Re: Widget smoothness (was: Unidentified subject!)

[Federico Mena Quintero <federico redhat com>]

>  	Do we want people to fire up a GTK+-based app (or Gnome, for that
>  matter) and have it seem primitive?  MS's IE, one of the most-used apps in
>  the world (as sad as that is) has had the smooth scroll feature for a
>  couple of years now--an app without it will feel like 1995 to all
>  non-technical endusers who will be switching to Linux in the near future.
>  
>  	If CPU utilization really is an issue, we could build in an option
>  into the toolkit to turn it off.  Personally, I do not believe it would be
>  that big a deal (testing is necessary to confirm either viewpoint).

You cannot say whether CPU utilization is an issue until you have
profiled the thing.  Period.

And the point is moot.  What you do to smooth-scroll is create an
off-screen pixmap, draw a thin region there (say, your scrolling
increment), and then bitblt the contents of the screen pixel by
pixel.  The bitblt is essentialy free, since the video card does it.
So it should not use much more CPU than not doing smooth scrolling.

  Federico