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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...."
Have you seen the demo for OS X Tiger? It has a few concepts from Looking Glass. Things like angled panels with reflection (new iChat u+3 interface) and configuration/preference panels on the "back" of windows (Widgets).
Concepts that seems useless from Looking Glass are making their way to real products with very innovative approaches.
I'm not big on the whole 3D spatial desktop idea, but the 'peel' function looks very innovative and actually useful - I know I'd prefer it to minimise alot of the time if it were integrated into XFCE :-)
Had them for years. I still have an old SpaceBall 2002 sitting around in a box. Just do a google search for "6DOF input" or "3D mouse" and you'll find all sorts of neat stuff from back when VR was going to change the world.
"Have you ever thought about just turning off the TV, sitting down with your kids, and hitting them?"
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?
To me, the perfect Window manager has functions for tiling vertically and horizontally, for minimizing all windows (like Meta-M in Windows), and for minimizing and saving the minimization and then unminimizing (like Meta-D in Windows), and must have a titlebar theme that looks good though has a pixelwidth of five or less (like MicroGUI/ NanoGUI) Oh, and it has a shortcut for opening an rxvt terminal mapped to "alt-X."
To date, the only Window managers I could get all of these things to happen in are Sawfish and TVWM.
Knowing that one man's feature is another man's bloat, Window managers should put everything into modules and make it easy to add/remove features.
The best way to go is to make the core contain an event manager, a titlebar manager, and an API.
Everything else should be components that add in later, since anything could be bloat, though it should be capable of adding anything else.
The only Window manager that I know that is that tiny but also extensible is TVWM, though extension is a real pain.
If the window managers are extremely difficult to extend, then bloat goes in and stays in. Much better to live without it and "stifle innovation" by making it a separate program or part of an extensible manager.
Mod me down and I will become more powerful than you can possibly imagine!