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Preview of X Windows Eye Candy
glenkim writes "Remember Seth Nickell's blog entry about next generation X Window rendering? Well, in case you were wondering what it would look like, he's updated his blog with videos of luminocity, the experimental GNOME window manager, and screenshots of programatically themed widgets." From the post: "The wobbly window effect is mildly addictive. Kristian hasn't gotten much work done since he wrote it. He (and now I) spends all day moving windows around and watching them settle."
I just want to pre-emptively respond to all the posts that are going to say, 'well, as usual, Linux is catching up to Microsoft and Apple a couple years after the fact.'
<RMS> Thats GNU/Linux dammit ! </RMS>
Oh and to be honest with you... I dont think much has to be done to catch up with XPs GUI. It is one of the stupidest, unimaginitve UIs of recent times and does nothing particularly new or interesting or indeed useful. Oh I forgot... there is an irratating animated dog to help you use the (broken) file search features. I wonder if theyve patented that.
it is a flipping blog you idiot!!!
I am the Alpha and the Omega-3
That's all we need. How 'bout un-fucking the current UI usability problems with the Linux desktop before adding more superfluous shit on top of an already ridiculously complex system. At least they could use something that already exists.
-- uh...
... less productivity from the same hardware is good.
;-)
Yeah, you got that one right.
After N tries getting TFA in an otherwise-idle browser's window, and clicking on the MPEG4 link to see the demo, that browser is now at 30% of my cpu, and still hasn't shown me anything. Good demo of soaking up cpu for eye candy.
My main question would be; How do I turn off all the cpu-eating goodies, not to mention stuff like my-time-eating window wobble, and make it just put things where I want them with minimum effort?
My experience so far is that eye candy can't be fully disabled, at least it can't without sinking an inordinate amount of forever-lost time into learning yet another overly-complex GUI tool to tweak the settings. And some things can't be turned off at all.
Thus, I've been noting that the more recent the release is, the more of those obnoxious popup explanatory thingies I see. They would be useful, if they would go away cleanly. But more and more I stumble across popups that don't go away without a lot of wasted time and motion trying to figure out how to trick the software into erasing them. On several machines that I use, the bottom several inches of the screen are nearly unusable, because if the pointer ever accidentally touches the task bar that's there, a helpful information popup appears over what I'm trying to work on, and I have to suspend what I'm doing to poke around until it goes away. I simply can't throw away the huge chunks of time that it takes to learn the ad-hoc controls, different on every machine, that it takes to disable junk like this.
This is not an improvement. It's getting to be as bad as MS Windows. (And the same things happen a lot with OS X.
Hey, the MPEG download finished - and I got a popup saying that I'm "missing software required to display this movie file." Grrr...
Those who do study history are doomed to stand helplessly by while everyone else repeats it.
Yeah it's cool, but how much of your system's resources does it take up?
I mean hell, I can't even stand KDE and have been using IceWM for a while now for the specific reason that it runs light.
Sugapablo
How about you grow the fuck up.
Once you have a few years on you, you'll see that a constant barrage of eye candy does nothing to improve productivity any more than a constant barrage of new programming languages or 'development methods'. Just new ways of doing the same thing, except things that were working just fine are now broken. The fact that you have to working hardware every two years to display a 1.5ft^2 bitmap is proof enough.
This is technology looking for an application, vs an application looking for technology. It's not called "progress", it's call "churn". Progress would be a demonstration of how the technology solved a definable problem. "I can see the windows better" is not definable. Hell, it isn't even sensible, since few monitors have more that 1.5ft^2 for displayable area. How the hell do you 'lose' windows in that small a space? To much eye candy maybe?
Now, pull up your diaper and go out outside into the real world for a while. You've been drooling over 'shiny things' on the computer to long today.
PS. I enjoy eye-candy as much as the next guy, but I don't confuse it with 'progress'. My real beef is with developers who confuse 'pretty' with 'productive', make the eye candy an essential part of the application, and provide no way of turning it off.
Aah, change is good. -- Rafiki
Yeah, but it ain't easy. -- Simba