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."

Comments

nice, but

[ardor]

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.

Re:Nip it in the bud

[BenjyD]

A second pre-emptive comment:

1) It's a tech demo. Nobody is suggesting wobbly windows are going to improve productivity. Given a wide range of possible effects like this, however, creative people can come up with nice ideas to make your desktop more usable. Decoupling the screen display and window contents rendering allows all sorts of cool things.

2) It runs on old crappy hardware, so no, you won't need to go and buy an Nvidia 69999FX-eXtreme to run it

3) It's not 'bloat' (whatever that is), it's just using the hardware and X-server abilities to their full. By shifting much of the rendering to the graphics card, you could actually lower CPU usage. I'm sure a thousand openbox/console/ion/ratpoison users are waiting to post "I don't need this". To which I say "well go back to your teletype then".

Re:Pleasantly surprised

[squiggleslash]

Well, my counter to that is it most certainly should be meant to improve usability. I know that Seth's reason for posting the article is to say "Wheee! Look at this, look at what we can do!", but without context "what we can do" is useless. The context here is that the techniques are designed to improve UIs in various ways.

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.