Slashdot Mirror
3D Sphere Interface for XP
Brian Brian writes "I found this super cool 3D, inside a sphere, desktop interface. The videos really demonstrate it. I would love this built into OS X but it is just for Windows right now. And if nothing else, the paradigm is the coolest way to handle multiple screens." Here are a
collection of screenshots & videos. I'm skeptical that it wouldn't be very practical, but it sure looks fun.
http://li3-33.members.linode.com/~sunny/slashdot-m irror/www.hamar.sk/sphere/screenshots.htm
if the bandwidth gets out of hand, I'll shut this mirror down
Sunny Dubey
and the screen shots page won't last much longer either But here's the Mirrot Dot Link in case you missed it
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
Tried it last night, actually, while I was playing with my desktop.
It's a fun theory tool and shows you exactly what SUN was going for in Project Looking Glass. However, when it comes down to it, it has no current practical application. Windows are stored in the sphere, not used in it, which means that everytime you want to recover an open window, you need to go into sphere mode, look arounnd for the window, find it, and then bring it back to flat mode. It adds a whole extra step to the process, and definitely a lot more time.
I think the best improvement may be interaction with windows inside the sphere, but as the website proclaims, this project is still in Beta.
Best,
- Brandon
Anyhow, I hope they have improved it, as I had it installed just for the *neat* factor, and the damn thing would always start up whenever I booted into XP. I use windows so little, I didnt bother tracking down where the start up processes were, but it wasnt in the norm HKEY/LOCALM...BLAHBLAH. It was very buggy too. Even 3d desktop is cool, but then again, no real use. I cant even manage my own projects, much less 3d windows flying around.
I tried it out when it was first posted on Slashdot of spring of 2004. It was extremely impractical and had numerous flaws. It was susceptable to alt-tabbing for example. If you were going back and forth between windows a lot, you would occasionaly switch out of the gui and see your regular Windows destktop. Kinda kills the 3D effect right there.
Looking Glass
Just
Sorry, I only grab one page deap on stories but you can see the thumbnails:
e enshots.htm
e x.html
http://slashdot.fluky.org/www.hamar.sk/sphere/scr
Also their main page:
http://slashdot.fluky.org/www.hamar.sk/sphere/ind
The links aren't going to work but you can get the idea from the thumbnails Google image search
You mean ``Doom as a tool for system administration''?
It's been done (as a research project!) on Linux though.
http://www.cs.unm.edu/~dlchao/flake/doom/
William
Sphinx of black quartz, judge my vow.
First of all, the modeling in OS X would be sorely stunted due to the limitations of the UNIX backend.
:)
Care to back that up with any technical information?
(tip: before you do, please watch the 2004 WWDC Graphics State of the Union address here.)
Apple really took a step backwards when they made OS X because they tried to abandon the original interfaces and paradigms that so many of us loved from the original MacOS days.
Again, specific examples please. The only one that really springs to mind is that the Finder is no longer 100% spatial by default, and even that's changeable.
Besides, 'interfaces and paradigms' have nothing to do with the machine's graphical and rendering abilities. OS X is much more powerful in this regard than preceeding versions. QuickDraw is certainly superceded (albeit not entirely replaced at present) by what OS X provides at present.
Windows just has better rendering and gaming capabilities, and it really shows with this.
OpenGL, Quartz 2D Extreme, etc. are extremely capable APIs. If you disagree about OpenGL, you'd better take that up with the guys at id Software.
The gaming abilities of Windows machines are certainly taken advantage of much more than on the Mac. However that doesn't mean that those abilities are not present on OS X.
Secondly, I can see some practicality in it. For example, if you can read the slanted boxes, you can take advantage of some additional space on the desktop with some creative maneuvering of the windows. Whether it's worth it or not is another story, but at least it's a cool knick knack to play with for a while.
Indeed, it's a good toy to play with for a few minutes or hours. But it can't compete with something that's as genuinely useful (at least to myself and many other Mac users) as Expose.
Finally, anybody that uses "paradigm" really shouldn't be posting on a "news for nerds" site. It's... it's just unnatural
Now that I can agree with. Although my distaste for the word has nothing to do with the word itself, rather how it's abused. Used in the right context and to convey actual meaning rather than to dress up an otherwise vacuous comment, it's a bearable term.
What's the frequency, Kenneth?
Since the site was slashdotted before it was even posted to non-subscribers you can go here if you want to download it:
http://www.majorgeeks.com/download4222.html
I have often regretted my speech, never my silence.
-Xenocrates
OK, kudos for an interesting idea. But I don't see a lot of practacal application of it.
I'm all for modifying the desktop, but I don't think this model is going to really solve any problems. Cool stuff is all fun and good, but in the end for something like this you have to address and solve a problem. Fulfill a need.
"The Sage treasures Unity and measures all things by it" - Lao Tzu
I've used it a bit - It's really nice - Or rather promising! ;)
;)
;)
I didn't use SphereXP for very long, as it wasn't very mature when I used it, but I found Spaces, which was pretty good - It's not exactly the same, but they both make use of our spacial memory - With spaces I could have 30+ windows open and have no problems at all navigating them
The only problem is that they are "images" of the window, and hence does not update once they are out of focus.
Plus, none of them support multiple screens, as far as I can remember - I use a dual screen setup right now, but I would still *love* to have it
I got interested in it after viewing demonstrations of Sun's Looking Glass (I think it's called) - now they updated in real time, but that was "built in"... Plus it was linux
Any technology distinguishable from magic, is insufficiently advanced.
There is a power toy that adds multi-desktop functionality to windows.
r toys/xppowertoys.mspx
n stall/2/WXP/EN-US/DeskmanPowertoySetup.exe
It doesn't work as well as it could, but its better than just one desktop.
http://www.microsoft.com/windowsxp/downloads/powe
Direct Link:
"Manage up to four desktops from the Windows taskbar with this PowerToy."
http://download.microsoft.com/download/whistler/I
For large sets, this will be our guide even unto death, for the LORD will work for each type of data it is applied to...
The GUI on XP loads fast - if you've ever wondered why it takes another minute for it to become useable, it's because it's still loading all the services and crud in the background - the difference with linux is that it loads the crud up front in the open. When it's ready to go, it's ready so to speak.
Here's something you can do in WinXP (maybe in earlier versions too). It's not quite what you asked for, but it'll let you see everything at once:
CTRL-Click on the taskbar the windows you want to use. Then right-click on one of them, and select "Tile" either horizontally or vertically. I do this when I'm trying to watch different IM conversations.
I would love this built into OS X but it is just for Windows right now.
I can recall seeing some kind of 3D finder for OS X before, so I did a google and found it. It's called 3DOSX. However, I also found another one called 3D-Space VFS as well. They aren't the same thing as the UI the Slashdot post is talking about, but still are some kind of 3D interface.
I can corroberate. Saw this a lonnnng, said "hey cool", installed, it runs like shit.
And it's a terrible UI.
And I'm easily impressed by bells and whistles. I could get nothing done using it. It vanished from my computer roughly 5 minutes after I installed it.
And this is ME. I would've been one of the ones insisting that we should just give Microsoft Bob a little time to flesh itself out.
xkcd.com - a webcomic of mathematics, love, and language.
On Mac OS X, there is a small, free software program called "Desktop Manager" that provides multiple desktops. You can configure the desktop "transition" to look as if it's a multiple faced cylindrical polygon (where each side face is rectangular) rotating. This transition is advertised as cube rotation rather than polygon rotation, but you can have more than 4 desktops/faces, and it certainly doesn't make a cube.
I once had a signature.
http://sourceforge.net/projects/virt-dimension/
A great tool. I've been using it for quite a while on Windows 2000 and the only quirk is after setting up how you want it to behave having to shut it down once to store its settings in the registry. I also keep a backup of the registry key for that. Other than that it works great for me, and I'm used to KDE.
home
http://virtuawin.sourceforge.net/ That's what I use and it can do what you want.