Comments on cool plasmoid popup animations

[Lucas Murray]

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?).

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

-- 

Lucas Murray :: http://www.undefinedfire.com
GPG Fingerprint: 0B88 499E 3F5B 1405 D952  258A AD90 B4F5 90B6 3534

-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: signature.asc
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 197 bytes
Desc: OpenPGP digital signature
Url : http://mail.kde.org/pipermail/plasma-devel/attachments/20090319/e255e0da/attachment.sig