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Thinking About Desktop Eyecandy
An anonymous reader writes "This article ponders over whether excess eye candy and special effects being incorporated on the desktop is a good trend after all? The author explains why he thinks the users are taken for a ride by the OS companies in compelling them to upgrade their hardware in order to enable these processor intensive and memory hungry special effects."
...you made a good point, that eye candy is ok, provided that it can be turned off. However, you may not realize that isn't always that simple.
.dlls supported, one for providing a 3d based desktop, and another for providing a 2d desktop.
Let's take a hypethetical situation. Lets say I write a UI that uses a 3d api to render the desktop. (we will call this supposed UI, 'SparrowGrass' so we have a name to work with.)
Using 'SparrowGrass' I can enable all sorts of 'spiffy-wa'(as my console gamer friend calls them) hardware accelerated effects, such as dynamic shadows, translucency, and such. But because they are expecting that there is a 3d card with a good T&L chip in the machine, it will run like a dog without it.
So either because I find such 'spiffy-wa' effects morally offensive when I am trying to remotely reconfigure a DC, or because I lack the latest 3d card, I choose to disable the fancy 3d features of 'SparrowGrass'. However, I am still using a 3d API to render the desktop.
If you looks at one very famous company's 3d API, printing text to the screen involves rendering a couple of polygons, and basically texture mapping the text onto them. While you have turned off the 'spiffy-wa' features, you are still going to be taking a hit for using the 3d API in the first place.
it seems unlikely that there will be two sets of
HA! I just wasted some of your bandwidth with a frivolous sig!
While certainly, many of the "gee whiz" demo's we see of the eye candy are largely useless, and could even be considered a detriment to productivity, there are a number of more subtle side-effects of this eye candy which are and can be very useful and a benefit to productivity.
A good example is the window shadows in OS X. These are created through compositing, which is part of the "eye candy" layer. The drop shadows help define the edge of the window without having to have a thick and useless window border. OS X windows are borderless, which improves screen usage, and the shadows allow you to clearly define the edge.
Another example is Expose. This is handled by the compositing system as well, to resize, scale, and reposition the windows
Translucency is another benefit in certain areas, such as with overlays.
While all these things can be done without a fancy eye candy layer or 3D acceleration, they suck up CPU power. We'll eventually see the 'gee whiz' stuff go away, but the real productivity boosts will stick around.
Also, there's the argument that "Hey, i have all this power, why should I just let it go to waste doing nothing" has some merit as well.
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I fucking HATE that. Sometimes Safari loses sanity and I get the dreaded beachball. Guess what -- the system menu is modal to the application, which means I can't select Force Quit. Instead I have to open a terminal and type 'killall Safari'. What the HOLY FUCK?