[Appeal] Translucency: Second try

[Hans Oischinger]

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
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