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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
tell me why I would want to look at my document while it's twisted sideways?
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
If Linus had done enough research he would never have started Linux because FreeBSD did everything he wanted it to do.
Give the guy a break, at least people are trying to do something new. He took his own time to write the software, and give it away and all people here can do is bitch about it. If you don't like it, don't use it.
The more you know, the less you understand.
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.
Karma: Segmentation fault (tried to dereference a null post)
Because I know that's the first thing I clicked on, and it was slow then. Here's the mirror.
|/usr/games/fortune
I'm all for whistles, don't get me wrong, but without the bells, I'm just not convinced.
Steven N. Severinghaus
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'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 :-)
+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..)
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
Think you could you be less productive?
I like it because it's new and shiny.
Now get back to work.
I don't need no instructions to know how to rock!!!!
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.
No, leave XFCE alone. I'm already concerned about the bloat in XFCE.
"I'm bored"
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.
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!"
>What problem does this solve?
Your desktop is insufficiently cool.Some mornings it's hardly worth chewing through the restraints to get out of bed.
I love it how ignorant people think that the same group of people are working on everything gui related, from browsers to video drivers.
Geezus man, this guy probably has NOTHING to do with KDE or the XFree86 project. If he wants to sit and watch pr0n all day or write a 3D window manager, it's his damn business.
It always amazes me how people can have such a gimmee mentality.
ask yourself, "What problem does this solve?"
How about asking yourself the same question when it comes to the plethora of ways to prepare food?
The only problem that eating solves is nourishment, but yet people eat a variety of foods. Some foods taste better than others. Some people taste foods differently than other people, yet we only really need it for nourishment.
Any project started by a programmer or group of programmers is to fill some need, which may only be personal. Like food, we like variety and sometimes want something different or better or the combo of the two. If the creator (chef or programmer) like what they have done, they might want to share with the rest of the world.
The problem any software project sovles is self interest. It doesn't need to be anything more than that.
To belittle people for sharing is absurd.
----- Oooh, Shiny!
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.
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?
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.
The more you know, the less you understand.
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!