Next-Gen X Window Rendering For Linux

Bytal writes "Seth Nickel, a GNOME hacker, has an extensive treatment of the next generation Linux graphics technologies being worked on by Red Hat and others. For all those complaining about the current X-Windows/X.org server capabilities, things like 'Indiana Jones buttons that puff out smoothly animated clouds of smoke when you click on them,' 'Workspace switching effects so lavish they make Keynote jealous' and even the mundane 'Hardware accelerated PDF viewers' may be interesting."

Comments

"Hardware accelerated PDF viewers'' ?

[Neil Blender]

And only a few days ago we were asked, "Where have all the cycles gone?" Sheesh.

Re:"Hardware accelerated PDF viewers'' ?

[AJWM]

Um, if it's hardware accelerated, it will be eating fewer of your CPU cycles.

Re:"Hardware accelerated PDF viewers'' ?

[bonch]

Hardware-accelerated PDF viewers, huh? Aqua beat already does that. The entire OpenGL-composited interface is described using PDF, which also makes it awesome for publishing because what you see on screen is how it's going to look on paper (and you get a free "Save to PDF" in your print dialogs).

Not that it isn't cool to see the OSS desktop community finally looking ahead like this. It's something people have definitely been crying out for. But when I see the section titled "What It Might Look Like," I look over at my Mac and see what it already looks like. :)

Then again, I am quite happy to have people follow Apple's lead rather than Microsoft's. Please, no more taskbars, "start menus," integrated filesystem/net browsers, and whatever else is coming over from the Windows world and polluting desktop Linux. Though KDE is still cool, at least Gnome is willing to try some different directions in the name of usability (rather than familiarity...because from a usability standpoint, the Windows GUI sucks the most of all, and we should not be cloning it).

Re:"Hardware accelerated PDF viewers'' ?

[Billly Gates]

Keep in mind the taskbars and menu's were highly influenced from NextSTEP before MS added them into Windows. Same with using a graphical language like postscript and now pdf.

Also gnome is very macintosh like and one of the early macintosh developers wrote nautilus if I recall.

No one is stealing anything. Even the menu bars on the top of the screen came from Xerox before Apple used them.

What I like about kde and gnome to some extent is that they are highly customizable compared to either mac/windows. The problem is the later versions of kde look a little cluttered as a result but you can make your desktop look like anything.

Also you can have kde put a menu on the top of the screen just like gnome and macos. I think you can add a task bar to gnome as well.

I think perhaps some new innovative idea's are needed instead of just borrowing existing ones. Perhaps a way to handle many apps running at once without the desktop looking cluttered is next.

But I believe(could be wrong) that Windowmaker,kde,gnome all use ghostscript which is a postscript clone. The original macos and nextstep used it. Windows has an equilivant but I do not remember the name since its been a long time since I admined Windows boxes.

Re:"Hardware accelerated PDF viewers'' ?

[pjt33]

what you see on screen is how it's going to look on paper

Subject to the rather big assumption that your printer's capable of it. The effective resolution of Preview.app is far greater than that of most printers.

Re:"Hardware accelerated PDF viewers'' ?

[grolschie]

Um, if it's hardware accelerated, it will be eating fewer of your CPU cycles

Not necessarily so. Well, only if they use hardware acceleration to do existing tasks that are already being done solely by software acceleration. I mean, how many resources does xpdf et al use really?

However, if they are introducing new eye candy wizz-bang GUI magic, chances are that the hardware requirements (including CPU and RAM) will be much higher anyways - even with suitable h/w- accel compatible hardware. And for course those without the h/w-accel compatible hardware, this would eat up even more CPU cycles for the rendering. I repeat, how many resources does xpdf et al use really?

Re:"Hardware accelerated PDF viewers'' ?

[Leo McGarry]

The entire OpenGL-composited interface is described using PDF

I sobbed when I read this.

I wrote a really long post correcting this widely and wrongly held opinion some weeks back. I don't feel like finding it, or being that verbose again. So short versions.

No PDF, no OpenGL.

Quartz 2D is a display-list engine, but it is not a PDF interpreter. Rather, Apple wrote some very, very simple shims that quickly translate PDF files into Quartz 2D display lists and back. Nothing in Quartz 2D is represented in PDF format unless it's sitting in a file on the disk.

The windows are drawn on the screen by a piece of software called Quartz Compositor. A couple of years ago, Apple rewrote Quartz Compositor to take advantage of hardware acceleration. They did use OpenGL for this, but only in a very limited way. Each window is represented as a texture on a surface and fed to the graphics pipeline for compositing.

Quartz is amazing. Nothing else in the world comes anywhere close to it, despite what some very confused people seem to think. But you're really selling it short when you describe it as "PDF and OpenGL." Because it isn't.

Re:"Hardware accelerated PDF viewers'' ?

[Sark666]

...because from a usability standpoint, the Windows GUI sucks the most of all, and we should not be cloning it

Hmm, I can't really agree there. There's lots of things wrong with windows, but there is a lot of things they have done right in the gui.

It's seems too many linux devs detest windows to the point where they don't allow themselves to see what they have done right. We should be thinking embrace and expand whenever it's appropriate. We should look at what they have done right and benefit from it.

Here are some examples I find of things that just should not exist at this point. In these examples I'm talking about gnome.

1) Remembering windows size/positions. This drives me nuts. I've read that the reasoning behind this is for the most efficient use of the desktop (e.g. you launch a 2nd term and it positions itself beside the 1st term instead of overlapping). Sounds good, but in practice it makes me a less efficient user. Back in my windows days, I liked that whenever I launched the file browser it was always in the same position where I left it. I could rely on this and be ready to click whereever I needed. Same with the file dialog, calculator or whereever. I EXPECTED them to be in a certain position and thus I could work faster/more efficiently. I think maybe a compromise on this would be the default should be that gnome remembers size/position for all apps unless the developer of an app explicitly coded an app not to follow this behaviour. So the wm is the default unless the app says otherwise. I can see the benefit of autopositioning maybe with terms, but for most other apps it just makes me slower and gets in the way. As it stands I feel like I never know where an app will be when it launches.

2). Hot keys. For the love of god can someone fix hotkeys in gnome! Ok again this is coming from a windows background but bare with me. I was used to the alt key toggling the menu of whatever is the active app. Toggles are good, they are efficient and I believe intuitive. Just like play/pause on almost every player that exists. Ok so when I first used gnome, no alt hotkey toggle. Ok fair enough, I have to actually press alt f, but then I try alt f again to get out of the menu and nothing. I have to press escape to get out of the menu. Ok ignoring that, once I'm in the menu the other hot keys are rendered useless. Go ahead try it, press alt f, and then press alt e to get to say edit. Nothing. This is clunky. Once you are in the menu only the arrow keys navigate the menu's.

I work for a company testing applications and a key thing we look at is the hotkey placement of apps as when employees are using apps everyday all day, you want those hotkeys to be laid out efficiently as possible. So sometimes once in a menu it's quicker to just left arrow over once but sometimes it's less keystrokes to use the hotkey while in the menu.

I was going to go on about the menu functionality with gnome but I'm going on too much. You might say it sounds like I want kde but there are many more things about kde I don't like over gnome, and I appreciate the streamlined environment of gnome over kde.

Now you might say I was conditioned to the windows way of things. But really look at what I said above about say the hot keys. Which system is the more efficient. I'm talking number of keystrokes here and navigation.

It erks me when people say just flat out say the windows gui suck most of the time. On my thought of embrace and expand. I think there should be a document really analysing what windows has done right, and if they have done it right, why would we or would we NOT implement it.

Re:"Hardware accelerated PDF viewers'' ?

[MemoryDragon]

Actually Aqua is currently probably the furthest of all GUIs, but it also has problems. (Having a Mac myself I know the problems) Compositing needs lots of video RAM, open a handful of Windows on Aqua (or x.org with xcomposite on) and see the rendering speed go down significantly once, the memory limit is reached and stuff has to be swapped over the agp into the main ram.

The next problem Aqua has, is that only a few functions really are hardware accelerated, Fonts for instance still are a problem with no acceleration, overall the rendering speed could be faster.

Where Aqua in its current incarnation really can shine, is in effects where the full hardware acceleration can kick in, which is transparency and shadows. Resizsing windows with shadowing however brings Aqua to a crawl (same goes for x.org xcomposite with shadows)

Dont know if those problems are resolvable with the current crop of graphics cards, but I assume once some rendering stuff, like brezier curves (which is used for font rendering) is moved into the shader level, things will become really interesting.

The biggest gripe I have with Aqua is the missing remote functionality, theoretically it would be possible to stream the PDF drawing functions over the net. That would give a much better solution than plain X directives (which are far too talkative) but Apple does not seem to use it.

Re:"Hardware accelerated PDF viewers'' ?

[null etc.]

Um, if it's hardware accelerated, it will be eating fewer of your CPU cycles.

True, but it will be eating more of your GPU cycles.

Re:"Hardware accelerated PDF viewers'' ?

[Anonymous Coward]

Keep in mind the taskbars and menu's were highly influenced from NextSTEP before MS added them into Windows. Same with using a graphical language like postscript and now pdf.

I don't know how the Dock (from NeXT/OpenStep) influenced the taskbar. And I have no idea what you mean by the menu's having been highly influenced from NeXT (I haven't seen too many people that use a floating menubar like NeXT did, but again I'm not sure if that's what you mean).

NeXT wasn't the only company at the time to use Display Postscript. Sun's NeWS system used it as well, and there are a few others that I can't recall right now. And NeWS came out before NeXTStep.

Also gnome is very macintosh like and one of the early macintosh developers wrote nautilus if I recall.

Members of the original Mac team (Andy Hertzfeld, Bill Atkinson, etc) founded Eazel, who made Nautilus (and others). Many people worked on Nautilus, such as Pavel Cizler -- who wrote Tracker while at Be (and is now at Apple working on the Finder). I wouldn't say Gnome/Nautilus is very Macintosh like, both from a classic and OSX point of view. But, that's just my opinion.

No one is stealing anything. Even the menu bars on the top of the screen came from Xerox before Apple used them.

No. Smalltalk (Xerox) had no menu bar, either at the top of the screen, or at the top of the window. A right click (or 'yellow button', or whatever the hell they called it) in the window opened up a popup menu. You can see a picture of Smalltalk-76 in action at: http://users.ipa.net/~dwighth/smalltalk/St76/st76f igure3.gif

Or, you can download Squeak, an open source Smalltalk implementation created by the people that created Smalltalk back at Xerox, and check it out for yourself. No menu bars at the top of the screen, or at the top of a Window. And Squeak was created in the mid-90's (so it's not like they didn't know about menubars).

But I believe(could be wrong) that Windowmaker,kde,gnome all use ghostscript which is a postscript clone. The original macos and nextstep used it. Windows has an equilivant but I do not remember the name since its been a long time since I admined Windows boxes.

I really don't understand this. If you're just talking about general use of Postscript, okay. If you're saying the original MacOS used Postscript as it's method of rendering to the screen (i.e. like Display Postscript, or whatnot) then you sir are on crack.

Re:"Hardware accelerated PDF viewers'' ?

[ultranova]

I mean, how many resources does xpdf et al use really?

A lot, actually. Try viewing a PDF document made from scanned pages - simply moving from page to page in xpdf will take 5+ seconds.

Re:"Hardware accelerated PDF viewers'' ?

[AJWM]

Perhaps a way to handle many apps running at once without the desktop looking cluttered is next.

Well, even Motif Window Manager lets you iconify running apps ;-) But more seriously, isn't that what multiple virtual desktops are for? That's how I use them.

Re:"Hardware accelerated PDF viewers'' ?

[Reverberant]

Even the menu bars on the top of the screen came from Xerox before Apple used them.

According to Bruce Horn: "Smalltalk had a three-button mouse and pop-up menus, in contrast to the Mac's menu bar and one-button mouse."

Re:"Hardware accelerated PDF viewers'' ?

[koh]

You're raising some interesting points here. Your Windows background does show, but you may be quite representative of what new Gnome users will stumble on their first time around.

I'll try to address these points, while avoiding being too technical (which is a pain sometimes :)

1) Remembering windows size/positions. This drives me nuts.

Okay, okay. You're probably right on this one. However, please consider that a linux desktop is not used like a Windows one, specifically :
- people generally use several workspaces and lay out their windows on multiple "screens", so to say,
- you're not supposed to reboot an X terminal as often as a Windows workstation - you just lock it and leave it as is. This comes from older times, but still shows,
- typically, people just arrange their windows *once* and leave them that way. For a very, very long time. When time comes to reboot, they save their session, preserving their windows' position (okay, this does not work all the time) then log back in again later.

Indeed, the X Window System was not supposed to be used like an MS Windows desktop, and the differences still bite us from time to time (why does evolution remember the active pane but not its window position across sessions ? WHY ? Answer : because it's the window manager's business, not his, and e.g. Metacity doesn't support this quite right yet).

2) Hot keys. For the love of god can someone fix hotkeys in gnome! I was used to the alt key toggling the menu of whatever is the active app.

The Alt key is a modifier. It is not a "real" key. It is meant to be used in combination with another "real" key, just like Shift, Control, Super, Hyper, Fn, Apple, etc. It is not cross-platform. It is not standard. It is usually mapped to the Meta key under Linux, which was once used to set the high bit on characters you typed on older terminals. You don't expect something to happen when you press the Control key alone, right ? The same applies to the Alt key.

Use F10. One press of F10 activates the main menu, both on Linux and Windows. Another press dismisses the menu. I don't know about Macs (do they have an F10 key ?) but a real (though nonstandard) key like F10 is much easier to code for than a modifier like Alt.

Hope this helps,

Cheers

ko

Re:"Hardware accelerated PDF viewers'' ?

[kisielk]

I just tested this. Push alt-f, and then push alt again on its own, the menu should disappear. Alt-f alt-e does switch to the edit menu here, in both Mozilla and Explorer.

Re:"Hardware accelerated PDF viewers'' ?

[jgrahn]

Well, even Motif Window Manager lets you iconify running apps
Motif? Hell, that functionality was in twm(1). It's always been there. Multiple desktops were the next step of course, and that's why I run ctwm(1). Maybe there's something better around the corner, and maybe not.

Re:"Hardware accelerated PDF viewers'' ?

[Leo McGarry]

What can I say? That site is just flat-out wrong. It's an ancient description of an equally ancient Quartz demo, and it gets the internals flat-out wrong.

It says, "Quartz does not use Postscript as its internal graphics representation language. Instead, it uses Adobe's Portable Document Format (PDF) standard which is a superset of Adobe Postscript."

That's just completely incorrect. Quartz 2D graphics are not represented internally as PDF. They just aren't. When a Quartz 2D graphics context is stored in memory, it's stored as a display list, very similar (conceptually) to the way OpenGL scenes are stored in memory. To convert the context to a pixel buffer for display on screen, Quartz Compositor (or Quartz Extreme, depending on hardware) renders and composites the graphics context, which results in a bitmap.

A Quartz 2D display list is very similar to PDF in the way regions are defined and paint applied to them; this makes it easy for PDF files to be converted into Quartz 2D display lists and vice versa. But it's equally true that the Open Inventor file format is similar to an OpenGL display list in the way that vertices and surfaces are defined. You would be wrong to say that OpenGL programs store scenes internally in Open Inventor format; you'd be equally wrong to say that Mac programs store their graphics internally in PDF format. It just ain't so.

Can an Open Inventor model be trivially read from disk and turned into an OpenGL display list? Sure. Can a PDF file be read and trivially turned into a Quartz 2D display list? Yes.

That's it. Okay?

Re:"Hardware accelerated PDF viewers'' ?

[nbert]

I don't really see your point - the concept of virtual desktops or workspaces solves the problem of having many apps open at the same time. I currently have more than 15 windows open and none of them are minimized or behind another window, because I simply aranged them on 4 workspaces. Finding the right worspace isn't difficult either, because I arranged them by topic (shells are on worspace 2 for example, Firefox and Thunderbird are on worspace 3).

Just because neither Apple nor Microsoft have "embraced" this concept doesn't mean we have to reinvent the wheel.

Re:"Hardware accelerated PDF viewers'' ?

[AstroDrabb]

I don't know about 5+ seconds, maybe it is your box? However, I do agree. Just run top and move to another page in xpdf and watch the processor usage jump way up, 90%+ is not unusual (this is on a 3.04GHz HT P4 with 1GB memory). The official PDF viewer from Adobe is not much better, it sucks up a bunch of processor time between each page display. Once the page is displayed, my processor usage drops to about 0%-1%. Something isn't right with xpdf or the official Adobe PDF viewer under Linux.

This box is dual-booted with WinXP SP2. Under WinXP if I open a PDF with the latest version of the Adobe Reader, the processor jumps to about 30% usage from 0%-1% usage. While that is not "great", it is still much better than the huge spike I get on the same system under Linux. As a major user of Linux, I personally would like to know what the huge processor usage is from? I actually use Linux with the official NVidia Linux binary and an NVidia GForce 3 TI 500 (this card still kicks butt and can play the latest Doom fine), so I get pretty good 3D excel.

Re:"Hardware accelerated PDF viewers'' ?

[dbIII]

1) Remembering windows size/positions

You can use other window managers and still have all your gnome applications, including the toolbar.

2). Hot keys.

You can use other window managers - enlightenment had these features well over five years ago, and most other window managers worked on since then (and probably some before then) have these features. Gnome is a big project, and parts of it just aren't being worked on anymore, but you don't have to use the window manager that comes with it - most other window managers work with it just as well.

Re:"Hardware accelerated PDF viewers'' ?

[Bloater]

"it uses Adobe's Portable Document Format (PDF) standard which is a superset of Adobe Postscript"

Not to mention that Postscript is a turing complete programming language and PDF isn't, so there is no way it can be a superset.

Re:"Hardware accelerated PDF viewers'' ?

[Sepper]

My thoughts exactly. When was the last time you viewed a PDF while playing Quake?
Even if half of the new apps gets hardware support, it's kind of a good thing: the GPU was MADE for this very reason...

I can already see the future spec for cards:
"Get 2356FPS for rfc2616.pdf! "

Re:"Hardware accelerated PDF viewers'' ?

[Coryoth]

How do you manage 15+ applications that are open?

Well, my suggestion is to combine together multiple desktops with something like this, which allows you to group and control windows elegantly, and potentially in complex and useful ways. If groups could, for instance, hint to the taskbar to group their entries, and applications were capable of hinting to the WM whether to create a new group for its subwindows... well, then you'd have some very useful new window control/management tools available to you.

Jedidiah.

Re:"Hardware accelerated PDF viewers'' ?

[Positrix]

You don't expect something to happen when you press the Control key alone, right ?

actually, i expect it to fire my rocket launcher...

Re:"Hardware accelerated PDF viewers'' ?

[jovlinger]

could it be that

a) win xp version is more optimized (spend more time optimizing the program used by 97% of your audience... heavens forbid)

or

b) win xp averages load over a longer period? both run a 100% when something can run; the question is over which period you average load when summarizing it as a simple number.

I think their efforts would be better spent on...

[TrollBridge]

...negotiating with graphics card manufacturers to get some solid, open drivers for Linux.

That would make this endevour much easier in the long run, would it not?

In case of slashdotting...

[Anonymous Coward]

Forward: For a drawn out post on next-generation X rendering, this blog entry is really short on eye candy. I apologize, but I'm at home, separated from my beloved eye candy, and figured I should write this while I felt motivated. As a way of forcing my own hand, I'm making a link now to a blog entry I haven't yet written that will contain screenshots in the future :-)
Next-Generation Rendering For the Free Desktop

For the past half year or so Red Hat's desktop team has had people working toward making accelerated graphics rendering on the free desktop badass, but doing an ass job of actually talking about what they're doing in a larger public / GNOME context. They've been doing a combination of experimentation (from that cracktastic OpenGL compositing/window manager luminocity to xsnow for the Xcomposite generation) and knuckle-down no-holds-barred infrastructure work (like making Win32 GTK work on Cairo so GTK can move to cairo as the default backend). With RHEL4 kicked out the door we've been able to rebalance day-to-day work on GTK and X onto other people to give the nextgenren hackers free hands. Currently the full-time nextgenren team at Red Hat is Owen Taylor (gtk/pango maintainer), Søren Sandmann (x hacker), Diana Fong (visual designer), Kristian Høgsberg (x hacker) and Carl Worth (cairo maintainer).

I'm really excited because these guy's expertise is across a broad chunk of the rendering pipeline, from the toolkit down to the x server, which is going to give this effort the ability to work on this from a global perspective rather than optimizing the bits where we happen to have influence in. I'm doubly excited because other companies (well, Novell at least, but hopefully others will join) are starting to invest in this effort too!

I'm hoping to drag Owen into spinning this off into an umbrella effort (ala project utopia) to help maintain a coherent story/platform even as lots of people pour work into lots of different packages and distros. There are so many different ways to attack the X rendering issue that I'm a little worried about seeing a lot of fragmentation of effort and the result not being particularly coherent. I do hope people experiment with lots of different approaches, but I also really hope that in we can give developers a consistent platform for doing cool graphics on the free desktop. It would be a real shame to end up with the message in two years being "well, platform X has the feature you want, but you have to worry about also working with Y because X won't work well on distro Z". This sort of technology-choice morass can really dampen developers playing with this stuff and adding support all over GNOME, which is exactly the sort of quick-fiddling big-payoff stuff I think we'll see a lot of as soon as this stuff starts landing. In other words, lets push toward the point where people can feel confident and start hacking up cool things for this system inside GNOME.
What It Might Look Like

A really good system needs to have lots of pieces in place all hooked together....its not something that can be hacked apart and replaced by arbitrary random incompatible bits (though there are points of commonality, such as OpenGL or Render). For example the pieces in one imaginable architecture - by no means the decided-upon final one or anything - might look like:

* A sophisticated drawing layer (cairo using glitz/opengl or render as backends)
* Stock renderers built on top of that drawing layer (pdf/ps rendering backed by cairo - such as Alex Larsson's xpdf fork in evince, svg rendering backed by cairo, etc)
* A toolkit that agressively takes advantage of the features in the drawing layer, exposing them to applications and themes (gtk+)
* A window+compositing manager that can work closely with the toolkit but essentially takes the window contents as a static image in compositing (metacity with luminocity-like GL compositing manager features fused in to deal with window effects, synching up smooth resizing

So basically

[falcon5768]

OS X.

Actually reading through it now, it looks like they are going for a combination of OSX and XP. Still got to ask, are they beating a dead horse, when OSX does Xwindows too?

Re:So basically

[Lussarn]

OS X and quartz is no standard, it runs on one architecture and one OS only. This is meant for all the other OS:es who needs good visuals. Apple puts their mony on qartz, all other unix companies on this. Lets se who wins, whall we.

But why do they need their own...

[jpellino]

oh. sorry. parsing error.

I read that as "Next Gen-X Window Rendering for Linux"

Cool

[M3rk1n_Muffl3y]

I am sure the new Linux desktop will make OSX look like Windows. And then the entire creative department will rush out and buy Linux based laptops just to look trendy.

Evas?

[ZennouRyuu]

Seems to be working toward the same goal as the E folks with their DR17 and associates libraries.

Don't get too carried away now

[cronius]

Windows that shrink scale and move all over the fucking place with cool animations

Yes, sounds... nice. And easy to work with.

Re:Don't get too carried away now

[bestadvocate]

"move all over the fucking place with cool animations"

Like duckhunt for your x-windows?

Inevitable comment about bloat

[NanoGator]

"Indiana Jones buttons that puff out smoothly animated clouds of smoke when you click on them"

This is kinda cool. I know it seems gimmicky and all, but I have to say there's something to be said for having a UI that subtley lets you know what you just clicked on.

I know a few people aren't keen on eye candy. They worry about slowing things down etc. But I have to say, in my own experience, the more visual feedback I get from my computer, the more attuned I get to using it. A lot of my actions become reflex instead of having to decipher what I should do next. For example, I use Opera. When a page is loading, a red X lights up. (Click on it and it stops the page from loading.) It's subtle, but I actually do react to that red icon there when it's on. Somewhere deep down, I have a sense of "This page is ready for you to browse". I find that sort of thing useful.

Of course, it can be done badly or absurdly, but eye candy like this can actually be really useful.

Re:Inevitable comment about bloat

[bonch]

What you're describing are called visual cues.

There's a difference between eye candy and visual cues. The genie effect on OS X looks cool and is fast because of the hardware compositing going on. But more importantly, it's a quick visual cue to show you that you have just minimized a window, and it travelled down to the second spot on the right of your dock, so you know where it is. You also get a scaled version of your window down there. When an icon bounces for your attention, it's a cute little effect, but it's also a visual cue to let you know the app is wanting your attention.

It goes beyond animation effects, too. People have commented on OS X's "gumdrop" window controls, which look cute and friendly, but few seem to notice they're arranged like a traffic light, which is intuitive for most people. Red, yellow, and green circles--red closes the window, yellow minimizes, and green zooms.

Note that I use OS X as an example simple because I think it's the undisputed king of GUI visual cues. I think Linux needs more creative taste and aesthetic in its interfaces. I'm willing to contribute.

Re:Inevitable comment about bloat

[Jeremiah Cornelius]

I think that th e"bucket of snakes" progress bars will advance usability by 20 years, or so.

I also like the well-placed use of the word "fucking" in the descriptions.

Re:Inevitable comment about bloat

[jerometremblay]

I think that most people who say they dislike visual effects actually think about USELESS eye candy.

A visual effect is useful only if it conveys additional information. It must not be used simply because it's possible to do so. For background/low importance tasks, I'll take a subtle icon animation over a modal dialog box any day.

Re:Inevitable comment about bloat

[hey!]

"Indiana Jones buttons that puff out smoothly animated clouds of smoke when you click on them"

Well, if experience is any guide, I think this can be boiled down to these two points:

1. It is good that this kind of thing can be done.

2. In 99% of cases where it will be done, it will be a bad idea.

Re:Inevitable comment about bloat

[schon]

People have commented on OS X's "gumdrop" window controls, which look cute and friendly, but few seem to notice they're arranged like a traffic light, which is intuitive for most people. Red, yellow, and green circles--red closes the window, yellow minimizes, and green zooms.

How is that intuitive? They are completely *UNINTUITIVE* because colors don't actually translate into physical cues.

Or are you suggesting that when I see a yellow light, it means I should minimize my car?

Traffic lights typically mean "go, prepare to stop, stop" - telling you what to do, rather than you telling them what to do. If people were to use them like traffic lights, they would only use the window when the green button was bright, then quickly prepare to stop (say, by saving their work) when the yellow button was bright, and not using the app when the red button was bright.

Re:Inevitable comment about bloat

[Gob Blesh It]

"Can you give me an example of something that is eye candy without serving as a visual cue?"

I can. You know all those Gnome and KDE themes that try (badly) to imitate Aqua? They copy the eye candy without understanding the reasoning behind it, or the value of visual cues. Too often, the result is badly misapplied pinstripes, distracting transparencies, and so on.

Re:Inevitable comment about bloat

[SoulOfMyShoe]

I believe you are missing the point. It's not that the buttons function exactly like traffic lights, but that it uses a paradigm that people are already somewhat familar with to help people know what to do. True, it is not a 1 to 1 correlation, but the user could at least get the idea that red indicates that you will stop using the program, yellow, that you will put the program on hold (by moving it out of the way), and green, that you will proceed with the program. It may not be a perfect system, but I do agree with the grandparent that it is at least a clever way to help convey visual clues to users who may not be familiar with the interface. Are traffic light colors universal? I know that those colors have that connotation here in the U.S., and I think I remember them being that way in Europe too (but I didn't drive there, so I didn't pay a lot of attention to them). I suppose that even if the connotation is not present in other countries, the colors shouldn't be detrimental to people's understanding.

Re:Inevitable comment about bloat

[Gob Blesh It]

Huh? Would you prefer the gumdrops be plain gray?

I don't understand why you think the X/-/+ don't help convey the purpose of these widgets. The colors are an added visual cue for the 95% of us who can distinguish red and green.

Re:Inevitable comment about bloat

[gremlins]

I disagree with the part about useless eye candy. I think useless eye candy is great so long as it doesn't take away from the ablity to work. For example I have a Thinkpad Laptop with a graphics card in it. In my normal day to day use I don't even use the 3D ablity of this card. However If I could have it do all kinds of cool eye candy stuff with out slowing down my computer then all the better. I mean hell I paid for it.

Re:Inevitable comment about bloat

[Osty]

WRT visual cues....do I *really* need stuff in a menu to change because I am pointing at it? I can already see where my mouse is pointing. That 'cue' is very annoying, whether it is in web pages (in web pages, it's not quite as bad if done properly, since a web page has no standard layout), or application menus (highlighting here is just dumb and gives me a headache more than it helps me in any way...whoever started this trend should be shot).

When your mouse pointer is between two menu items, which one is activated when you click? Maybe you're using a huge display at a low resolution, but for the rest of us on our lowly 21" monitors at 1600x1200 aren't easily able to determine if the pointer is one pixel up from the boundary between two items, or one pixel down. By highlighting the menu item, you can see exactly what you're going to get, without any guess work. Of course, if the items in the menu move around depending on where your mouse is at (*cough*OS X dock*cough*), that's bad. But highlighting? How can you not like highlighting? I assume then that you never use a keyboard to navigate menu items?

Speaking of menu items and visual cues, one I really like is the fading menu selection in Windows 2000 and newer. When you select an item from a menu, the menu fades out with that item still highlighted. If gives you a nice visual confirmation that you did indeed select the correct option, without the annoying double- or triple-flash that macs used to use (no idea if they still do that in OS X; and not saying that the flash is bad, since it serves the same purpose, just that I find it more annoying than a nice, smooth fade out).

Re:Inevitable comment about bloat

[Tim Browse]

Can you give me an example of something that is eye candy without serving as a visual cue?

That's easy - any pointlessly skinned application that doesn't conform to the host OS's look and feel for window furniture. So, on MS Windows, that would be iTunes, Windows Media Player, Quicktime Player, RealPlayer One, ephPod, ZipMagic, etc.

These offer no visual clues other than "We're different!", when in fact the only difference in this respect is the way they usually fail to replicate all the Windows UI conventions (e.g. iTunes used to refuse to maximise when you double clicked the title bar, and so on).

About the only things I can see an argument for with kewl skinz is apps that are trying to be small/compact - e.g. Winamp etc., where the standard controls don't work well that small.

Re:Inevitable comment about bloat

[NanoGator]

" Eye candy is there for nothing more than the purpose of looking cool.."

Well, I'm going to get needlessly nitpicky here: Any time Eye Candy is being triggered by something happening, it is Visual Feedback. One of the most useless bits of eye candy I can think of is the Windows Start Menu fading in. I have no use for it. It's pretty, but it interferes with my productivity. (Just as you mentioned...) You have to understand, though, that it is still providing Visual Feedback. It's giving you a moment to let you know something has appeared on the screen as a direct result of pressing the Start button. The benefit doesn't, for me, outweigh the cost. But it's still there.

Anyway, I'm not shooting down your point, simply nitpicking a detail of it. :)

Re:Inevitable comment about bloat

[bitflip]

I know a few people aren't keen on eye candy

I gave up eye candy when I found it was causing a cavity between my ears.

XGL, OpenGL-based X11 Server

[bonch]

I submitted this story to Slashdot last week, but for some reason it seems to be stuck in "Pending" status, so go here: http://nat.org/2005/february/#9-February-2005

It's an OpenGL-based X11 server, complete with some screenshots. Apparently, window dragging is very smooth (no repaint events are even given to the apps), and with Cairo and GTK, this really could be the future backend for Linux desktops.

Fully accelerated FBDev across monitors?

[alan_dershowitz]

I didn't see any specific mention in here, but does this include having a fully 3D accelerated Framebuffer device across graphics cards? I've been missing this for a while in X, having just gotten triple-monitor across two Radeons working. It would be cool to be able to play any 3D game across three monitors.

I'm not losing any sleep over this, but it would be cool. I read on an X board that some people are looking at this, but it's obviously a big undertaking.

Re:Fully accelerated FBDev across monitors?

[battjt]

Xdmx works. It will build a single X server across multiple X servers (even different machines) and effeciently pass the opengl through. There may be a more efficent method, but at least one method works.

Joe

Some issues...

[bani]

overall the idea is good, however...

1) rendering to texture is slow on some GPUs, especially GPUs with limited memory.
2) alpha blending is expensive on almost all GPUs.

imo X needs an overhaul, needs to ditch the legacy crap (lose Xaw for example) and move on. stop interfacing with video hardware like it's 1980.

Re:Some issues...

[NanoGator]

"2) alpha blending is expensive on almost all GPUs."

Well, to be fair, compare the task of running Doom 3 to the task of being a pretty desktop UI. Cards will always get better. If the idea takes off, new cards will be tweaked to make the experience more interesting. (For this reason, it's a good thing for all of us that Microsoft is heading in this direction, too.)

I wish this was here sometime soon...

[bheer]

but considering this guy has basically laid out a "What It Might Look Like" roadmap, this looks like more more vaporware than Avalon ever was. Three more years, at least.

What next...

[GillBates0]

'Indiana Jones buttons that puff out smoothly animated clouds of smoke when you click on them.

...a paperclip that bats its eyelids and talks to you when you click on it? We could call it Xlippy.

Re:What next...

[PDA_Monkey]

You mean Vigor 2.0?

Graphic Card Dependencies

[lxt]

Particularly true with Tiger (what with the new CoreImage technology), OS X really can push eye candy more than Windows (and Linux) for one main reason - the mac development team have a limited number of graphics cards to develop for, and the drivers are pretty much rock solid.

I just don't see that happening in Linux / Windows - developers must write for as wide a range of hardware as possible. One would therefore imagine that such eye candy being talked about in Linux would be optional, and you'd only get the full benefit with the highest powered and most compatible graphics card - whereas in OS X, most users can get the eye candy without any problems. Of course, there are certain graphics cards on macs that don't support Core Image, Quartz Extreme etc, particularly on the older macs people are upgrading, but I'm willing to bet the majority of macs will be able to run Core Image etc. Whereas here, the minority of PCs will be able to run the Linux eye candy.

Re:Graphic Card Dependencies

[radish]

You're right. I mean, what we really need is some way of programming graphics stuff which didn't really care what card was doing the rendering. Some way of standardizing the interface and available functions. Maybe I'm crazy...I don't know, it seems like it might just work.

As for naming, well, it should be Direct. And modern sounding, like Xtreme or something. How about DirectXtreme? Bit long. "DirectX" - yeah - that's cool!

So how about it? Anyone with me?

Re:I think their efforts would be better spent on.

[Lisandro]

Seriously. Otherwise all the effort being put into X.Org's newest extensions is basically tied to the good will of card manufacturers when it comes to modern videocards.

Anyway, there's a lot of terrific work being done on X.Org - Cairo, XComposite and Damage specially. When these extensions become supported by the GUI toolkits, we'll be in for a treat. It's a shame it took guys like Keith Packard so long detach themselves from XFree86.

Re:All this, and yet....

[NanoGator]

"Don't make it snazzy, make it *functional*, snazzy can come later."

I was under the impression that most of the UIs for Linux already are functional.

With that said: Visual feedback is part of being functional. Imagine if ythe cursor you used in the field you typed this into didn't blink. You could adjust to it, but admittedly this 'snazzy' feature is helping you.

'Snazzy' is more benefical than most realize. Remember that we, as a species, are interactive creatures. Visual snazziness really isn't all that different from body language.

Re:I think their efforts would be better spent on.

[the_2nd_coming]

no... because basing it on OpenGL means that they are abstracting the GUI from the GFX card and the GUI will run on a computer that does not have the right hardware. if the right GFX card existed in the system, all the better.

Re:All this, and yet....

[Per Wigren]

Hey, this will get you "Windows that shrink scale and move all over the fucking place with cool animations". What more could you want?

Yet more eye-candy...

[aardvarkjoe]

Looking at the article, I see:

A few things that sound useful, like:

• Hardware accelerated PDF viewers
• Synchronized smooth resizing so there's no disjunct between window borders moving and the contents redrawing (you should see the demos of this in luminocity... it really makes a difference in how real the interface feels, just as double-buffering did for stuff moving)
• A shared path between on-screen display and printing (using Cairo's PDF/PS backends)
• Alpha transparency in applications whenever and wherever the urge strikes us

A couple things that may lead to greater usability:

• Toolkit themes that draw with layer blending effects, delightful bezier curves, and irritating alpha gradients
• Live window thumbnails

And lots of rather pointless fancy eye candy:

• Indiana Jones buttons that puff out smoothly animated clouds of smoke when you click on them
• Hundreds of spinning soft snowflakes floating over your screen.... without messing up nautilus
• A photograph of a field of long dry savanna grass as your desktop background... where the grass is gently swooshed around by a breeze created by moving your mouse across the background
• Windows that shrink scale and move all over the fucking place with cool animations
• Vector icons with very occasional super subtle animations rendered in realtime...a tiny fly which buzzes around the trash every several minutes, etc... think mood animations as in Riven (which as a total random aside is still a shockingly beautiful and atmospheric game years after it came out, postage stamp sized multimedia videos notwithstanding)
• Workspace switching effects so lavish they make Keynote jealous
• Brush stroke / Sumi-e, tiger striped, and other dynamically rendered themes where every button, every line looks a little different (need to post shots / explanation of this stuff, but another day)
• Progress bars made with tendrils of curves that smoothly twist and squirm like a bucket of snakes as the bar grows
• Text transformed and twisted beyond recognition in a manner both unseemly and cruel
• A 10% opaque giant floating head of tigert overlayed above all the windows and the desktop.

Now, these fancy effects are certainly kind of cool, and may look nice. (Though I can guarantee that when they're all in, I'll probably still be using Blackbox.) However, is that really all that the future holds? More special effects, without any substantial improvements in usability?

Re:Yet more eye-candy...

[grasshoppa]

A photograph of a field of long dry savanna grass as your desktop background... where the grass is gently swooshed around by a breeze created by moving your mouse across the background

Well shit, I'm a command line junky, but sign me up. Seriously, this would be bad ass if it were integrated correctly into the overall desktop.

Re:Yet more eye-candy...

[pclminion]

Hardware accelerated PDF viewers

While I agree in principle on the need for hardware acceleration of PDLs (page description languages), can we PLEASE not use PDF as the standard? PLEASE?

Why not SVG, for instance?

Re:Yet more eye-candy...

[Just Some Guy]

Y'know, I saw Hackers a few nights ago. The fact that I (still) can't type "mess with the best, die like the rest" in flaming letters on my RISC laptop really peeves me.

Go, X.org! Lead us to The Gibson and beyond! Give us our translucent Pac-Man viruses and melting death heads! Oh, and Angelina Jolie while you're at it, OK?

Re:Yet more eye-candy...

[Mr. Cancelled]

"...is that really all that the future holds? More special effects, without any substantial improvements in usability?"

Improvements such as.... (?)

Don't think I'm singling you out, as I'm not, but why is it whenever someone posts articles regarding improvements to X, and really to Linux in general, that everyone comes out of the woodwork to complain, without offering any positive comments, or conclusions?

Your post goes into detail about how you don't want these effects, and run Blackbox still, but WTF do you want then? And I ask this to everyone when they complain about what developers are working on in Linux... Everyone can complain, but few are able to offer good input, let alone suggest how we get from point "a" to point "b".

Let's face it... Eye candy sells pc's (No... Not to you Blackbox users... You guys are probably happy running on a PII still). You want to know why the Amiga still gets the nod a lot of the time? Because it did things with graphics (aka 'Eye Candy'), which no one, on any platform, was doing at the time!

Yes, they had a multi-tasking environment, and a lot of other unique things about them (as a former Amiga owner, I can tell you that the pro's and con's were pretty equal in some ways... Lemme tell you that I don't miss the "black screen of death", with tis esoteric guru errors!), but the fact remains that the Amiga stood out from the pack due to its eye candy capabilities.

You know why a lot of people (again... Not us typical Slashdotters, but the average Joe Computerguy) are drawn to the Mac? It's clean, well thought out, and it looks good on screen! You laugh at the puffs of Indiana Jones smoke comment, but one of the things which many people notice first about my Mac is the "puff of smoke" that appears when you drag an icon off the dock. Yeah, it's cheezy, and won't entertain anyone for too long, but it grabs the eye and sticks with you!

A lot of people in this thread, and elsewhere, point out how much they hate Windows, and its GUI, but look at one of the faster growing segements of consumer software: GUI Mods, and eye candy! People want a cool looking computer, and have shown that theyr'e willing to pay for this.

So when everyone's here knocking these guys for adding new and accelerated features to X, I applaud them! Will it win over new users? Very possibly, and even if it does not, it will show that Linux is capable of the same kind of cpu-waste than Windows and OSX is, which is important to a very large demographic of people.

And I hope that this also indicates that more hadrware vendors will be jumping on board soon too! I still find it very frustrating that if I want accelerated graphics in Linux, I have to either run it on older hardware (My old ATI Pro Wonder, and a CompUSA branded S3-Virge, for instance, will run in accelerated modes), or purchase an Nvidia card. I personally like ATI card, and have them in both my X86 boxes, as well as my Mac, and they perform great! Until you add Linux into the mix...

Under X, my 9600 card still will not run in accelerated mode when driving dual monitors. My OSX box and Windows however will handle this just fine.

My point is rather than berating people for developing something that you're not interested in (all the while alluding to the fact that they should be focused on something else, without quite saying what that something else is), why not focus on the potential increase in users of OSS software (Linux), and think about the hardware support and technology which will follow such an increase in usage. Or better yet, start learning how to code, and prove to the world that you're right. All's you're doing otherwise is whining IMHO, and potentially driving developers over to other platforms.

Think about it... You're an OSS developer trying your best to ignore the financial gains of developing for Windows or OSX, in favor of developing something the whole world can enjoy for free, and all's your target audience do

Re:Yet more eye-candy...

[NotoriousQ]

I know you are joking, but why not have animated vector fonts. Now I can really have that aqua font I always wanted.

Also imagine if the font specifies its own translucency and reflectivity with normal angles. Suddenly you can now have a terminal where the fonts look like they are made of glass or mirrors, and reflect other fonts and applications around you.

Of course -- taking this to the extreme, we should have ray traced desktops for that ultimate visual candy.

Raytraced desktops are the way of the future. Remember you heard it here first. (actually you probably did not -- since I am sure thousands of other people have probably considered it, and it is probably implemented in some obscure way on N64 or something)

overview of modern display systems

[OmniVector]

i wrote a paper on this topic for my CG1 class, and it covers most of the modern display systems with a few right around the the horizon.

i'm hoping cairo/glitz will give quartz extreme a run for its money. now we just need to get started on implementing something similar to coreimage/corevideo!

Re:overview of modern display systems

[Leo McGarry]

Dude, I hope you got a fucking F on that paper. "Display PDF?" Come on, man. Let's run this down, okay?

Display PostScript worked by embedding a PostScript interpreter right into the operating system. The system would run PostScript programs, rasterizing them to the screen, to produce screen output. The system would do exactly the same thing but route the output to an attached laser printer instead of the screen to produce printed output.

Quartz 2D is not, and has never been, "Display PDF." Quartz 2D is a display-list drawing API that uses a drawing model that's very similar to PDF. Apple included code in the OS that could trivially convert any Quartz 2D display list into a valid PDF file on disk and vice versa. But Quartz 2D is not "Display PDF."

Your section on Quartz Extreme gets a lot of important stuff wrong, too. It doesn't take Quartz Extreme to put a transparent window on top of another window. That's something that the very first builds of Quartz Compositor were capable of doing. Quartz Extreme offers nothing that Quartz Compositor didn't offer; it's just that Quartz Extreme does the same job with the GPU, while Quartz Compositor did it all in the CPU.

Seriously, man, this paper is pretty terrible. Even if your assignment is finished, I hope for your own knowledge you go fill in all the gaping holes.

That's great and all

[theantix]

It's a nice idea, for sure. I just hope it fares a little bit better in reality than Seth Nickell's last grandiose idea. I'd like to see some of these idea implemented and not just discussed. Of course, I've contributed nothing to the success of these projects either -- and Seth's ideas are great. I'm not saying that I'm so much better than him, just that I hope some reality can emerge from this grandiose idea so that Linux doesn't develop the same reputation for vaporware as does Duke Nukem.

OSX Trolls

[SalsaDoom]

You know what? I'm really sick of seeing OSX trolls posting all over slashdot.

Everytime ANY topic comes up, some OSX troll pipes in "So its just like OSX!" well, OSX isn't fully (or even mostly) open source, Quartz Extreme isn't an open standard, etc. Ok? Do you understand that? Even if it was, we like our software to be GPL'd so that we don't just shift ourselves from being slaves to Bill Gates and Microsoft, to being slaves of Steve Jobs and Apple. Mabye you don't care if you really 'own' your PC or not but we linux users do. So STFU with your OSX this and OSX stuff that.

Its even getting absurd. Someone mentions making a Linux network for sharing sound -- some OSX Troll pops in "Just spend thousand of dollars on mac parts and there you go! You don't have to use an inexpensive solution!"

Pretty soon I'm gonna start seeing "If those idiots voted in OSX instead of Bush everything would be perfect now".

The Gentoo-Emerge trolls never came close to the kind of witless trolling that you OSX fuckers are reaching!

I don't like your cheesy OS! I think the widgets are ugly! I think that stupid bar on the bottom of the screen looks like CDE back from the grave! I like my Athlon64 instead of your goddam PPC! I like my beige case instead of your tiny little silver box! I want to be able to open my case and see what shits inside it, and I don't want to have to use a fucking laptop harddrive in a non-portable computer!

Every-fucking-topic some OSX troll shoes his stupid platform in, its worse then the Liberal-Conservative crap from the Americans.

Look you obnoxious pricks -- not everyone digs your fucking Macs.

--SD

Re:OSX Trolls

[bonch]

You know, using something that's not GPL'd doesn't make you a "slave" to anything. Your emotive rants against people who (gasp!) enjoy their operating systems drown out any rational points you tried to make about open standards.

There are plenty of "just like Linux!" posts on Slashdot all the time too. Plus, someone could argue you're a slave if you use the GPL, since you're not 100% free like you are with a BSD license. See how easy it is to paint people with a broad brush.

Re:OSX Trolls

[Blakey Rat]

Kind of off-topic but:

I want to be able to open my case and see what shits inside it, and I don't want to have to use a fucking laptop harddrive in a non-portable computer!

When the "non-portable" computer is 6.5"x6.5"x2", it's not unreasonable to expect it to have a laptop harddrive... especially when it comes with a CD-ROM also. I mean, there's only so much physical space that they're working with, here.

If you want a normal-sized HD, you can buy the regular iMac or the G5.

Re:OSX Trolls

[wootest]

"Every-fucking-topic some OSX troll shoes his stupid platform in"

You know, there's a reason that "but does it run Linux?" is a running gag around here. If you can't tolerate multiple OSes, you may find you're on the wrong site.

"Look you obnoxious pricks -- not everyone digs your fucking Macs."
Not everyone digs your fucking hatred either. Claiming friendship with the GPL and then leashing out against one of the companies that are starting to build more and more of their software based on open source technologies? Obnoxious indeed.

What these "trolls" are trying to do is inform you that "hey, our OS does this too" or "hey, here's another solution to this problem". This is different -how- from what people running any other variant of *NIX do all day on Slashdot, over-zealously or not?

Re:I think their efforts would be better spent on.

[DarkMantle]

Well, forgetting ATI, the nVidia drivers are solid, and I don't see why you're so adament on them being open. I've created some great 3d renders in OGL code without needing to know the details on the drivers. Also Windows GUI was designed all without knowing exactly what code is in the drivers.

Good documentation is all that's needed, and if you are going to insist on something from the manufacturers being open, how about we get Open standards so the same calls work on all vid cards.

Wait, we have that, it's called OpenGL and standard driver formats.

Welcome to last week

[shish]

Those of us who like out UIs fast, featureful, and pant wettingy gorgeous, already have what we want

Re:All this, and yet....

[91degrees]

Don't make it snazzy, make it *functional*, snazzy can come later.

Or not at all. Personally, I turn off just about any eye candy. Don't even need rendered window dragging.

No

[Chuck Chunder]

Such "negotiation" would be largely a waste of time. You need to give graphics card manufacturers a market to care about and demand for their cards. Currently usage of 3d on Linux is very limited, a few games, visualisers and niche apps.

If 3d is used more widely used on the desktop then more card makers will see linux as a market for their cards and more people will be using 3d and pressuring for better, more open drivers.

Uhm, E17 anyone?

[CountZer0]

From reading the article, it really just sounds like they are talking about ideas that Raster and co. have been long advocating (and developing) in Enlightenment DR17.

Granted, Enlightenment is a window manager that lives on top of the existing X protocol, but nearly every single piece of 'eye-candy' this guy mentions is already do-able in E17.

Since taking advantage of these new toys would require a new theme system, Havoc and I have been talking about how a very different theme / widget rendering system might work with this that allows for custom design of any window, widget, or anything in between. One of the things us designers have been experimenting with behind closed doors is what you can do with a window's design when its not drawn out of a bunch of stock widgets but you have a freer hand.

Sounds just like the themeing system in E17 to me... http://enlightenment.org/pages/systems.html

Don't get me wrong, the things Seth describes sound cool, but the way he describes it makes it sound like they're the only ones with these ideas, when in fact Enlightenment 17 is already enabling most of what he mentions in this article. Sure, it's not a "production" release yet, but DR17 is certainly usable today, and has most of the features he mentions.

Heck, some things Seth talks about (Live window thumbnails) have been available in Enlightenment for quite some time (I know DR16 has them, and maybe earlier versions as well)

Re:Uhm, E17 anyone?

[joeytsai]

No, the sort of things Seth is talking about is not what E is about. Maybe in the superficial stuff like pagers and advanced theme management, but Seth is speaking of a whole new framework.

Enlightenment is sort of hard to categorize. I believe they refer to the whole suite as a "Desktop Shell". That is, they offer more than a Window Manager (a suite of high-powered libraries, a launcher/panel, desktop effects, file browser, etc.) but less than Gnome or KDE in terms of a desktop environment (which include full cross-platform toolkits, application interoperability, central configuration, random daemons, etc.) The goal of E17 seems to be creating an amazing user desktop experience, but the goals of the next-gen rendering are mainly a superset.

What Seth is talking about is the fundamental application stack for rendering windows and widgets on the screen. Right now, the printing usability situation is really bad. This is one area where I think Windows really gets it right. Adding a printer is quite easy, and your document always looks like what those "print preview" pages allege it will. Currently, there's little guarantee that the printed output of your document will match what you expect it to be, because there's two different rendering pipelines for screen versus page. This is what Seth is talking about. Unless they want to get even more ambitious, the Enlightenment project has nothing to do with printing.

By itself, E17 may be able to give your windows shadows or fake transparency, but a full compositing manager + hardware accelerated backend will allow true alpha blending, fast updates and fun live animations like OSX's genie. Note that this extensions can be easily used by E17 as well, but are really impossible without them.

Finally, the toolkit integration is probably the most exciting. I know E17 is sporting a basic toolkit library itself, but that's probably because they want tight integration between native E17 apps and the WM. I personally think this is the wrong move, because they're probbaly not going to be able to create a fully-featured and cross-platform toolkit like GTK+. (Hence, not many application developers are going to use EWL.) A GTK (and eventually, QT4) application will be able to rely on a sophisticated drawing level (Cairo, instead of Xlib), which will allow all of its applications to be rendered nicely, allowing blending and more free-formed widgets. gDesklets and the like are just the beginning.

Bloat Alert

[nurb432]

'Indiana Jones buttons that puff out smoothly animated clouds of smoke when you click on them,'

Now that is a useful extension..

No wonder our brand new 4ghz machines run slower then my 20 year old AtariST..

Morons. "just beacuse" isnt a reason.

Finally?

[Dr. Evil]

Don't be so condescending to OSS. Prior to MacOS X, the Mac was an OS in the dark ages.

If MacOS didn't gut BSD, it would still be using cooperative multitasking.

Re:Finally?

[Gob Blesh It]

True... but even System 6.0 was a paragon of usability compared to the state of Gnome and KDE today. Even the constant crashes gave you a dialog whose buttons were action verbs (not to mention a cute little bomb icon). Hard to hate something like that.

Re:Finally?

[qurk]

I'll beg to differ a bit. When I was at college, the opportunity to spend a couple minutes at a Mac usually ended up with me leaving, in less than a minute, due to a headache. Seriously the thing seemed sluggish, the refresh was hyptonizing me, and two parts - everything seemed counter-intuitive and 1 mouse button?

I wouldn't call it a paragon of usability. It may just be me, but I always seeked out the sparcs where I could just log onto the unix system. Could do almost as well logging on at home over the console with modem on an 8088 with 640k ram and a CGA screen, console hasn't changed too much since then.

But don't get me wrong, I'm not bashing Macs. I honestly don't have enough experience with them to bash them. I just question the term "paragon of usability". OS X seems good, I played with it at CompUSA for like 2 or 3 minutes and thought, "cool" with no headache :)

Re:Finally?

[snuf23]

Hard to hate something like that?

You have go to be kidding. It even got worse when System 8 would chastise you for "not shutting down properly" when you were forced to hard reset the locked up bastard. Gah! Nothing like that smiling little MacOS face telling me I've been a bad boy and to be more careful next time. YOu! YOU! Be more careful! You don't overwrite other programs memory space and trash my work!
Oh yeah and the crash dialog boxes may as well have been labeled "Fuck me" for all the good they did. Force quit? Yeah that worked well. Should have been labelled "Finish Crashing".

The usual bullshit

[pclminion]

Yet more pointless eye candy without any real usability advances.

Don't get me wrong -- I think X is "usable enough," but really, I don't think the moniker "next generation" is appropriate for anything but the most fundamental technological advances. Buttons that go "poof?" Is this seriously what we're concentrating our effort on?

Re:I think their efforts would be better spent on.

[SQLz]

So...you tell people that specialize in graphics programming to drop their keyboards and start calling people for specs? Why would you have some of the most talented programmers in the community become lobbyist?

One key points of open source development is that there is lots of different people from lots of different backgrounds doing the jobs they do best. I mean, how much do you think people would contribute if they were told not to work on their field of expertise to but to just email companies and bother them about specs all day? Its like having a bad job except, your not getting paid.

Open source is NOT about controlling the efforts people are making to contribute. Thats why X was forked in the first place. Now that we have people coming out of the woodwork to add great features to X, your complaining?

Re:Battle has already been won

[Skeezix]

OS X is wonderful, to be sure. But it is proprietary and only runs on Mac hardware. Xorg is open source and runs on many operating systems and architectures. Big difference. You will continue to see Linux improve in the coming years and there will be more and more Linux desktop deployments. That is the advantage of open source. The battle is far from won. You didn't hear it here first, but you did hear it here.

No repaint events

[gr8_phk]

"no repaint events are even given to the apps"

IMHO, no app should be given information about it's environment. The only reason expose events exist is because back in the day there wasn't enough memory to store a complete image of every window - so the apps had to be asked to update parts of the display when they were exposed. Apps interacting with other apps without user intervention is definitely a no-no and is the source of some Windows security holes. I just how when (even IF) an app gets to screen capture itself they don't show other data through the transparent parts. It needs to be pulled from its private video memory and not off the screen. The user of course should be able to take a screen shot, so either the window manager needs to have special privledge or it needs to be integrated into the server. I think the special privledge is consistent with what exists today.

yadda yadda Apple is better yadda yadda ...

[Sweetshark]

Hardware-accelerated PDF viewers, huh? Aqua beat already does that.
Well and before Aqua beat there were "hardware-accelerated postscript viewers" - but they were normally just called "printers".

Re:Almost

[TheNetAvenger]

If Linux can beat Longhorn to the punch with a fully 3D rendered GUI, ala OS X, I will switch 100%

Not to smack the OSX hornet's nest, but...

Linux needs to do far more than get to the OSX level if it wants to hold a candle to the Avalon plans Microsoft is not only putting in Longhorn, but WindowsXP.

The only things OSX is doing that Windows2000 didn't do is the off-screen rendering and having a more extensive vector based drawing capabilities ala Adobe.

Avalon is not only a whole new UI system for the OS and applications, but it is a simple development model that will let 10 year olds create 3D applications that look awesome. Easy programming will be a key part of the Avalon in Microsoft's Windows. DO NOT UNDERESTIMATE MICROSOFT IN THIS AREA. You will see awesome 3D applications and true 3D implementation that is functional in simple Visual Basic apps written by novice programmers even. Mark my words. (Letting things like Kylix die on Linux is another mistake everyone here is letting happen and should also be addressed, but is off topic for this post)

Additionally, OSX uses very few GPU hardware accelerated features in the UI and is only a 2D accelerated UI. It is not a 3D UI, you can place cameras, lights, etc in a application like you can with Avalon, they are night and day comparisons at this point.

With that said, it is sad that Microsoft's UI Beta is far more advanced that even what Apple seems to be planning or providing for its users, Apple is supposed to be the Graphics leader, and once again they are still playing catch up.

As to Linux, and the open source world, we need a revamp on a mass scale. A new X11 system that is hardware integrated expanded OpenGL and a whole Multimedia API like Microsoft's DirectX.

Someone above mentioned that things are harder on Linux and Windows, but actually they are right now easier on Windows, as developers, even hard core gaming developers can write to DirectX for all aspects of input, and audio and visual output and not have to deal with specifics of the user's hardware. This is something Apple also needs to implement, but they never have had to since they always control the hardware, but as their hardware expands with different features, it is something Apple needs to consider as well.

Hardware abstraction is a good thing, especially when dealing with high performance hardware like GPUs and Sound Cards that have built in rendering capabilities.

Linux, Open Source in General, and even Apple need to think past just getting by with OpenGL, and have a full consistent API if we are ever going to see a lot of great UI enhancements to these OSes, and offerings of Games that are easier for developers to port and create for the OSes.

Just like the Xbox, half the reason of its success is the ease of development for the games, using a DirectX interface made it super easy for Windows game developers to flip out an Xbox version and vise versa. It also made it easy for developers to take a game for the PS2 or GameCube and drop it into the standard DirectX programming on the XBox and Windows to create games for both platforms.

With DirectX the ports to the XBox and Windows became easy and routine as they only had to learn to port to DirectX, not a mass array of hardware. Which is where we are now, even with OpenGL and the driver situation in the open source world.

Ok, kind of got off on a rant, but we need to encourage the original developer and our open source leaders need to sit down and design a system that if far beyond OpenGL and the standard *nix models that are outdated for pumping mass amounts of audio and visual data to the screen and even across networks.

We also need to slap Apple in the face to get their attention. Them having control of the hardware is GREAT for them and their OS development, but it DOES LITTLE for gaming developers for OSX or for application programmers that want to add real 3D interface elements to their applications.

network transparency

[drew]

so are they putting any work into how these applications will work in the X Client/Server model, or are they just sweeping that under the rug (a la the dri and shm extensions). i'd be thrilled if they were looking at how they can add these as extensions that reduce the amount of X calls that need to be sent accross the wire, so you could use meaningful gui applications over slow to moderate speed network connections. of course it doesn't sound like it from any of the things that he mentioned, and it seems that X development lately has taken a 'the thin client is dead, so who needs network transparency' route.

Screenshots, get yer screenshots

[Nailer]

XGL, also known as X they way it should have been (and will be)

Imitation is the higest form of flattery

[cthulhuology]

Back in 2000, I remember Raster showing how cool EVAS was (the rendering backend of E17), and he pointed out that OpenGL sucked for doing a lot of 2D windowing because creating textures was so resource intensive. If you had textures that had to be rendered on the fly back then, you were pretty much limited by the hardware. Now 5 years later, we've got another project implementing the same basic idea, and largely because of politics and waiting for hardware we've barely moved anywhere. Congrats Raster you were right all long :)

Detailed description of Quartz/PDF

[bonch]

From PDF Information: OS X and PDF:

"MacOS X is the first operating system on the market that actually uses PDF-technology within the operating system itself. Apple calls this technology 'Quartz'. Quartz is a layer of software that runs on top of Darwin, the core (or kernel) of the MacOS X operating system. It is responsible for the rendering of all 2D objects. Alongside Quartz, OpenGL takes care of handling 3D data (used in games like Quake or Unreal as well as professional 3D applications like Maya) and QuickTime handles multimedia stuff (movies, sound,...).

Quartz

Quartz replaces QuickDraw, which was used within earlier versions of MacOS. Within QuickDraw, the native file format was PICT. With Quartz, this now becomes PDF.

Quartz performs a number of tasks that include include:
automatic PDF generation and save-as-PDF (disk and clipboard)
conversion of PDF data to raster data or PostScript. The fact that Quartz can rasterize PDF files means that even cheap inkjet printers can output complex files. Gone are the days when only the screen preview of EPS-files was printed on non-PostScript printers.
a consistent feature set for all printers
automatic on-screen preview of graphics
high-quality screen rendering

In short: Quartz implements a set of rules for describing how pictures and text are displayed and printed. Because Quartz uses the PDF drawing model for imaging, native applications can create and import PDFs without the need for outside programs.

Some people have been wondering whether Apple pays licenses to Adobe for the technology used in Quartz. Here is what an Apple employer had to say about this: The Quartz renderer and the PDF interpreter that Apple ships with Mac OS X are built with Apple code, with no external licenses, by Apple employees. Adobe just publishes a specification for how it's supposed to function. This gives Apple considerably more flexibility with regard to what Quartz and the PDF interpreter can be used for.

Adobe PDF versus Quartz PDF

Since Quartz uses PDF, one would assume that everything that is possible within a PDF file is also supported by Quartz. This is not the case. Quartz uses only some of the features of PDF, it is based on a subset of the full PDF specs.

These are some of the things that are used within both the official PDF specs and Quartz:
the PDF imaging model
Common colour spaces: grayscale, RGB and CMYK
Embedding of images (even though Quartz does not support masks)

And these are things that are feasible in PDF but that are not (yet?) implemented in Quartz:
Annotations
Colour management using ICC profiles
Forms
Actions
Bookmarks
Digital signatures
Security
DeviceN (used within PDF to offer improved support for images containing spot colours)
Embedded fonts
Form XObjects: in some ways the PDF-equivalent of an EPS, meaning a group of objects that are a sub-part of a page.
Transparency

In fact, one of the main differences between both systems is that the PDF specs are now at version 1.4 while Quartz adheres to a subset of the PDF 1.2 specs."

Re:Detailed description of Quartz/PDF

[Leo McGarry]

There's a lot of misinformation in there. I have no idea where some of this stuff came from.

1. Dividing it up into Quartz and OpenGL is misleading. If you want to talk about it in terms of functional block diagrams, OpenGL and Quartz 2D (note: not just "Quartz") do the same job. They take instructions from a running program and turn them into patterns of pixels on the screen. But Quartz 2D is not responsible for all 2D drawing. QuickDraw can also be used to draw to the screen; pre-Tiger, QuickDraw is quite a bit faster than Quartz for doing aliased RGB drawing. QuickTime also renders directly into the window, bypassing Quartz 2D entirely. So saying that Quartz is responsible for all 2D drawing is just plain wrong.

2. Talking about "native file types" is also misleading. There is no native Quartz 2D file type. Quartz 2D display lists can be translated into PDF and back for disk storage, but that's not the same thing.

3. The whole thing about how Quartz rasterizes PDF files is bogus. When a PDF file is loaded into a Quartz 2D drawing context, it gets converted by the file I/O code into a Quartz 2D display list. This is a resolution-agnostic floating-point-based display list format that has absolutely nothing to do with either pixels or PDF. If this display list is destined for the screen, it goes to Quartz Compositor (or Quartz Extreme) which renders the display list into pixels. If it's destined for a printer, it goes to the printer driver. If it's destined for a file, it gets converted back to PDF format and stored on disk.

4. There is no PDF interpreter built into Mac OS X. That is, there is no piece of software that takes PDF input and spits out a bitmap. Quartz doesn't work like that.

Other than that, this comment is sorta-mostly-kinda correct. More or less.

Re:Detailed description of Quartz/PDF

[Leo McGarry]

searching through every search engine and reading every website contradicts what you're posting

Have you considered reading Apple's developer documentation on the Quartz imaging system instead?

Is Arstechnica wrong?

In large part, yes. Please read this. (Wow. Déjà vu.)

Dear Angry Antagonistic Guy...

[Nailer]

Because its the technology being described in the article

Because your post is about different rendering systems and whether they use OpenGL. The thing I linked to is about X and OpenGL.

Re:I think their efforts would be better spent on.

[MacJedi]

LINUX != x86!

The opposite of what I want

[neurojab]

I already have what I want:

- Zero eye candy.
- Zero window decorations to maximize screen real estate
- Ability to quickly manipulate windows without the mouse
- Ability to show multiple windows simultaneously without tediously resizing each.
- Ability to quickly switch tasks without touching the mouse.

I use X and a window manager called "ratpoison". Combined with xbindkeys it provides speed, elegance, and simplicity like nothing else.

This new next gen window rendering system looks like a load of junk to me. What productivity benefit will it provide?

Geeks doing graphics

[Jozer99]

I don't know about this. Linux Geeks really don't have the eye to make an appealing desktop. Microsoft's and Apple's (especially Apple's) UIs are the results of lots of studies, then professional cooperation between graphic artists, professional animators, and programmers. With an open source project like this, it tends to be a mish-mash of gaudy concept effects in odd places stuck in by guys who's idea of a perfect GUI is a VT1000 terminal. If they could all get together and hire some real graphic consultants, then maybe they could come up with somethat is really appealing and easy to use. If you use a Mac, after the first minute or so you don't even notice the effects, they are just part of the experence (unless you are using an old G3). The same is true of Windows XP much subtler alpha transparency effects.

Re:Let's run through the list, shall we?

[Leo McGarry]

What do you have to offer other than your word?

Well, an understanding of the topic we're discussing, for starters. I mean, I know what all the words mean, which is clearly something that you can't truthfully say. All you've done is pull quotes from marketing brochures! There's no evidence at all that you have even a passing familiarity with the basic concepts under discussion here.

you're going around claiming Quartz doesn't use PDF for imaging

Correct.

when every developer documentation from Apple directly states that Quartz uses the PDF imaging model

Also correct.

Gasp!

How can this be! How can Quartz 2D both be PDF and not PDF!? He's a witch!

Friend, in order to wrap your head around this topic, you're going to have to understand what the expression "imaging model" means. An imaging model is not a file format, and it's not an instruction set, and it's not an interpreter. It's not actually any type of computer software at all. Rather, it's a way of looking at things.

Back in the old days, we had QuickDraw. QuickDraw used a pixel-based imaging model. You drew to the screen by specifying coordinates in terms of pixels: integer coordinates, bottom-left origin, one pixel was exactly one seventy-second of an inch. Regions were translated literally by shifting bitmaps around in memory. That was the QuickDraw imaging model.

That worked great for drawing to the screen, but it didn't work at all for drawing to a laser printer. For drawing to a laser printer you needed a totally different imaging model. Which means you had to do one of three things in your program: Either you had to maintain an internal representation of whatever you were drawing in whatever form was appropriate for printing and then convert that to QuickDraw for on-screen display, or you had to maintain a QuickDraw representation and convert it at print time, or you had to do both.

But the advantage of QuickDraw was massive: You could draw right into video memory. Toggle a bit in memory and a pixel changed color on screen. Very efficient.

Quartz 2D is different. It uses an entirely different imaging model. Rather than representing on-screen graphics as bitmaps in memory, Quartz 2D creates a layer of mathematical abstraction. With Quartz 2D, you still have a bottom-left origin, but you're not longer on an integer plane. Coordinates are given as floating-point numbers. You don't deal in pixels, but rather in mathematically pure regions of the drawing plane.

You draw in Quartz 2D by defining regions. A region is a locus of floating-point coordinate pairs. For example, (2.1, 3.37), (6.29, 5.3), (7.889, 1.961) defines a triangle. You draw by telling Quartz 2D to fill that region with a certain color, defined by any of the supported color spaces. For instance, you might use RGBA, meaning you'd specify red, green and blue color components and a floating-point opacity value.

Sending these commands to Quartz 2D from within your program creates an in-memory data structure called a display list. This display list doesn't look like anything at all; it's just a sequence of bytes that are encoded to represent the scene you drew. The display list doesn't become anything until you send it to Quartz Compositor (or Quartz Extreme) to be rendered into pixels.

The fundamental assumptions behind Quartz 2D drawing -- the coordinate system, the color spaces, all the low-level details --are referred to collectively as the "imaging model."

PDF has an imaging model that is very similar to Quartz 2D's imaging model. Not identical, but very similar. That's because Apple's engineers were inspired by both PostScript and PDF when they created Quartz 2D.

Because Quartz 2D and PDF use the same imaging model -- the same set of fundamental assumptions --it's very easy to convert a PDF file describing a scene to a Quartz 2D display list that describes that scene. Or you can go vice versa, starting with a Quartz 2

Re:Let's run through the list, shall we?

[Ford Prefect]

I think it's more that Quartz is another graphics API, where many of the rendering features ever-so-conveniently map on to PDF 1.4's rendering model.

In other words, it's easy to go from one to the other - it's trivial to convert a bunch of Quartz instructions to an equivalent PDF document and vice versa, even though the internal representations of the data are completely different.

Quartz isn't about applications sending actual PDF data across a pipe or socket into a renderer, it's a bit more sensible than that. :-)

On X "bloat"

[pjc50]

http://cbbrowne.com/info/xbloat.html

you must be kidding

[idlake]

X11 on OS X is dog slow compared to running X11 natively. In fact, Quartz itself is dog slow for text rendering. And that's not surprising: contrary to what you are stating, the use Quartz makes of hardware acceleration is still quite limited.

If XGL is fully OpenGL accelerated, it is leapfrogging anything Apple has implemented in Quartz today.

you don't quite understand

[idlake]

mo X needs an overhaul, needs to ditch the legacy crap (lose Xaw for example)

X11 is a protocol. Xaw is not part of the protocol. It was "ditched" long ago. People still use it because they still have applications that depend on it, but that doesn't need to bother you.

stop interfacing with video hardware like it's 1980.

I don't know what that is supposed to mean. X11 has numerous server implementations that interface with hardware in all sorts of ways. Many commercial and workstation X11 implementations have had dedicated hardware acceleration for more than a decade. What more do you want?

If you are saying that XFree86's architecture is a bit dusty, well maybe you are right, but XFree86 isn't X11, it's one of many implementations.

NeWS did not use Display Postscript

[spitzak]

NeWS used it's own interpreter written at Sun. In many ways it was much better than DPS. Most important was that it defined operators to actually create and manage windows, while DPS required you to use X or whatever to create the window and then you could use DPS to draw into it. NeWS also supported an object oriented extension to the PostScript language that was used to create user interface objects in it. NeWS also had many other minor improvements over PostScript, such as allowing null to be a dictionary key, and allowing non-bool to be the argument for if statements, types for colors and paths, etc. It also had a much better "wire compression" scheme for reducing the PostScript program down into bytes, the NeWS one had no structure and thus could be streamed easily.

In many ways Adobe/DPS were way behind NeWS.

This is great!

[rnturn]

I can't tell you how many potential Linux/UNIX users I know that have told me they're waiting for something like buttons that disappear in a puff of smoke and, until Linux has that, they'll stick with Windows.

Darn it! I forgot the "sarcasm" tags.

For some definition fo solid

[bluGill]

Perhaps the drivers are solid, but only if you are running the right Linux (not *BSD, reactos, or any of the other open source operating systems that would like good support for these cards) on 80386 (not PPC, sparc, MIPS, or any of the other systems linux and the others run on - though admitidly not all of them have the right hardware to connect the card - but some do. I'm not sure about x86-64 either, though I suspect not)

In short, your stable drivers are useless to me because I'm an old BSD guy (complete with beard) and I'm convinced that the sysV style init that most of linux uses is evil and all that. I'm looking for drivers that are stable on my systems, not theoretically stable if I'm willing to run something I don't otherwise like.

Why can they just work on GnuStep?

[taweili]

It looks like they are moving toward the direction of Mac OS X (Open GL accelerated, Vector Graphics 2D backend). Why not put the effort on GnuStep and make it easier for Mac OS X app developers to bring Mac OS X apps to Linux and extending Linux developers' access to a more commercial market of Mac OS X applications.

Re:Let's run through the list, shall we?

[jaoswald]

I don't know much about Quartz vs. PDF, but it is clear you are missing an important metaphysical point.

DATA != REPRESENTATION

Simple example: the digits "42" are not a number. They are a textual representation of a number, which is an abstract concept. A number has certain properties which the textual representation does not. I can add and subtract numbers, but I can't add and subtract text.

A "PDF" file is a representation of an image using various bytes, starting with "%PDF-1.3". Another representation of that image is a mathematical idealization with certain properties. The bytes that a Mac stores in memory to process the image is yet another representation, the bytes that travel to the video card are yet another, and the glowing pixels on your screen are yet another. Finally, the light from these pixels stimulates the optical cortex in your brain.

When you are looking at the screen of your Mac, is your brain using Quartz?