OpenGL windowing in Linux: very cool effects.

Posted:
in macOS edited January 2014
Hi, check these out: Movies of Luminocity in action.



This is a new windowing engine for linux called Luminocity. It is similiar to a Quartz+Aqua+CoreImage combination.



It seems that this Linux project is visually ahead of OSX now. \

Comments

  • Reply 1 of 5
    kickahakickaha Posts: 8,760member
    You say that like it's a good thing.



    Aren't these the same folks who *BITCHED* about the 'resource hogging eyecandy' in OS X? Wacky.



    Anyway, they're 'ahead' in bizarre eyecandy, but the *ability* to do that has been with us for a long time. Taste is when you *could* wield power, but *choose* not to.
  • Reply 2 of 5
    While the eye candy that is being worked on in Luminocity is interesting, if you examine the project a bit more you will notice that most of the really interesting stuff is being done through Cairo, a new vector based imaging system that has been in development for a little while.



    Cairo is the real news here. It is a imaging system that takes Display PostScript for a real run for its money. The goal is to have a end-to-end system that can basically draw anything that you can draw in PDF 1.4 , and be able to do it to any display or printing device and have it look the same. Resolution independence, vector formats (inline raster allowed but not encouraged), hardware accelerated where possible (video card hardware to render alpha, a pipeline for effects like CoreImage), and with output to monitors, PDF (currently only bitmap, but vector is in the works), PNG, SVG, buffered image (for running a monitor... at any resolution or DPI)...



    And the Mono project has basically chosen it as the method they are going to use to run Windows.Forms emulation so that it will run on any OS. That means you could take the source code for a Windows .Net application, port it over to Mono with minimal changes (in some cases), and compile it for the Macintosh or Linux or Windows... in fact you should be able to run the same executable on all of those platforms (as long as they have Mono installed).



    Oh... and because Cairo allows you to make your UI in a vector programing language, you can do all sorts of subtle things with the UI (like small animations) that can run almost entirely in your graphics card.
  • Reply 3 of 5
    xoolxool Posts: 2,460member
    And in Longhorn all your windows can spin around in all directions so you can always see what's underneath what you want to be working on.







    The wobbly windows are somewhat funny. They remind me of the old OS 9 control panel that would enable gravity for your icons. You could grab an icon by the corner and it would pivot beneath your cursor according to its center of gravity. Move the cursor back and forth and the icon would wobble as it dandled from the mouse as if you were doing it in real life. You could even toss the icons across the screen and they could bounce off the edges.



    I also compare the wobbly windows (at least the animation when they appear) to Tiger's widget animation. Where Tiger is Aqua, Luminosity is Jello.

  • Reply 4 of 5
    Note that the authors have turned all the settings to "ridiculous" levels for the demos to make things obvious. If any of this stuff makes it to real production things will be very much toned down. But since this is all done in the 3D acceleration units of the graphics cards, it doesn't make much of any impact on the CPU.
  • Reply 5 of 5
    gene cleangene clean Posts: 3,481member
    If you look closely, you'll notice that they're RedHat employees. I don't remember RedHat every bitching about OS X eye-candy.



    And this, coupled with Cairo, is great news for FOSS. Apologists will always dismiss it, but that doesn't make it any less important. Great stuff.
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