Quartz Extreme = Animated Desktop?
I am wondering if Jaguar will allow Macs to have an animated desktop "movie loop" as opposed to just an old-fashioned desktop pic (ie wallpaper). I think it would be cool to have a calming stream trickle across my desktop as I worked, or maybe puffy white clouds slowy rolling across my TiBook screen- ala' an animated sky sequence....
Comments
<strong>a moving desktop would cause some icons to dissapear alltogether and the dock, since it is transparent could not be seen</strong><hr></blockquote>
why would either of those thing smatter? just because the desktop is being animated does not mean things would dissapear... maybe it would get harder to see these things, but you would just wait a sec for the desktop to "go back" to a "frame" in the animation that allows that part of the screen to be seen clearly...
anyways... I think this can be done now, but it is a pain in the *** ... for example, you know those programs that change your desktop bkrnd every 15 min or so? well who is stpping you from changing that interval to lets say 24 pics/sec and make the desktop change in a sequence,... so you would have 24 frames/sec on your desktop? Is that even possible or am I making it up? I dono I have never used said program, only heard of it on these boards...
If it cant be done now, it would be damn cool if jag lets us....
Apple has no reason not to do this.
[ 05-26-2002: Message edited by: scott_h_phd ]</p>
I really wish I could remember the name of the app that did this. I dumped it a while ago. It replaces your desktop picture with a spinning galaxy graphic which animates continuously. I got rid of it months ago because, on my lowly G3/350, while it was certainly beyond cool, it was also a real CPU-sucker.
<strong>Given the sloooowness of aqua as it stands, can u imagine the performance hit from an animated desktop! <img src="graemlins/bugeye.gif" border="0" alt="[Skeptical]" /> </strong><hr></blockquote>
quicktime is not slow. I remember a demo of a animated desktop using qt sprites
<a href="http://www.versiontracker.com/moreinfo.fcgi?id=11202&db=mac" target="_blank">xBack</a>
xBack has been out since the Public Beta days.
Displays screensavers as your desktop. If you have the SaveHollywood screensaver, you can play movies that Quicktime can play on your desktop, and hence, animations.
Quartz Extreme should dramatically improve xBack.
[ 05-27-2002: Message edited by: Nostradamus ]</p>
<strong><a href="http://www.versiontracker.com/moreinfo.fcgi?id=11202&db=mac" target="_blank">xBack</a></strong><hr></blockquote>
That's the app I couldn't remember.
<strong>Given the sloooowness of aqua as it stands, can u imagine the performance hit from an animated desktop! <img src="graemlins/bugeye.gif" border="0" alt="[Skeptical]" /> </strong><hr></blockquote>
You don't have to imagine. Try it out:
<a href="http://www.versiontracker.com/moreinfo.fcgi?id=11202&db=mac" target="_blank">xBack</a>
The hit is pretty bad on my G3/350 using a full-screen animation (an animation that changes the entire screen with each frame).
I don't think, on today's hardware, a low bandwith QT movie would be too bad. A looping waterfall, where the waterfall part of the movie was only a portion of the image, would be really cool.
Actually, this exactly equivalent to having a big QT movie going in the background all the time. That's not too bad - depending on the movie.
[ 05-27-2002: Message edited by: spotbug ]</p>
mike