“news from the bling-brigade”
For those of you who where not able to come to FOSDEM and are interested in the eye-catching parts of my talk, I provide you with a screencast of the demo I hacked up to accompany my talk. This one is the second of the three demos (one, two, three) I showed in my talk to underline the facts I chatted about. To all trolls out there… this is about the effects and techniques used, not the content itself. So please spare me the “copycat”-reprovals.
 (click to play back, ogg/theora, ~1.1 MBytes) |
 (click to play back, avi/h.264, ~2.6 MBytes) |
Here is something I wanted to show also (at least in video-form as it does currently not work on a i915 graphics-chip with current drivers) during my talk, but was not able to finish it up properly. You can clearly see the remaining glitches. Running on a GeForce 7900GT using nvidia’s proprietary driver. It provides a modest glimpse of what a future gtk+ might be able to do if it is fully composite-aware…
 (click to play back, ogg/theora, ~0.9 MBytes) |
 (click to play back, avi/h.264, ~2.0 MBytes) |
All shown screencasts do not do the smoothness justice you see when running for real without the screen-recording going on. These kind of things will get much slicker once we have full EXA-accelerating drivers (paths for Copy, Solid and Composite) available in common distributions running on the latest and greatest X.org can/will provide. The screencast are all done under compiz.
BTW, the gtk+-developers are absolutely aware of missing features, shortcomings and expectations of users (both for end-users and for application developers). They have the drive and urge to improve and change things. So to the trolls… please just die! To everybody else… let go of everything and start helping out now. The more help they get form you, the faster we reach UI-toolkit heaven!
Any questions that might arise you may put in the comments-section or send me via email. And I have not forgotton about lowfat.
February 28th, 2007 at 7:29 pm
Wow that looks great, I really hope you enjoy your internship with our friends at Fluendo. Would it be possible to use the blur code that Dave Reveman put in Compiz (and I assume you used in the demo) to copy the Vista Aero effect, I tested Vista a while back and while I was left with a certain taste of brown stuff in my mouth the blurry window edges really appealed to me and I’d like to have them in my Fedora setup with Compiz.
I hear you drew quite a crowd at FOSDEM, even setting off the alarm with applauds, that makes me so sad since I passed on going to FOSDEM this year.. at least you people had fun.
February 28th, 2007 at 7:44 pm
Very cool demos…
What font are you using in Evolution? (Sorry, that’s a bit OT).
February 28th, 2007 at 10:45 pm
Could you please tell (mail me or something) how did you record & produce those videos? I’ve tried tools like Istanbul for recording high quality screencasts but all I’ve tried has failed or produced very bad quality video. I have seen a few blog posts on planet gnome and other places about the tools but I haven’t found them very useful so far.
March 1st, 2007 at 12:53 am
The fonts look like http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Candara
March 1st, 2007 at 2:30 am
those videos look great.
is it true ur going to release low fat soon?
March 1st, 2007 at 8:17 am
@ David Nielsen: Yes this is perfectly possible. The needed functionality is in place. If I’m not mistaken one could even make a border of a metacity-theme now blurred (thanks to the new window-type matching code in compiz). But a bit cooler would be a dedicated decorator for compiz, that does all drawing with cairo/vector-graphics instead of metacity’s bitmap-based system. FOSDEM was great and the audience made me enjoy giving the talk, despite the fact I was slightly anxious.
@ Stack, Tobias: Yes that’s Candara.
@ erik: I record single frames with xvidcap and encode the results with a set of scripts I wrote. The scripts are included in this file here: http://macslow.thepimp.net/projects/encode-commands.sh you will need mplayer/mencoder, ffmpeg and ffmpeg2theora to be installed on your system for this to work. I should one day convert that to gstreamer.
@ lagorgy: It will not be a release (it is far from done!), but it will start it’s life in the open. Preparation is still taking some more time as I am also in the middle of organizing stuff for my internship and another talk I was asked to do at CeBIT this months. And on top of that having a new girl-friend does not help common time-allocation-procedures
March 1st, 2007 at 11:56 am
The glitz-test didn’t work well for me (Ubuntu Edgy Eft + self-compiled cairo 1.2.6 w/glitz enabled).
The animation itself is smooth and beautiful but the background is more or less random (but changes a bit once in a while) and the GTK+ buttons blink so I guess it’s because some of the double-buffering stuff got out of synch.
March 1st, 2007 at 1:07 pm
Hi,
just because I don’t want to have a look at your site every 10minutes:
When will lowfat so the light of the open source world?
Just a hint, please
March 1st, 2007 at 8:34 pm
@ Peter Lund: Hm… sounds like a GL-driver issue. While it worked on one machine it did not work on another. Main difference was gfx-chip and driver. Did you try it under a composited or non-composited environment? The stacking of widgets on top of a GL-context, which is created implicitly if you use the glitz-backend, currently cannot play well with gtk+. And the culprit of this is… ehm… gtk+. But this is a known issue and will be worked on afaik.
@ Stefan Schwarzburg: I hope to get things going before the weekend.
March 2nd, 2007 at 3:56 pm
Non-composited. I use the closed-source nvidia driver and — this might be important — I enable RandR rotation because I prefer portrait over landscape when I read/write code.
Here’s a portion of the glxinfo output:
OpenGL vendor string: NVIDIA Corporation
OpenGL renderer string: GeForce 6600 GT/AGP/SSE2/3DNOW!
OpenGL version string: 2.0.2 NVIDIA 87.76
Keep the beautiful bling coming
March 2nd, 2007 at 4:05 pm
Peter, you should use the 9631 driver.
The 8776 is pretty outdated.
March 2nd, 2007 at 4:37 pm
@ Peter Lund, Steveway: 1.0-9746 even -> http://www.nvidia.com/object/unix.html
March 2nd, 2007 at 4:57 pm
Yes, but the 9746 only adds support for the 88** cards and there are some posts about problems with them on beryl-project.org wich got fixed by using the 9631.
BTW, How is lowfat going? Will we see a glimpse today?
March 4th, 2007 at 10:21 pm
(whoa, that’s a rather unforgiving captcha thingy you have there — a simple disagreement over a few misplaced pixels and it throws out my entire comment!)
8776 may be old but it’s what Edgy Eft gives me.
Feisty Fawn should be out soon so I hope to give glitz-test another try within a month or two.
Thanks for the help so far