[plug] Last nights Novell installfest question

[Russell]

On 8/3/06, Bernd Felsche <bernie at innovative.iinet.net.au> wrote:
> >I have no idea what good the wobbly windows are, but they look
> >impressive, until you start to feel seasick ...

Xgl and the window manager support (wobbly windows, transparent
windows, rotating desktops, and the rest) are features whose time has
come, in my opinion.

Mostly they make the desktop feel much more natural, like making
windows really act like sheets of paper.  Why shouldn't I be able to
grab the top corner of a window, have a quick look behind it by
peeling it back, then have it go back to where it was when I let go?
Imagine you're working on a document on paper, and you're referring to
other documents on the desk.  You'd do things like that all the time.

Transparency has already been useful for me, by making it possible to
work on the source code of a program in the top level window with that
window slightly transparent, such that I could monitor the progress of
the previous version of that program in the window behind.  Text on
text doesn't work well, but text on graphics does.

It used to be that you could maximise almost any window, and watch it
redraw itself to the new size.  With machines getting so much faster,
many windows now just snap to the new size with no visible delay. One
way to view Xgl and things like it (Xgl is what I have experience
with, but also Apple's effects, whatever they're called, and the stuff
supposedly coming in Vista) is that is slows down this process and
uses that time to provide useful feedback.

Some of the effects can be overdone, especially the wobbly windows.
But others are just so natural, like having a window deform as I'm
dragging it across the desktop.  I find myself wondering why
everything is so static on desktops without Xgl now, and it's only on
my laptop at the moment.

We finally have the graphics horsepower to make all this possible on
many existing desktops, and probably most new desktop installations.
Let's not ignore the possibilities because it's not what the desktop
did last year.