On Tue, Feb 22, 2011 at 3:49 PM, Philipp Überbacher <hollun...@lavabit.com> wrote:
> The rest sounds nice, and it might well be that X has become old, but I > don't see the big improvement coming up. Windows are called surfaces > now, can have different shapes and are more flexible, compositing, > transformations, I got that bit, but I don't see the UI improvement. > I've seen the demos with shapes flying around the desktop, I've seen > the conventional compositing window managers and wayland will probably > do all that and more, but I don't see the improvement in User > Interfaces. what its going to do,i think, is two-fold: 1) promote more and more toolkit design that makes everything just a compositing stack. GTK has already moved significantly in this direction, but could go a lot further. Qt is in a similar position. the more this happens, the easier it is to reason and create new GUI widgets that do cool things, easily and simply, because its all part of a very simple model: you draw to your surface, it will be composited onto the screen in ways that you don't have to worry about. sounds a bit like X ... except that X is explicitly *not* a compositing model. for a simpler explanation of the kind of thing i mean, consider the difference in ardour between the main "tracks" area of the editing window and all the widgets around it. its fundamentally impossible to implement the tracks with widgets - it uses a "canvas" object instead which embodies idea like z-axis stacking, transparency and so forth. but likewise at present it would be a lot of work to implement all the widgets as canvas "items". now fast forward a few years, and find a spot where the drawing model for the canvas, the button widgets, the tree/listviews, for everything *inside* the program is the same as the model for everything *outside* the program. drawing a particular "thing" on any other thing becomes identical, whether the other thing is a "window", a "button", a cell of a listview, etc, etc. 2) more and more apps able to take advantage of v-blank sync to reduce computational load due to unnecessary redraws. instead, the whole system will be a lot like a video-framebuffer version of JACK: the vblank interrupt arrives. everything with a surface gets a chance to redraw if it needs to, the surfaces are composited together, and boom, its on the display. no more guessing how often to redraw stuff, no more wierd ass hacks to get smooth animation, etc. if you think this sounds like special effects, i suggest a few minutes playing with a relevant iPod/iPhone/iPad app where these smooth transformations of what is on the screen is a central metaphor in how the UI's work. _______________________________________________ Linux-audio-dev mailing list Linux-audio-dev@lists.linuxaudio.org http://lists.linuxaudio.org/listinfo/linux-audio-dev