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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."
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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From the site:
People have been asking what sort of hardware this was done on. Videos were shot on a mix of an IBM thinkpad X30 (with a paltry Intel i830 video card using open source drivers) and an IBM thinkpad T41 (with a slightly beefier but still pretty old Radeon Mobility 7500, also using open source drivers). Everything we're doing so far is light on hardware requirements.
On the topic of usefulness, that's not really what I think these videos are supposed to show. The point is that we now have the foundation to do useful things with.
The demos in the website run on either Intel integrated vidcard, or on Ati Mobility Radeon 7500 (both with open-source drivers). Bot are very low-end vid-cards these days.
What "bloat" are you talking about? It seems to me that both major desktops (KDE and Gnome) are getting faster and less memory-hungry with each new release. So I REALLY fail to see your point. But if you are worried about bloet, simply don't enable any of the new features, or use XFCE or something similar! Problem solved! Me? I have vid-card, CPU and memory to spare, bring on the advanced features!
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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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Geez... I saw the videos and it looks pretty sweet! If it's going to make my windows friends jealous, I'm on board. Will I use it on my linux desktop? You bet. Will I load it on my linux router? Uh, no.
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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?
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.
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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