techno-Socialist
this is sweet...
watching xscreensavers "bubbles" pop transparently ontop of my xterm...now does anyone know how to make fvwm ignore focus for a particular window?
Our intelligent designer has never created an animal that we couldn't improve by strapping a bomb to it.
Back in the early 80's, color CRT's started to become available. People's reaction was remarkably similar to current reaction to 3-D desktops. Some people thought is was pretty, and that was enough. Lots of people wondered what good it was, and whether expending more than one bit per pixel was really a good use of memory. Would X become bloated? Would bit-blit still work? Some programmers who liked black and white better because they found it easier to read.
If improved a little it could make me more productive, apart from pleasent looking desktop. The thing that I'd look unto is sphere windowmamanger.
I would put on a background star map (like in skyglobe) and I would be able to look at whole celestial sky, and with zooming! (currently with xplanet I have on my desktop only current view of the sky).
Oh, and I downloaded their videos.
#
#\ @ ? Colonize Mars
#
I don't get it either. It's like vrml - everyone thought it was cool, but the problem was... vmrl is a crummy game engine - there's nothing to shoot at ;)
Imagine getting 3D popups on your 3D desktop!
Imagine being able to view your spam email in transparent windows that are tilted at 45` towards the horizon!
Imagine all of the additional mouse work you'll be doing so that you can rotate your windows in 3d!
Imagine the new computer that you're going to need to buy so you can use your 3d desktop!
Bah!
Why throw a ton of people into quickly improving an emerging new technology when we can split all those people up into smaller teams to try & develop the same thing from several different angles.
...End Rant...
Thus rather than continually improving upon potential "killer apps" (not that I'm saying Looking Glass is such an app), we can all slowly develop slightly different versions of the same thing, all the while ensuring that cross-compatability doesn't exist.
Oh! And don't forget the reunion party in 2 years when we all get drunk and lament the fact that products from the likes of Microsoft stole the fire that should have been ours. Even though our solution was technically superior to Microsofts.
Ok... Maybe I do sound a bit jaded, but it sure does seem that as soon as a killer new technology or application comes on the market, we suddenly have a ton of applications being produced trying to replicate the performance of that technology, rather than either building upon the strengths of it, or developing a totally different, non-copycat alternative. Wassup with that?
That has to be the loopiest website I have ever seen. "No to Empire!"
The same sort of vague claims I always see:
1. Build skills to act effectively for peace and justice.
Nice. "Build skills," whatever that means. Sounds like office-speak.
I love how the war in Iraq is criticized, when meanwhile Iraq violated UN resolutions. Violating UN resolutions are bad, right? What's the point of having resolutions if nobody will enforce them? Iraq was shooting at us, violated 14 counts, and we had the legal right to remove someone who killed his own people. Yet America is made out to be the villain by a bunch of college kids who think they're being "enlightened" by going against the grain and putting on goofy masks in a protest. Lame. Bush is gonna win because of you damn loopy lefties, and I blame you for it.
as far as I'm concerned, what practical use does a 3D desktop environment give me? If anything, i'll get the windows so twisted that I won't be able to use them anymore.
first let me get a program that operates in complete 3D (like a 3D website that needs a browser that can display in 3D) then once windows appear as 3D boxes instead of planes, i'll use a 3D window manager.
Hrm, I don't quite agree. The weakness we get from having so many alternatives is bloat in the footprint of the program itself, and dilution of the resources for development and support of the project. I don't think alternatives are what keep *users* away from OpenSource, they are what keep OpenSource away from OpenSource, by factionalizing development/support efforts.
Every project should have a reason why they exist, and routinely compare themselves to the next closest things. When two projects get close enough to share some or all of their code, developers should put that high on the priority list. I know for a fact my PC doesn't have to be working as hard as it does to run a mix of applications -- and that performance hit is what I'd worry about users shrinking away from the most.
We need to get more excited about projects that encapsulate lower level functionality in a way that provides a flexible enough API for developers to offload their redundant code areas, but I see no reason to bash on new WMs -- most of these problems are in the realm of toolkits.
Someone had to do it.
Anyone noticed that on first screenshot two windows intersect very strangely(calculator is parallel with the screen surface, and it intersect with the left window)? Line of intersection should be vertical, not 45 degrees like there.
No sig today.
How about compatibility with other wms like KDE and Gnome? Of course this thing is a nice piece of eye-candy but I'm sure there are many people set in their ways and comfortable with their familiar manager.
I would like to have some of these features, however I can't say I'm ready to just start using another wm cuz of some novelty.
Why not take some of the existing technology from this wm and incorporate it into other wms?
Just a thaught....
....move along....nothing to see here....
If you did, then to complete the experience you'd really need FSV. 5 year old code, but even an apt-get junky like me managed to compile it with no problems ;)
Do you see what I did there?
The hard drive in my Pismo Powerbook (400 Mhz 512 MB RAM) recently ate it. I was able to recover my $HOME with lots of time and cold packs...boy that sucked!
/tmp and /var/tmp on tmpfs. tmpfs works like a ramdisk but it dynamically grows and shrinks depending on its contents. It's just the thing when swap isn't appropriate but little scratch files get made.
Anyway, I had to reinstall Debian from scratch on this thing. I did two things differently when I did so. I used reiserfs instead of ext3 and when I set up KDE for the first time I used minimum eyecandy and reenabled very few things. Those made things feel much snappier.
I also got some small improvements by putting
The system feels pretty good as it is right but I could prelink everything and get a bit better performance out of the gui apps. While you're at it, install hdparm and tweak your drives. Enabling DMA makes a big difference.
Dancing poodles are interesting, not because they dance well, but because they dance at all. These 3D desktops are interesting, but only as a sideshow. The desktop/document/filecabinet paradigm is tired not because it is inadequately modelled on out computers, but because no one wants to work that way anymore.
X, Aqua, Windows: they're all sufficiently 3D, with stacked windows. If anything, they could use less dimensionality, and simplify the inherent complexity: window groups, accessible process data/logic/presentation tiering with pluggable dataflow, pattern copy/paste, OS-level replication and triggers, omnimedia messaging by reference, flowchart programming.
Making a 3D "desktop" is worse than just bogging down in a 20th Century soulkilling paradigm. It's distracting us from using the 3D parallel processors to separate presentation from logic and data, to obtain all those other features which reflect the way modern people intercommunicate at work, play and everything in between. Hopefully the open source of these new arrivals will allow the best functions to be salvaged and dragged into a new paradigm created by a visionary person or group. Then these machines might start becoming less of their own problems to solve, and begin to disappear in the magic of a real solution.
--
make install -not war
First impression is, "What's the point?" I mean, it's not going to do anything to make my desktop more efficient or effective. If I want eye-candy I'll change my wallpaper.
But the one thing that I think would be useful would be able to shrink a window, not into a small box with everything scroll-barred up the whazoo, but make it 10% or 30% original size with everything squished accordingly. It provides a complete picture of the application window, but with a great reduction of details. But the details could be sufficient to be useful. For example, with experience you can recognize patterns in log text from a distance.
Okay, well, this is neat and all, but I'd consider
it a lot bigger deal if we could get rid of these
pseudo X toolkits (Qt, GTK) and replace them with
a toolkit written specifically to work with the
X window system.
Here's some news, linux-fucking-lamer: open source's greatest strenght is NOT that distrobution [sic] equals desktop environment.
I think we all agree that VR interaction as presented in the early 90s was a complete crock. It is not more efficient to have to "walk" into a "room" to find stuff on your computer. And the necessary hardware at that stage was rudimentary, slow and bulky.
Forget all that other crap. Put on your VR goggles and run a system like Metisse. Run all your existing applications in windows as normal, only now you can put them anywhere in 3D space around your workstation. Have dozens of windows open at once, all easily accessible, without desktop switching.
Long webpages could be opened to full height, sticking up through the ceiling and down through the floor. Instead of scrolling, move the whole window so the area of interest is closest. Pick out interesting sections (images or whatever) in the distance before you've "scrolled" there.
I can think of endless ways a 3D window manager could be used in conjunction with VR technology, even without any specialised applications. If I could seriously set one up now, I would. I'd probably still use my CRT as a second display device (after all, I might need to show something to other people).
Realistically speaking, this isn't practical without true see-through displays. (I want to be able to see the rest of my environment behind the windows -- such as the keyboard -- and the current displays of this type, to my knowledge, use camera passthroughs which are probably a bit laggy and nauseating to use.) But I want one, as soon as the tech catches up -- assuming it hasn't already...
No real point or witty comment, just an off-the-wall observation:
I've always thought that Russian Cyrllic looks a LOT like English characters viewed in a mirror (try it sometime, if you don't look real close you could be fooled, especially if you don't read Cyrllic).
But in that image the text is upside down and underlined (or I guess "overlined") and it sure looks like an India alphabet - devangari(? - I think that is the name of one of the subcontinent's alphabets).
Maybe there is some sort of social commentary buried in there somewhere...
When information is power, privacy is freedom.
And it's cool. A little slow (OK, so I ran it on top of KDE) but I think it has some cool features, the setup I really liked was: - surface like a sphere or cylinder - window auto scaling to 40% - auto flat (the window you focus on becomes flat instead of staying all distorted). That window-peeling stuff is very nice, although I don't know how useful it can be, unless it gives you enough time to bring the window in the back to the front before becoming flat again. This stuff can be really useful for having many windows on the same desktop (could be a little better than having several virtual desktops). I think this could at least be used as the foundation for an Exposé-like feature in other window managers. Of course someone is bound to say that OSS should innovate and not just imitate, but hey, Exposé is really cool, someone could add a similar feature (though not exactly the same) to KDE, GNOME or both...
Go hug some trees.
Seems to me that with a 3D desktop, we need 3D apps, so someone needs to start a fork of GTK which is source and binary compatible with the official GTK library but renders 3D widgets. The same could be done for other windowing toolkits, but I'd be most interested in seeing GTK first. Imagine firefox, GIMP, or [insert your favorite GTK app(s) here] running with true 3D widgets.
This would be really neat with those 3D stereo page-flip glasses (yes, I have a pair) which give true stereoscopic 3D from a regular CRT monitor.
perl -e 'print $i=pack(c5, (41*2), sqrt(7056), (unpack(c,H)-2), oct(115), 10);'
This spacial desktop organization is just crap. Who wants this stupid stuff? Tabs, panels, expose', alt tab, etc... all solve the problem of navigating a workspace. This is a 2D environment based on flat pages of text, get over the desire to jazz it up in stupid crap ways. What we need is a real 3D computer, with knobs, dials, and levers; a little interaction. 3D is great for games and movies about hackers ;) but stupid for modern desktop applications.
its out https://lg3d-core.dev.java.net/ 53 megs including java needs a 2ghz chip
Some of the features in Looking Glass seem kinda pointless, like that 3d cd jukebox idea. The organization of windows by tilting them out of the way looks like a good way to waste screen space.
Metisse seems to take a slightly different approach. The features outlined in the screenshots actually look like they make an effort to help users manage windows. I do agree somewhat with Steve Jobs' position that users shouldn't have to be janitors; a system that makes some useful decisions for the user seems worthwhile.
It looks like Metisee preserves window locations when using the 'shaped' screen and scales contents down, allowing users to utilize spatial relationships and visual cues to find data.
I also like the idea of folding over window corners to see the lower windows. Seems more useful then Alt-Tabbing. This feature is implemented from a research paper. I've seen several posts here that lament open source's propensity to copy rather than innovate. Here is a concrete counter-example of an open source project trying something new and leveraging academic research. Even if the project is a complete failure, it should be applauded for taking a risk and implementing something different.
As an aside, I remember some comments on the original Looking Glass article that critized flipping widgets over to change settings and view properties. The new Tiger Dashboard in Mac OS X is now doing the same thing. The reviews seem positive on that score. I can't really decide what I make of that. Property sheets sometimes obscure their apps, so I guess flipping is a wash, but I think I would prefer to see the application and its properties.
======
In X-Windows the client serves YOU!
Otherwise we'd have to call it Sparkling WM or something like that :)
Ok, so I had a look at the screenies, and wasn't completely repulsed. Certainly, there are some aspects of the wm that could, theoretically, be quite useful. Transparency on any window (and not to the root window, I mean real transparency, like has been possible in windows since win2k), rotation on an x-axis (well, sometimes) and certainly scaling would be really useful. Well, at least, that's what I think, but the crux of the matter is that we all have personal tastes, and that's probably part of what draws us to "alternative" operating systems like linux and bsd. And any others that I have left out before an OS zealot flames me.
So I go get the packages, which, on dialup, does take a little time (Ok, I was kinda using all the bandwidth I could at the time). I compile and install both nucleo and metissa. So far, so good.
I followed the instructions that were given to a T, and the X server actually started up, joy of joys, with what seemed to be a working wm.
Seemed to be.
Because none of the goodies that were supposed to work (rotation, scaling, transparency, feeding the dog) did, in fact, work. Neither did any of the usual things you would expect a window manager to do: window movement and resizing, for a start.
And don't even start me on fvwm. Or the color cyan. We are out of the 70's and there's no need to inflict that on ourselves any more. Heck, if I wanted that, I would just go get a fugly sun box.
I'm quite willing to try it all again, if there is someone with some ground-breaking tips for me. I'm certainly not beyond being told that there was something banally silly that I was doing. But remember, I was following instructions.
All the negativity aside, I think that there is potential here. Perhaps this is something for the good people at x.org to look at. Certainly a properly hardware accellerated X server would be good. Something that does all of the other nifty things that metisse promises (the aforementioned scaling and transparency at least, though I think that the rotation and pee-back ideas are quite novel) would be a great step in a good direction, imho.
Perhaps it's also time for the good people at the enlightenment project to get something solid from E17 out there. Much of the hardware accelleration that should be taken advantage of on today's desktops is supposed to be in there.
Let the flames begin.
It's still running, though I'm not sure there's a good reason why. It probably has some applications some people use, or they (understandably) don't want to deal with (l)users complaining about their web pages disappearing.
It no longer serves as the mail server; that's what they turned off. They moved to a Sun iPlanet server; this was part of the transition to JHED, the central LDAP server for login.
There's another service for web hosting these days called FESTER, and there's a reason I'm not using that. (No, the reason isn't that FESTER doesn't provide subdirectories. It has more to do with my strategy of offending some of the people some of the time....)
|/usr/games/fortune
this looks to be a cool toy, hope someday will become a bit more uable and useful for an also free win brother of metisse check out spherexp (http://www.hamar.sk/sphere/)
I am putting myself to the fullest possible use, which is all I can think that any conscious entity can ever hope to do.
The second screen shot about the "Auto Scale mode" looks like a feature that works better than Expose on OS X. The thing I don't like about Expose is having to work with function keys or desktop hot corners in order to activate it. The Auto Scale mode looks like a version of Expose that runs while you are working, without having to resort to function keys or hot spots.
It looks like a feature in which the shrunken windows are visible around the normal size active window, without any overlapping. I presume switching between windows requires you to simply click on a shrunken window, which would resize it to normal and shrink the previously acitve one, kind of similar to Expose.
This also eliminates the need for a Task Bar, and would also have the advantage of actively showing the windows contents, rather than just representing a window with a Task Bar button. OS X can display a minimised window's contents in the dock, but this Auto Scale mode can display minimised window contents in a larger fashion, depending upon the space available on the screen.
I also presumed that Expose was OS X's answer to the Task Bar, because their dock didn't allow you to switch windows as efficiently as the Task Bar. This Auto Scale feature looks like something that is a combination of Expose and the Task Bar, but works better than both. I think this is a really innovative concept for window managers.
Seriously though, has anyone acutally tried eitehr lookingglass or mateise? No. So i think we should try to be as open as we can until actually tried it out. As omnipotent as we all think we are, we are still human and shold wait to try it before making a supreme judgement.
Computers may be able to multitask well, but most people (even smart computer-literate types) generally cannot. I for one can still only visually pay attention to one program at a time.
The Windows GUI (running nearly all applications maximized) tends to be the most popular approach, and for good reason: the program you're paying attention to is visually pervasive, and all the others are out of sight (and out of mind) on the taskbar at the bottom of the screen. It caters to the natural abilities of human attention and visual perception.
Some of you will claim that a 3D desktop, with the ability to deposit numerous windows in specific locations and go pick them up later from the same spot, more closely matches the way we deal with real-world objects. You're right, and that's exactly my point -- in the real world, when you set a bunch of things down in different places, what you get is a cluttered mess. Why do we think that recreating the ability to make messes (and reintroducing the obligation to keep things organized and arranged) is somehow a good thing?
The Windows GUI is actually pretty damn usable, except for some minor problems:
Moderator hint: a comment is neither "Flamebait" nor "Troll" if it is true.
is a desktop window manager that mimics how MY desktop works, so I can feel comfortable, at home, and productive. I mean, they call these things files and folders, and it's called a desktop,and you have "tools" and whatnot, right? So how come they never LOOK or ACT like any *real* desktop?
Here is an example...uhh... this would be.. ummm, well, it's just an example.. *mine*
Random crap just appears, then the next day it's gone. You never owned it, it ain't yours, you don't know what it is,and it's usually scary looking anyway so you don't care when it goes away again.
You lay something down, go to the kitchen, come back, and the real important "thing" you just were working on has now morphed into last months bank statement, which now has a phone number on it with no name attached, but a date next to it underlined TWICE.
Odd random fires occur.
You notice that the old candy dish you throw your keys and change and junk in now has a birds nest with 5 little peepers all looking for some food. They get the last of your chips from the bottom drawer. For a moment you think about asking the dog how the birds got there, because he's the only one that would really know. Then you realise he'll just tell you what you want to hear anyway, so you forget about it.
You go to reach over to your small tools area to work on some hardware, and find that compound reverse dado titanium layered over fine ceramic skill saw blade you bought last year.
There are many odd Cds with no labels leaning up against the lamp base,all very important, but you have to use your magic 8 ball to see if you should try them out or not, because at least one of them you remember has hack_orifice_of_doom_2000 on it.
You try to make a post-it note and find 6 empty card board packages that pens and pencils came in, but not a single pen or pencil to be found. The cardboard boxes though you KNOW you can make something cool out of, so you lean them on the random cds pile leaning on the lamp base. That takes up the space that your duct and electrical tape is now using, so you put the electrical tape in your pocket and chunk the duct tape under the desk.
The point was moot anyway, because you don't HAVE any post-it notes.
You go to change out some RAM, and not finding a handy mylar bag, you take that old chip bag in the bottom drawer, that is now REALLY empty, turn it inside out, and put the ram sticks you will never use again EVAR into the bag and back into the drawer, for future archaeologists.
You go to print something, and you MUST decide,for paper, do you use the backs of the distro something 3.2RC1 HOWTOS you printed out four years ago, or do you use the backs of your girlfriends letters she's written but hasn't mailed off yet... hmmm.. hmmmm
Now, someone builds a computer version of an ergonomic actual human being uses-it desktop like that, call it "3D", I'll take a gander at it.
Its not asthetically pleaseing. Its freaken' ugly! I'll be the first to say it. THE EMPORER HAS NO CLOTHES! While I'm at it, I freakin hate aqua too! Not only are newer desktops requiring more and more cpu cycles, they are becoming uglier and decreasing productivity! To me the hallmark of gui design was be. But I suppose if they were still around in their original constitition, they would be just as amped about a 3d desktop or eye candy. damn hippies! If Sun wants their linux distro in corprerations in mass quanitty they had better rethink looking glass. Corperations just aren't that stupid.
Well.. maybe. Or Maybe not. But Definitely not sort of.
yeah - sco.
I was expecting a new-looking glass alternative :(
The screenshots for Metisse suck and you can only use FVWM - what gives? It is a great demonstration of how productive Java is though.
Looking Glass: Looks awesomeMetisse: Looks like crap
Looking Glass: one guy in his spare time
Metisse: "a lot, see the source" (really one dude hacking other sources though)
Looking Glass: from scratch because of Java APIs
Metisse: hacked X server, hacked FVWM, hacked vnc.
Looking Glass: very secure
Metisse: insecure (it's in C and it's hacked up code)
Looking Glass: easy to write plug-ins, dynamically load
Metisse: hack fvwm in C, recompile
There was an article a while back saying that the language doesn't matter for security because it is bad programming that is responsible. Even without looking at the source I can guarentee there's no buffer overflows, double-free's, format string exploits, etc in Looking Glass. And I would bet my life savings there's at least several in Metisse.
There was an article recently about Java performance where most posters insisted it's still slow and jerky, but the movie of Looking Glass sure looks good to me. It's sad that people still use C/C++ to create lame hacks like this Metisse when there are such better alternatives. Can you imagine if the whole OS was written in a modern language?
Another 3D environment is Croquet:
Honstly, I don't see a point for this operating system, if you're going to use a monitor. It makes no sense to have it displayed on a CRT or LCD monitor. It'd make more sense if it were for newer computers that came with projecters as monitors... but a standard monitor? Waste of time if you ask me. I mean... the monitor is flat nonetheless. There's no way the OS can actually have depth. Even though we have a lot of 3D games that run great, it's nowhere near the same. Windows are going to interfere with each other. Maybe if we just kept the OS the same and built in some kind of window-manipulation powers, as to where we could peel the windows back, drag them around and resize them better, etc, then it wouldn't pose such a problem.
Just my two cents.
"Instant gratification takes too long." - Carrie Fisher
Has anyone tried this? How do you an a pure practical basis tilt etc windows? Keyboard shortcuts, right click menus? It is the way the practical user input is configured that makes or break this idea IMHO.
With more options available for desktop navigation the traditional the one handed browsing seams to be slow, complicated and cumbersome. As someone else put it, bring on the WASD options!
Because slashdotters lame-ass zealots who think anyone who hasn't been using linux since kernel 0.9 is an idiotic newbie (even though they just started with 2.4)
They also seem to want everyone to use linux while they complain that everyone except them is too stupid to use linux.
Slashdot has become microsoft's greatest advertisement; and I don't mean those ad-banners MS is smart enough to have here.
know for a fact my PC doesn't have to be working as hard as it does to run a mix of applications -- and that performance hit is what I'd worry about users shrinking away from the most.
:).
Most users have far more computing power than they need and aren't going to care if their system is a bit slower because of the mix of applications it has to run. Most people don't complain about how slow windows is
It's just there's too many almost identical ways to do everything. It's confusing as well as a waste of effort.
Doesn't Looking glass try to make more of the desktop rather than just tilt windows though? I mean Looking glass has the option to do more with a window, like giving a window more than just the one surface to work with.
Not sure how young Metisse is but all it appears to be able to do is rotate windows...
Just because X is rendered with the help of OpenGL, it does not mean that the Linux GUI environment is up to MacOS standard. It is the what's inside windows that count, not how things are rendered on the screen.
OpenGL or not, the Linux GUI still looks like a hack...and the screenshots showing Emacs don't help.
The vastly different look and feel, from one app to the other, is one of the main problems, but it is never gonna go away...
I am sorry, but project looking glass...
"a revolutionary evolution"! come on people.
I can see some plausible ways this (or the Sun java 3d thingy) would help me find information, or the windows I want, on a busy screen - so it might make ME more efficient (whether the windows are for files or objects or applications or tasks). No idea about you though :)
By all means organise some user trials, if you're curious or it bothers you...
As you suggest, there may be many things that could improve productivity and usability. But the thing about open source is that pundits and managers don't get to say THIS one or THAT one must be done first. The problem that gets addressed first is the one that someone actually writes the code for! It's that simple. If you think something else is more important, organise a project or team to fix it, or do it yourself. That's how it works.
Now if only I could persuade someone to write me that utility to...
Paul "Say no to feeping creaturism"
The screenshots are beautiful. Anyone know what kind of graphics card you'd need?
Hi,
I've read several comments like "time shouldn't be spent on that kind of things" and "we've seen that already (e.g. Loooking Glass)". As one of the two guys responsible for the Metisse project, I'd like to say a few words...
I started playing with application redirection while I was finishing my PhD in 1999. The ideas that led to Metisse are described in the thesis, defended in July 2000. At that time, I was just considering this as an interesting application for videoSpace, a video toolkit I had written during my PhD.
In 2000, Microsoft Research presented the Task Gallery at the CHI conference. Although I don't like it particularly, I was pleased to see that some people were using an application redirection mechanism to explore new window management techniques. The Task Gallery, however, required a modified version of Windows and its source code was not available. So I decided to spend some time to create something that would allow other people to experiment with new window management techniques ("new", not necessarily "3D").
The result of that work was named VideoWorkspace. A paper describing it was presented at a french conference in 2002. A web page in english including images and videos was already available at that time. The source code came a little later (November 2002). Last year, I published another paper on Ametista, a revised version of VideoWorkspace. The source code for this version as well as videos and snapshots have been available for more than a year.
A few months ago, Olivier Chapuis, one of the fvwm developers, took Ametista and mixed it with fvwm and a modified X server (based on Keith Packard's). This is what we now call Metisse.
The goal of all this has always been to allow people to experiment with new window management techniques. Metisse is not a replacement for your existing wm. It's something that will hopefully help us create a replacement. Until recently, VideoWorkspace/Ametista/Metisse was one of the only freely available things that allowed to display existing X Window applications with OpenGL.
To conclude, I'd say: time shouldn't be spent reading press releases from Sun, Microsoft or Apple to know if they will open-source their technologies. I wish more slashdot readers and free software developers could pay attention to what the research community is doing...
Nicolas
Yes together with some SGI workstation, VR, and spaceball we can rule the galaxy as father and sun!
Why a workstation anyway? "Joe, get that Onyx4 from the garage!"
I'd bet many incredible human advances were made by people who were simply bored and threw their entire creative being into some little bit of curiosity.
Take the Kama Sutra, for example...
http://www.pycage.de/software_expocity.html: //www.thegraveyard.org/skippy.php
http
Also see 3ddesktop and 3dwm...
why, I have friends all over the world! Just this morning in fact I received a nice long email from my friend over in one of the ministries in nigeria. He and I have been working on some very exciting projects! And I have a lot of friends in russia, and most of them are girls who all want to marry me!
It don't have support for opengl apps, that's kinda dumb, since the wm uses opengl to draw things... The interface is dumb too! No big X in corner of window? that's dumb... No support for centered background? Had to use icewmbg to get that. Looks Cool tho... Should have support for a few other wm's tho... Would love to see Metisse with icewm.
Metisse looks like a good start, but I'm still waiting for the QWM using the Quake engine. Imagine being able to take any cool Quake map and organize your stuff in it! This would make file deletes a lot more fun too, if you get my meaning!
Seriously, in such a system you could create rooms for objects of different types and navigate to them using your 1337 fps skillz. Or if you're lazy or suffer motion sickness you could send a bot to go find the stuff and bring it back. The bot would of course be customizable, so you could make it look like a dog (Rover skin), a butler (Jeeves skin), or your wife/girlfriend/so (skin skin)....
To the making of books there is no end, so let's get started
DAMN FVWM ALL TO HELL!!!
it does look cool.. but why fvwm out of alll the x-mans or (x-men) ?? crap!!
still looks a little choppy for my tastes.. but the concept is cool.. something different on the desktop for a change.. i like the screen shot of the one that simulates the slight rotation of the windows.. i wonder how a person could get used to that..
if they really wanna be cool, they should make their x-man require 3D Glasses for the true effect.. mmm.. 3d glasses...
- Hi I'm Linus Torvalds and I pronounce Linux, Lih-nix..
I get a seg fault trying to start this app.
Anybody else get it to start?
----- If communism is a system where the government owns business, what do you call a system where business owns govern
> 3. Window peeling - this is kinda nifty. Instead of minimizing, resizing or moving your current window
... maybe not ratpoison, though), and I remember being able to do it in school a decade ago.
> to see what is underneath you 'peel back' part of the parent.
> That's what I always liked window managers that supported the "shade" feature.
Which ones haven't? I'm pretty sure that you can do it in all the major ones (KDE, GNOME, IceWM, Xfce
It's a neat feature. Double-click the titlebar and the whole window (except for the titlebar) disappears. Double-click again to bring the window back. In some distros, KDE is set up so that a shaded window will temporarily appear when you mouse over it, and resume shading when the mouse leaves. This is sort of the opposite effect of how peeling seems to do it.
--
-JC
http://www.jc-news.com/coding/freedom/
> The vastly different look and feel, from one app to the other,
:)
> is one of the main problems, but it is never gonna go away...
I would never pretend that X is without its problems, but I think that this one is really exaggerated in importance. Granted, I compare against MSWindows and not Mac OS X, but I still maintain my point if only by way of stubbornness.
At work, I'm running Windows 2000, Office 2000, OpenOffice.org (to recover occasionally corrupted MS Word files), Opera, Mozilla Messenger, and xterm-on-ionwm-on-X11-on-Cygwin for Konsole-like functionality. There's also an accounting program custom built by some nigh incompetent outside developers. Every single one of these programs use a different widget set (even Office 2000, which is made by the same company as Windows 2000!), and the different widgets do not impede my productivity. They also don't make me shriek in terror when I look at them.
At home, I'm running KDE. Almost every program I run is KDE-based, so they have the same "Crystal" theme. On occasion, I run Opera, but the Qute theme that Opera is using pretty much meshes nicely with KDE's look, and both are Qt-based. The only other major widget sets I use are XUL (Mozilla apps) and gtk. I have gtk set to automatically use my KDE theme for its icons (a neat little tool called "GtkQt"), so gtk apps typically differ in only a few aspects, like button placement and 3D-ness of buttons. I choose to use a different look for Mozilla (Walnut), but if I wanted to, I could make it Qute, which would pretty much make my entire desktop experience homogenous.
But, you know what? There's actually a positive to having different programs running with different themes. If I see a wooden texture, I know I'm in my mail app without having to move my eyes around. If I see a bunch of buttons across the bottom of the app, I know I'm probably in KNode, my newsreader (I custom-placed the toolbar that way). If I see a vertical "tab bar" across the right side of the window, I instantly know that I'm at an Opera window. It's pretty neat. A different look can make it easier to instantly know where you are and what you're doing in your computer. I mean, would you paint your bedroom the same colour as your family room? (hint: brighter colours in the latter, subdued colours in the former)
But that's just me, of course.
--
-JC
http://www.jc-news.com/coding/freedom/
I realize this is very off topic, but what mode is he in that he has file tabs in emacs ?!
3D Window manager + Head/Eye Tracking + Angeoscopic display == Next Killer app.
Think about it:
If you can tilt your head and make the windows rotate to face you, it qould make browsing MUCH faster. Also having windows forshorten means that you can keep track of much more apps at once...
Also, Angiscopic displays will make 3D WMs really pop!
Ben
Ben Schleimer Life is like a sewer, what you get out of it depends on what you put into it.