[Appeal] Translucency: Second try

[Frank Karlitschek]

On Tuesday 19 April 2005 08:50, Hans Oischinger wrote:
> There are some reasons why the former effect is not very usefull
> Most of all: Transparent windows look stupid if there are many stacked onto
> each other and especially if they contain lots of text. The result is just
> confusing.
>
> Thorsten suggested to show all windows composited together and then made
> transparent as a whole (except the one we're interested in).
> That proved to be difficult due to limitations of kompmgr (I tried to hack
> it for my needs but it's hard to make it right as kompmgr has to be very
> very performant to not block updates and so every line of code that is not
> absolutely needed shouldn't be in there).
>
> However I created the most cool effect yesterday. I really fell in love
> with it and played with it over and over again because it looked so cool :)
> Of course it's again very obstrusive and so on but isn't all eye candy that
> way :)?
> There is a video online [1] but notice that it's not really smooth (xvidcap
> just isn't right for the task... anyone knows something besser?) and looks
> much better on my machine.
>
> Basically this effect sets window transparency to 80% and moves them
> smoothly out of the left or right screen border.
> The cool thing about this one is that it doesn't not only give you access
> to hidden windows, it also brings in a certain 3D look and feel as windows
> now seem to be stacked onto each other like a stack of cards. Once you
> activate a window the others are moved below it and so on.
> Hard to explain when you haven't used it... I'll try to provide a patch
> soon (don't want to give you something incomplete again).
>
> A drawback is that the "move out of the desktop" animation is done through
> XMoveWindow() calls and therefore hits the CPU (just like dragging a window
> with the mouse). That means that it may not be smooth on slower machines,
> but which slower machines have COMPOSITE anyway?
>
> I think it's really something distinct from other OSes even though Apple
> has something similar for their "Show desktop" F11 shortcut (see the video
> at [2]).
> If we don't include it on the taskbar we could at least use it for our
> "Show desktop" function.
>
> Greets, Hans
>
> [1] http://home.degnet.de/hans.oischinger/exposite-ng.avi
> [2] http://www.apple.com/macosx/theater/expose.html

Amazing! You rock!

When do you plan to commit this to cvs?

Cheers
Frank

-- 
Frank Karlitschek
karlitschek at kde.org