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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."
On the other hand, the similar effect applied to drop down menus did make some sense. It made the menu appearing more obvious and anyone glancing at an unrelated part of the screen and accidentally activating the menu would be more aware of their mistake with this kind of heavily animated approach. It also looked like it wouldn't get in the way, the way it was implemented.
I also liked the translucent file selector. That's the first time I've seen translucency done in a relevant, useful, manner. Yes, I do want to see the window underneath, damn it! Combined with Apple's "attaching selectors to the window they came from" philosophy, you could have quite a massive improvement in usability.
It's nice to see some of the techniques developed largely as eye-candy actually find uses where they have functional, not just subjectively aesthetic, justification.
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So download something that can.
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.
Wait till you see the "wobbly server effect"...
Linking to "X Window Eye Candy" Videos on the ./ Frontpage...that's like posting free porn.
You people are crazy. That poor server...
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
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.
For those of us who don't know, is there a KDE equivalent in the pipeline?
How does this compare to the upcoming Avalon engine for Longhorn?
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
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Just pretend the "s" everybody puts at the end stands for "System." You'll feel better.
Those are some interesting new features, quite innovative actually. However, I would be much more interested in hearing how X is being made smaller and faster. Xserver seems to be a nice continuation of Kdrive since the fork, but it is still lagging behind a full Xorg installation. Most X users are not serving up desktops to thin clients, and only need a full install for things like hardware acceleration and multihead support. I would think a small and fast X would greatly benefit desktop adoption, and if any of you have tried Kdrive on modern equipment, it more than feels snappier, it is.
Never start vast projects with half-vast ideas.
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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It already exists: Mirrordot
No it's not. From X manpage:
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?
Luminosity is a testbed for technology. It's not meant to show exactly what Gnome 2.12 or X whatever is going to look like.
You say its not useful but what about something like Expose which many users think is useful? Imagine how boring the early versions of it looked which did nothing interesting or useful? Think outside the box for a minute and realize that by using the technology someone may come up with some new ways of interacting with windows that nobody has ever thought of and turns out to be really useful. Your boring and bloated accusation is way close-minded and short-sighted.
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Combine it with the new Enlightenment stuff:
This one
This one
This one
This one
So who said that Linux was mainly textbased?
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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.
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.
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?
I know it's fashionable to bash UI eye candy, but there is a reason for it. For instance, the human eye is very good at determining depth. Drop shadows on windows help distinguish one window from another. When I turned on xcompmgr on my Ubuntu box, it was actually quite surprising how much easier it was to determine what windows are where. When you have Anjuta, Firefox, Glade, and a bunch of other applications open, it can be hard to tell what window is here. Drop shadows help create another way of visually distinguishing window placements that can enhance usability.
Transparency when done right can also help usability. The transparent dialogs here help cement the relationship between a dialog and its parent window. That's why Mac OS X has such great usability - it not only has some visually interesting eye candy, but that eye candy is designed to provide you with a series of visual cues that clue you in on what actions you're performing. The "genie effect" when you minimize a window to the Dock is another example of this - by showing the window move into the Dock you're providing a visual clue that lets you know that you can find that window again in the Dock.
When done right, eye candy can really enhance usability, and thanks to things like the Damage extension, the Render extension, and the Composite extenstion, Linux usability is getting better.
And for the record, those who think that eye candy adds excessive processor bloat, my current Linux system is a Duron 600mHz with 256MB of RAM and a GeForce4 MX. Granted, the T&L engine helps a lot in making the UI responsive, but given that xcompmgr and the Composite extension is essentially beta code it's quite shocking how little processing power this sort of thing takes. Now that T&L engines on graphics cards are pretty much standard, it's time that X put that power to use to enhance usability.
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.
it was called NT.
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.
http://www.gnustep.org
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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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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.