X.org Making Fast Progress

prisonernumber7 writes "X.org is showing a lot of progress! The combination of the XFixes extension, Damage extension, Composite extension and XEvIE (X Event Interception Extension) present in X11R6.8 present user interface designers with a wide range of here-to-fore difficult to achieve possibilities. What does this mean for the enduser? That's window shadows and window shadows within windows as well as true translucency for the OSS community. Good samples of Gnome and KDE desktops with drop shadows, and so on can be found here, here, here, here, here, translucency here, here and here, and its use on handhelds running Linux."

Comments

I hate to say it...

[rpdillon]

...but I've been waiting for translucency under X forever. It hurts me to admit it because I always thought that I didn't care about "eye-candy" but this is really cool. Why did it take so long?

Oh well...off to look into downloading, though I suppose I'll have to wait for the next version of KDE to take advantage of the new features.

Re:Drop shadows are wrong

[808140]

The development at X.org is only at the protocol level; they've added extensions that make translucency and drop-shadows possible without evil, CPU/network intensive hacks.

If it doesn't look right, it's only because the WM/toolkit programmers didn't think about it enough. But the actual X.org extensions are very, very flexible. Don't worry; this is just a showcase of what can be done, but it's not all that can be done.

Remember, X.org is producing the X server, which is the lowest level of the X window system -- all it is is an implementation of the X11 protocol. Everything you actually see is drawn by other processes, like the Window manager, individual apps, etc, etc. The X server by itself isn't usable and provides no UI whatsoever.

Re:Drop Shadows - choose a light source now guys

[Gleng]

I always thought it would be a nice idea to have the mouse pointer as the light source.