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Eye candy =)
by Spark on Sunday 09/Sep/2001, @13:34
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Yes, that's pretty damn cool (I use it currently), but I think he didn't speak about the style that is themable, but about fixed elements like the panel or the startmenu. Or even the login menu...
I would also suggest to work on the desktop/filemanager part.
Some ideas of Nautilus are pretty good. For example the transparent and colored select box when dragging the mouse while mousebutton is held. That's not just very nice to look at, but also easier to the eyes than a thin black line. :)
I also like how Nautilus renders Text below items. Very nice. KDE needs some improvement in this area.
Also missing is transparent moving od icons. I thought that was already implemente? I remember something like that, but can't find it in KDE 2.2. This does not just look nice, but it is VERY usefull to exactly see where you are placing your icon. :)
Something I do NOT like about the current KDE optic is, that it always and everywhere renders thin black lines! What's up with that? For example: I select an icon and click on the desktop to deselect it. Now their is a small black border around the icon... why? To show me that I clicked this last? It just looks ugly.
This also happens to buttons and many other widgets.
Please remove that! :) There is also a lot of weirdness when clicking and moving things. For example, when dragging an item, there are boxes drawn around the item and the text... why? It even lacks behind the actual rendering of the item... very ugly. :) Selected items do not look nice as well, that could be improved.
You see, there is a lot more about eyecandy than GUI-style and window decorations...
Some other ideas: When drawing the menu on top of the screen, can't you (optionally) place a shadow below it like Mac OS X?
Or even better, implement those shadows (optional) for every window and probably even icons?
That would just rock. I know that it would be quite a performance hit, but maybe this would force the lame XFree developers to come out with this alpha blending extension soon!
It would also be great to have real transparent windows (while moving or for backgrounds of some widgets), but I think that would be way to slow without native support by Xfree. :(
It would be great if someone could port Qt and KDE to DirectFB.
I know that people don't want to abandon Xfree, so it would be great if KDE would only depend on Qt, so it could run on every plattform that Qt supports and you could run this either on Xfree or on Linux framebuffer.
Qt/Embedded looks so great... why do our embedded devices have more eye candy than our desktop computers?? :) That's not fair. |
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Re: Eye candy =)
by Carbon on Sunday 09/Sep/2001, @18:08
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XFree already has alpha, with the xrender extension. Or am I mistaken?
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Re: Eye candy =)
by Spark on Monday 10/Sep/2001, @06:21
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Has it? I don't think so.
AFAIK transparency tricks like the Liquid menus or the transparent windows while moving in Enlightenment still have to be done by copying the screen to a buffer and using this as the background. :(
That's why this Enlightenment windows always stop for a second before you can move them transparently. This sucks.
Alpha blending could be used for so many things...
X is not really the greatest thing for a desktop.
I would gladly switch to DirectFB for desktop rendering and user X only for 3D games anymore.
echo "exec quake3" > .xinitrc
startx
:)
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Re: Eye candy =)
by Carbon on Monday 10/Sep/2001, @12:37
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Hmm, lack of one eye-candy oriented feature (that's already currently in devel) is hardly reason to switch entirely to FB. FB is good, but X has quite a bit going for it, like network windowing support, and acclerated 2d.
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Re: Eye candy =)
by Greg on Monday 10/Sep/2001, @14:29
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Not really. Xfree really doesn't have that much 3d support, nor hardware 2d. I know this is a complicated thing, you have to implement OpenGL or Mesa to even have and hardware acceleration in Xfree. Still, my video card, an S3 Savage4, that is has hardware accelerated 2d and 3d cannot do hardware acceleration because it is only implemented for 3dFX, Matrox, and NVidia chipsets. What about the rest of us? If I had full hardware accel. support for my board, X and KDE would no doubt run so much faster, but as I don't they are noticeably slower compared to win 98 with hardware accel. support from the manufacturer. Absolutely no 3d games for me until Mesa can fully support my card's chipset.
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Re: Eye candy =)
by Spark on Monday 10/Sep/2001, @15:32
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Accelerated 2D is MUCH better with DirectFB! They even have a DirectFB X-Server, which outperformces XFree in benchmarks. Couldn't try it yet.
XFree has more drivers and better 3D support. Drivers will come and 3D support is not important for the desktop (I could still launch XFree from within the DirectFB desktop for the game).
The network support is something, that many users don't really need. :)
It would be great, if KDE could just run on "Qt" (not Xlibs) and Qt would run natively on DirectFB, so you could choose your environment.
X is really not everybody's taste.
Or their could be something like a "layer" between Qt, the hardware/operating system and KDE, so you just had to port this layer (along Qt) to other plattforms if you want to run KDE on them.
KDE could become a kernel independent operating system, like Qube or Athene. :) That would really rock.
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Re: Eye candy =)
by Carbon on Monday 10/Sep/2001, @19:19
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>KDE could become a kernel independent operating system, like Qube or Athene. :) That would really rock.
Eh, I dunno about that. There's a whole lot more code and work in between a DE and a full OS, and the KDE developers are working hard enough as it is. On the other hand, perhaps a Linux distro dedicated to nothing but KDE (and not a crappy commercial one either, but an open source distro) would be very cool.
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Re: Eye candy =)
by not me on Monday 10/Sep/2001, @10:48
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>For example: I select an icon and click on the desktop to deselect it. Now their is a small black border around the icon... why? To show me that I clicked this last?
No, it's for people who like to use the keyboard. That line indicates where the current focus is so that you can move it around with the keyboard. Win2K has a very nice option that turns off these keyboard hints until you press an arrow key. Yet another option for KDE's overcrowded configuration panels.
>maybe this would force the lame XFree developers to come out with this alpha blending extension soon!
The render extension is already out. That's what gives us the wonderful anti-aliased text. Alpha-blending is already used in various places in KDE. I think with QT3 support for alpha-blending will become more universal, but I'm not sure.
>Qt/Embedded looks so great...
What you aren't seeing in the screenshots is the fact that QT/Embedded is not hardware accelerated, which makes it very slow. QT/Embedded was never meant to replace X for normal usage.
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Re: Eye candy =)
by Spark on Monday 10/Sep/2001, @15:23
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> No, it's for people who like to use the keyboard. That line indicates where the current focus is so that you can move it around with the keyboard. Win2K has a very nice option that turns off these keyboard hints until you press an arrow key. Yet another option for KDE's overcrowded configuration panels.
1) They should look nicer. :)
2) That's a nice idea. Why not just do it by default?
> The render extension is already out. That's what gives us the wonderful anti-aliased text. Alpha-blending is already used in various places in KDE. I think with QT3 support for alpha-blending will become more universal, but I'm not sure.
I know that it's used for Antia Aliasing, but I never saw it used for actual alpha blending of windows or widgets. I don't think this part is out yet.
If it is, why isn't is used? Maybe somebody know?
> What you aren't seeing in the screenshots is the fact that QT/Embedded is not hardware accelerated, which makes it very slow. QT/Embedded was never meant to replace X for normal usage.
Framebuffer IS hardware accelerated (look at DirectFB). And it's very fast.
Of course no 3D yet. :) But I don't need 3D on my desktop (yet). And it wouldn't be a problem to launch X to play Quake or so.
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Re: Eye candy =)
by not me on Monday 10/Sep/2001, @22:59
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The framebuffer is *NOT* hardware accelerated. DirectFB is not the framebuffer. DirectFB is hardware accelerated. DirectFB is a layer on top of the framebuffer that provides an interface to hardware acceleration. DirectFB needs lots of drivers to catch up with XFree.
DirectFB does look like a cool project. Those screenshots are amazing! Especially this one:
http://directfb.org/news/count/videoshot.png
I dearly hope someone ports QT to DirectFB (which is not the same as QT/Embedded running on the framebuffer) so we can enjoy that DirectFB goodness. However, even if KDE was ported to DirectFB, it probably couldn't use any DirectFB specific features because DirectFB only works on Linux and KDE is cross-platform.
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Re: Eye candy =)
by Matthew Gardiner on Monday 10/Sep/2001, @17:02
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In regards to QT embedded, the graphical layers bypasses X and talks directly to the frame buffer (in the kernel), hence the reason the importance of frame buffers in the kernel, thus removing the need to have a top heavy X + QT etc etc.
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