Slashdot Mirror
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 don't claim I know more than I know, and if you know you know more than I know, then by all means, let me know.
So download something that can.
Appears to be down or at least struggling already :(
Mirrordot should hopefully be created here:
Mirrordot link
Yesterday I have tried Xgl, Which also uses OpenGL to draw X. I think Luminocity and xgl are tightly related, but I am not really shure.
:-)
Anyway, what I got was a stable desktop with nice shadow and transparency features. It looks totally cool to have a transparent mplayer behind a transparent xterm that drops a soft shadow on it
Trying it out is fairly easy, just follow this description.
Open Source Alternatives
The current Luminocity effects are strictly tech-demos for now, basically showing what is possible. It will then be up to third parties like distributors and desktop environment to make something useful out of it.
The plan is to eventually merge the Luminocity composition manager and effect engine with the Metacity window manager. You will then be able to switch effects and behaviors like you do themes today.
It's like deja vu all over again.
KDE4 will propably have stuff like this. It should have double-buffered widgets, OpenGL-acceleration and Cairo-support, among other things.
Lesbian Nazi Hookers Abducted by UFOs and Forced Into Weight Loss Programs - -all next week on Town Talk.
It is not a feature to be, it is a quality test of performance while in development. More the test is intensive, the better it is
Signature Pro version 1.13.2-3 release 83.5 beta3try7 after-breakfast edition
Site is borked now, but they did say something like they turned the effect all the way up so it would be obvious in the video, but that it looked much better and much more natural when it just barely bounced when moved.
Hokey statistics and ancient misconceptions are no match for a good thought in your head, kid!
It already exists: Mirrordot
No it's not. From X manpage:
With all the effort put into wobbly windows and transparency, it seems like they ought to have windows and buttons themselves looking fairly slick. Instead they look like a slight improvement over Windows 98.
Since this comment keeps finding its way up from -1, Troll, I guess I'll respond. GTK uses themes.
http://www.illiminable.com/ogg/
downloaded and installed, brought up Windows Media player and dragged and dropped the .ogg file on to it to play.
Different thing. Avalon is an API which seems to be geared to bringing 3d-accelerated features to ordinary desktop programs, and to make this easy for the programmer. For example, in Avalon you can create a window, a rendering context and a simple scene with very few lines of code.
:-)
I guess you could use Avalon to create effects as shown in TFA. But it's really not limited to that.
In the end it's all about eye-candy though..
Don't whistle while you're pissing.
http://www.iki.fi/teknohog/luminocity-theora.torre nt
Escher was the first MC and Giger invented the HR department.
Stationary windows will take just as much CPU in '3d' as they do in 2d - basically nothing. It's not like it's redrawing at 100fps or anything. Things like redrawing after exposing a part of a window will likely take less CPU, as the graphics card can just draw the relevant part of the window's texture to the screen without having to regenerate it.
I imagine resolution won't be much of a problem. For actual 3d work, there is all sorts of complexity that limits the fill rate - overdraw, lots of textures, fogging, geometry etc. This is a very simple 3d system: flat projection, little geometry.
A (say) 2000x2000 resolution screen is only 4 million pixels - cards like the geforce 2mx (which is ~$30 or so?) will do 500 million/second theoretical.
He said the effect was turned up to maximum for the demo just so you could see it. Makes sense to make it really flashy when you first see it, then make it subtle for when you actually use it.
I'll never make that mistake again, reading the experts' opinions. - Feynman
KDE 3.4 has this, I don't know about earlier versions. You can start a new session right from the menu, and you can switch back and forth with Ctrl+Alt+F7 and Ctrl+Alt+F8.
This sig is only here so people stop skipping the last lines of my posts.