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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.
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
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.
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
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!
Lesbian Nazi Hookers Abducted by UFOs and Forced Into Weight Loss Programs - -all next week on Town Talk.
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?
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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No it's not. From X manpage:
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.
'When the going gets weird, the weird turn pro.' -HST
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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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.
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.