Re: FYI: Mac OS X Desktop

[Robert Wittams <robert wittams ic ac uk>]

> Anyone have an idea of how far Berlin is? 
Why not ask on their mailing lists, or look at their websites?

Heres the deal:
Keith Packard is working on extensions to X to provide alpha
transparency, in server libart-like capabilities using trapezoids,
paths, and eventually a better font model (easy access to outlines and
nicer - antialiased - text rendering). It looks like this is the most
viable solution to these problems, as X is not going away soon. 

see
http://www.xfree86.org/~keithp/talks/render.html

I don't know if this would help for things like the genie effect. Moving
some basic window management (still under control of an external
process) into the X server is more likely to help here, but that might
be too evil - I don't know about you, but I think I would prefer it if
fanciful/complex graphical effects were kept in a seperate address space
than the X server. 

Berlin might be a nice solution eventually, but it is not reasonable for
gnome to target it now. 

Rob