Comments on cool plasmoid popup animations

[Marco Martin]

On Thursday 19 March 2009, Lucas Murray wrote:
> On Thu, Mar 19, 2009 at 6:18 AM, Jud Craft <craftjml at gmail.com> wrote:
> > PS.  Is it impossible to draw a transparent (by color-key, I guess)
> > window in X?  If so, there might could just be a tooltip canvas that
> > sits on top of everything.  I admit these are very desperate and
> > probably impractical ideas.  Plasma may not even like the idea of
> > having more than one big screen canvas at a time.
>
> There are two ways to make transparent X windows:
>
> 1) Window shapes, and
> 2) An alpha channel.
>
> Window shapes works without compositing but it only allows either fully
> opaque or fully transparent pixels and is slightly laggy for animations (As
> you need to do a full X round-trip to change it). The alpha channel on the
> other hand allows for translucent pixels and is not laggy as everything is
> done by the client, it requires compositing to be enabled to work though.
>
> The only way to do what you are suggesting with any good results is to use
> an alpha channel, but doing that requires compositing and defeats the goal
> as then you can just use a KWin effect to animate the window in its
> entirety (Communicating with KWin to do custom animations is easy, I've
> been talking with the author of Yakuake about doing a slide effect for its
> main window. Maybe that effect could be useful for Plasma?).

it could be yeah, perhaps for popups.. when the sliding animation takes place 
all the window slides or is cutted away? (like, wouldn't wantthe popups being 
visible under the panel when they're animating)
that could be used for generic popups.
extenders like the notifications will still have custom animations, since we 
were thinking about something more complex, so it will have to be something 
that can be turned on or off individually for each window (xatoms?)

while we're at it, since i see a connection, somehing that quite bugs me:
panel shadows. they have to be disabled in panels mainly for two reasons: 
shape and the auto hide panel, thet animated not altering the window geometry, 
so the shadow couldn't follow it.
the effect you talked about could be used to animate the auto hide panels, so 
the shadow could follow the window in a correct way i think?
remains the shape.. don't know if some day will be possible to actually blur 
the alpha channel of the window, but until then, would be possible to have for 
panels a shadow that is a bit thicker and look more round? won't be perfect 
for all themes, but good enough (tm)
oh, my god this sounded like the whishlist to santa, so better i stop (could 
go on and on) :p

Cheers,
Marco Martin

> Speaking of Yakuake it currently uses window shape animations, if you want
> to see how that looks check it out.