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Preview of X Windows Eye Candy
Posted by
Zonk
on Thu Mar 24, 2005 08:37 AM
from the pet-the-penguin dept.
from the pet-the-penguin dept.
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."
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Pleasantly surprised (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Re:Pleasantly surprised (Score:5, Insightful)
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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Re:Pleasantly surprised (Score:5, Insightful)
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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Re:Pleasantly surprised (Score:5, Informative)
The plan is to eventually merge the Luminocity composition manager and effect engine with the Metacity window manager. You will then be able to switch effects and behaviors like you do themes today.
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Re:Pleasantly surprised (Score:5, Interesting)
Humans visualize a lot of 3D, so why not your windows? I can image computer-illiterates don't see "windows", just a bunch of 2D buttons and mess at a computer screen.
Using subtile animation and shadow effects could make computing a lot easier and accessable. It allows users to distinguish between front and back windows much easier. I would certainly welcome these features if they're stable!
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CoralCDN [mirror] (Score:5, Informative)
Re:CoralCDN [mirror] (Score:5, Informative)
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Re:CoralCDN [mirror] (Score:5, Informative)
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heh.. (Score:5, Funny)
Wait till you see the "wobbly server effect"...
Who did this? (Score:5, Funny)
You people are crazy. That poor server...
xgl (Score:5, Informative)
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 [gentoo.org].
Nip it in the bud (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:Nip it in the bud (Score:5, Insightful)
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".
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KDE equivalent? (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:KDE equivalent? (Score:5, Informative)
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nice, but (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Combine it with Enlightenment (Score:5, Interesting)
This one [rasterman.com]
This one [rasterman.com]
This one [rasterman.com]
This one [rasterman.com]
So who said that Linux was mainly textbased?
Why Eye Candy Enhanced Usability (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Re:Can't Play The Videos (Score:5, Informative)
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Re:Nifty, but the point? (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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Re:Nifty, but the point? (Score:5, Insightful)
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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Re:Nifty, but the point? (Score:5, Insightful)
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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Re:Please get it right (Score:5, Informative)
No it's not. From X manpage:
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Re:Buttons/windows still look archaic (Score:5, Informative)
Since this comment keeps finding its way up from -1, Troll, I guess I'll respond. GTK uses themes. [gnome-look.org]
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Re:Longhorn (Score:5, Informative)
I guess you could use Avalon to create effects as shown in TFA. But it's really not limited to that.
In the end it's all about eye-candy though..
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