Re: Next Generation Desktop UI

[Sean Middleditch <elanthis awesomeplay com>]

On Mon, 2004-04-05 at 16:39, Metin Amiroff wrote:
> Hi Gustavo;
> 
> Gustavo J. A. M. Carneiro wrote:
> 
> >It looks great, but
> > is terribly slow even in a fast computer.  A simple rubber-banding with
> > XOR-drawing lines would be 100x better (more usable) than this.
> > 
> 
> Interesting, could you explain "rubber-banding with XOR-drawing lines"
> with something like a mock up? I really like the current way Nautilus

No need for a mockup.  Just think the early 1990's style of drawing
bounding boxes.  Or, described, you draw a line by swapping the colors
around of a series of pixels.  (The "XOR" name comes from how it was
originally implemented; you'd swap bits on monochrome displays or
textures, and you'd just redraw the line to get the original pixels
back, so you don't need to re-render the background or buffer anything.)

Today tho, the result is very ugly looking, hard to see on larger
resolutions, and would probably make many people think there's something
wrong with their computer.  ~,^

> does that, prettier than Windows and KDE does, but you're right, it's
> a bit slower.

Which is unfortunate, given that even cheap hardware these days can
accelerate this sort of stuff.  :(  RENDER I think provides primitives
for this sort of stuff (does Nautilus use that?) but I don't believe
it's reliably accelerated in many drivers at all.

In the future, with the COMPOSITE extension, this sort of stuff will be
very easy and very fast.  Each desktop icon could be its own individual
window, which would be back-buffered, so dragging them around would be
quick (or any kind of animations, like making them bounce/jiggle when
clicked or grow when mouse-overed), and the selection box would just be
another window with translucent color, all rendered in hardware with no
precomputation work needed.  Basically what other systems have already
had for years. ;-)
> 
> Thanks,
> 
> --Metin Amiroff
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-- 
Sean Middleditch <elanthis awesomeplay com>
AwesomePlay Productions, Inc.