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...."

Comments

Metisse

[Draoi]

Metisse (or métisse) means 'mixture' in French.

It's also the name of a cool Irish-French musical duo

Re:Realtime?

[sploo22]

You seem to be misunderstanding it. The pixmaps are updated in real-time. There are two layers: the Xwnc layer renders the windows as pixmaps, and the FvwmAmetista displays the pixmaps using OpenGL.

Screenshots mirror

[paulproteus]

Because I know that's the first thing I clicked on, and it was slow then. Here's the mirror.

Re:can someone

[BrookHarty]

tell me why I would want to look at my document while it's twisted sideways?

If you only have 1 window open at a time, it would be useless. If you have multiple windows, shrinking or moving at an angle keeps them in view. Being able to zoom out and still keep it visible gives more desktop space.

Wonder what multiple videos would look like, if any movement the window could be enlarged. You could do all kinds of interesting new things with this type of desktop, if its not staticly rendered.

Re:What I don't get

[ShadeARG]

It's more about giving you a visual queue as to what the window contains as opposed to being able to read the contents comfortably. Think about the progression:

Text -> Icon -> Pager -> Angled Window

Each one gives more insight as to what's a particular window does than the previous incarnation. Make sense now?

Re:What I don't get

[gl4ss]

+5 'not getting it'.
from the site:
"Auto scale mode. The window with the focus has its normal size, the others "normal" windows are scaled (here 70%). This is done automatically. This reduce windows overlapping as the content of the scaled windows are still viewable.
Shot-3 Surface mode. Windows are automatically rotated to simulate a non flat screen (here a 1/4 of sphere). Optionally, the window with the focus is not rotated. Note the zoomed mplayer.
Shot-4 Peeling (or folding) window operation. "Clicking on a corner of a window of a window peels it back, revealing the window underneath it. The window springs back to its original position when the mouse button is released." (From M. Beaudoin-Lafon paper "Novel interaction techniques for overlapping windows")."

basically, you can fit more into the same desktop space and find the windows easier(like on macs now..)

Re:Before starting any software project...

[TekPolitik]

If Linus had done enough research he would never have started Linux because FreeBSD did everything he wanted it to do.

Especially the time-travel kernel module in FreeBSD. That was really cool, allowing the operating system to travel back in time to before it was even created so that it could do all those things before Linus started Linux

FreeBSD didn't exist when Linus started Linux. In fact its precursor, 386BSD (not to be confused with BSD/386) started as a separate project at around the same time as (and I believe a couple of months later than) Linux.

Re:Before starting any software project...

[maelstrom]

Okay you are right, I mis-recalled this:

M: What is your opinion of 386BSD?

L: Actually, I have never even checked 386BSD out; when I started on Linux it wasn't available (although Bill Jolitz' series on it in Dr. Dobbs' Journal had started and were interesting), and when 386BSD finally came out, Linux was already in a state where it was so usable that I never really thought about switching. If 386BSD had been available when I started on Linux, Linux would probably never had happened.