Slashdot Mirror
Impress Your Friends With A 3D Desktop Pager
xiando writes "3D-Desktop is a window pager for Linux. It works with any window manager and
the screenshots look very impressive. The idea is to allow you to look at all your virtual desktops in different 3D views."
I'll take the [1][2][3][4] of the default GNOME desktop pager, it's quite all right. I can even drag windows between desktops with it. Shiny screenshots, though.
The World Wide Web is dying. Soon, we shall have only the Internet.
I liked it better when it was called "Looking Glass" and was/is still in development by Sun Microsystems as demonstrated to an awed crowd by Jonathan Schwartz and was/is planned to be released as open source to the community when Sun has completed it.
As much as some people like to bad-mouth eye-candy, it's one of the reasons I've been able to swtich so many people from Windows. First you 'Wow' them with the eye-candy and then you tell them about the stability and lack of viruses.. 9/10 times the next question is 'why don't more people use it.' Eventually they feel like they know a secret and buy a mac. Likewise, this would be a nice 'wow' for people looking to introduce the layman to gnu/linux.
Yeah, I saw the screenshots. I also saw Sun's "spectacular" demonstration of similar technology.
I'm just not that impressed. Is anyone's productivity really suffering because of the horific amounts of time it takes to rotate through your desktops?
Launching and navigating the viewer would take you as long as shortcutting to all the desktops you're using. Yes yes, I realize I'm backing a linear technique to handle a potentially exponential problem (what if you have 82 desktops open? what then?), but in my personal experience, even when I have heaps of available desktops at my disposal I find myself utilizing only two or possibly three if things are really busy.
Instead of "improving my productivity" I wish these developers would focus their skills on what linux desperately needs -- more games!
I know this!
A similar program available is called SphereXP or some such thing. It works pretty well. It's not perfect of course. It still has some improvements to be done, but it is free AFAIK. It is kind of like the reverse of what this article is talking about. YOu are actually inside of a sphere and you can paste the windows and things to encircle you so to speak. I don't use it regularly because the minor flaws don't allow me access to say the task bar. The task manager doesn't work with it either. You can zoom in and out and have windows postioned further away and such. Like I said it really is pretty slick. I just am so used to a flat 2D desktop that it feels wierd to me. I guess if I used it more I would start thinking the 2D was inefficient and sucked.
>>>>>> Chewie, take the professor in the back and plug him into the hyperdrive.
Except that that wasn't the first time. This kind of visualization comes from Xerox PARC and is called "perspective wall". The idea is that the tilted views off to the side give you some context without taking up too much space.
Looks like Apple is still getting their ideas from Xerox PARC, even 20 years after the "original" Macintosh.
Same with this 3D pager crap. So now I got to sit and watch a 2-3 second animation each time I switch? Yippie!
Seriously who of the linux users really has the time for this? I am all for eye candy but not at the cost of either my working speed or taking up valuable desktop space.
I kinda like the way Enlightenment does it where you can drag a desktop over another and see them both at once partially although I have now switched the XFCE4 for its speed.
There may be a use for 3D on the desktop but so far nobody seems to have found it. About the only thing I can imagine is to go to 3D since you can then use the graphics cards power and offload the poor cpu.
The problem with most new gadgets including suns attempt is that they dare not break the current desktop design (because that would break all current application) and truly design a new interface.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
How much proformance does this suck out of the graphic card? What about those of us who can't configure 3D acceleration because ati can't release decent drivers? I think this need some time until there are drivers/modules/whataver that make life on linux simpler. Linux IS ready for the desktop.. it is just not ready for the avg. user.