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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 agree, a lot of these implementations are kind of nifty, but not particularly useful. I looked around but couldn't find any information about how resource-intensive this is.
It seems like part of a loose trend towards bloating Linux for the desktop market. Not that this is a bad thing, but something that should be kept in mind.
It's not meant to improve usability. It's meant to look good and show what the tech is capable of. And I think it achieves both goals quite well.
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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.'
Yes, you may be right. But the difference is that Linux doesn't have to be first, it just has to be better. And it will be. The rich base of command line utilities and a solid kernel are necessary to have great degrees of stability and richness at the higher levels (like an X server). I find my Linux base indispensable (from the point of view of the usefulness and scriptability of all the UNIX tools and primitives), and I think I concord with other Linux users when I say I'd be perfectly happy with my free Linux desktop when it 'catches up' in the less useful things like eye candy and hardware rendering. Because in the end, I'll have a Free, Powerful Desktop that Looks Just As Good As Yours, while you may be stuck with a good-looking, but still proprietary, mess of a system that is still sorely weak in the basics.
Just my two cents... but undoubtedly in the time it took me to write this post, it will no longer be pre-emptive.
he should create a video showing this wobbling effect used decently, rather than exaggerated. I'm inclined to believe him when he says that this movement is pleasant to the eye (actually, the sudden appearance of menus and windows seems to irritate new users whose brain is not used to this).
The translucency is done very very well. As mentioned before, this is the first video showing how translucency can be useful.
One might argue that this is an utter waste of resources. Well, in this is not true. Since most PCs sold after 2003 do have some sort of 3d accelerator included (hell, even the intel graphics chipsets have acceleration!), basic 3D acceleration is very cheap. Of course, there are people exaggerating the usage of 3d acceleration for the desktop. For example, there are rumors saying that Longhorn requires pixel shader support. But the consumer-level technology for basic T&L (hell, even the CPU can do this, since we aren't talking about >50k vertices) and some basic texturing without lighting or any nifty multitexturing has been around for almost a DECADE.
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excuse my ignorance: is there no video screen capture for linux?
I mean, they did go through all this work to make something look good and then released these crappy monitor shots?
As often as this has happened lately, you'd think someone would be courteous enough to put up a torrent of the videos rather than blow away various project websites everytime someone posts video-candy.
While a lot of Slashdotters and other geeks find a lot of pleasure in eye-candy without regard to usability, I think it's refreshing that Seth actually did post some examples of techniques used where they had an intuitively obvious improvement on usability. If he hadn't, I'd have ignored the demonstrations, or even flamed them. If everything had been like the initial wobbly windows effect, I'd have put it down as yet another thing that'll pointlessly bloat applications in a year or two in order to satisfy the "Ooo look, pretty colours!" mob.
Context is important. You can't really demonstrate a technique without showing that it's potentially useful. I think Seth, for the most part, wobbly windows aside, did a great job doing just that.
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I think someone needs to create better themes. Coders suck as artists and as theme designers. Coders also suck at designing interfaces. We need an interface design contest now, complete with bounties. All artists should be welcomed and no programming experience should be required to contribute. I suggest we make a glass like interface, or an interface such as the interface in the Lain anime series. Lets make something impressive, also lets make it functional. How can we use the extra dimensions and power to make things work better?
Shut the fuck up. Seriously. Every time there is an article on /. about X11 eye candy, a troop of future-shock losers come forward and start complaining about how we "don't need this" or how it's "totally useless" and other nonsense. It's called "progress" and we should talk about how we can apply this technology in interesting ways (like Apple has done with Aqua) instead of bitching about how it shouldn't even be created in the first place.
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You seem to assume that Apple will rest on their laurels. Recent additions include such things as core image and core video which is quite a leap forward.
www.apple.com/macosx/tiger/coreimage.html
Also, it's not just about how things appear on screen, but how it all works underneath and also how it is being used by application developers.
What gives OSX a lead in the GUI department is the Cocoa Framework and programming model, associated development tools and consistent use of interface design guidelines.
I wouldn't consider Linux to be catching up to OSX in the GUI space _unless_ GNUstep becomes more mature, gets a more modern appearance and is going to be widely and consistently used for application development on Linux.
For the avoidance of doubt, I am not trying to praise Apple here. After all, this technology came from NeXT and was at some point in time co-developed with SUN. Apple were just extremely lucky that NeXT saved their butts with this awesome technology.
Let's be honest, compared to other Unix windowing systems such as NEWS and OPENSTEP, X11 is archaic. It's bad enough that NEWS didn't catch on as a standard. Hopefully GNUstep will become more mature and finally take off, now that it is nearing a 1.0 release.
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What I'm really waiting for is easier and dynamic configuration, including true hot-plugging of displays. I want to be able to plug in a new monitor and have X recognizes it. You can dynamically resize the screen to a limited extent, but the available video sizes are still limited to what's in the xorg.conf.
Also, why don't we have fast user switching? I want to have multiple desktops belonging to multiple users, and switch between them quickly.
Fast user switching can be viewed as a special case of screen virtualization: Your applications are always talking to virtual server, either VNC or (better) NX. A physical display can then switch between different virual servers, multiple displays can share the same server, you can move display, or you can switch users.
This kind of stuff is much more important than eye candy, and you'll have more of a chance to make a name for yourself.
Video games give a good demonstration of what it is possible to do with a video card. That is irrelevant to what was demonstrated in these videos.
These videos were a demonstration of the type of thing that is possible because of the composite and damage (and perhaps a few other) extensions recently added to xorg. Before this, you were stuck with fairly static windows and fake transparency if you were using anything but a special X replacement (like XDirectFB or something). These videos show transparent, wobbly windows and real-time previews that weren't possible with regular X before.
Anyone who comes away from this saying, "No shit, graphics cards have been able to animate wobbly stuff for years," is missing the point by a lot. The hardware's been there, but the framework for using it hasn't. Now the framework is there, and people are demonstrating what's possible with it. It's a tech demo of the X extensions, not of whatever old graphics card was running in that guy's laptop. Games aren't a demonstration of that.
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Why not? I can come up with some technology that I think is cool but has no obvious (to me) usabilty. Then you come along with an idea to use it. It's not like every inventor also figures out the inventions final use.
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You should check out the Dashboard demos. The one one Apple's Tiger site don't show the animations and effects the Macworld keynotes show.
When you bring in a widget, there's a ripple effect, and when you configure a widget, it flips over to present the back with the configuration options.
I think this sort of thing is best left with non-main windows, because it can be annoying if every time you move your browser window a little bit, it starts jiggling around.
I support usability. and I, too, experienced the "joy" of mp3 player skins. However, I also support an experimental approach to UI design. I like to see all kinds of things tried even if they seem stupid on the face of it. Why not? We need people trying stuff that doesn't make sense (yet). For instance, I would love it, and I mean I would rotfl if I could connect a window flutter value to a wind, um, whatever the thing is called that measures wind speed. Usability? whocares? what a cool demo. not that that specific thing would be something I'd want to actually use, but, like art, it makes you think about things differently. you think, how can I connect my UI experience more directly to the real world? The experiments going on with the motion sensor in the new apple powerbooks are another example of that: nobody really (do they?) wants to use the powerbook itself as a game controller, tilting it this way and that. But it's cool, and people are thinkin' diff'rently now about those sorts of things. I say: awesome. but again, stress it's not about that implementation specifically as it is about a way of thinking, and finding new directions for research.
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