Long time no blog. With both Martin and myself out of development due to exams Luboš was the only active developer working on KWin last week (Minus some janitorial work) and he has already announced his changes, leaving very little for me to do. Now that I’m free once again and Martin almost done as well expect to see some nice improvements to desktop effects over the coming weeks. =D
The first thing I’d like to show off is the new window motion dynamics that will be available in trunk sometime over the next couple of days, if you can’t wait feel free to clone the “physics” branch in my Git repository (Just make sure to copy over those evil svn:externals before compiling). As a screenshot is useless for this here’s a short video of the new version, for those who dislike Flash an XviD version (Couldn’t get Theora working) is available here.
Comments
22nd September, 2008Gunni
What hardware do you have on this machine? I am asking because i am impressed by the smootheness, that i dont get here on my hardware.
22nd September, 2008parena
Oh, that’s very, very nice. Great stuff. If only I didn’t have nvidia. >_< Meanwhile, I though bad shadowing in wobbly mode was due to nvidia’s drivers as well.
@Gunni: don’t think you’ll need very high specs. Intel’s current onboard gfx chips handle this stuff with ease. My wife’s notebook beats the hell out of my GeForce 7600GT. As long as you don’t have nvidia, you should do fine. Beta’s of nvidia’s drivers are better, but still behind ‘the rest’, afaik.
22nd September, 2008Lucas Murray
I am running a nVidia 7800GT with stable drivers. There are all these people blaming nVidia for their slow drivers, their buggy drivers and their slow response to the issues—I’ve never had a problem. Here I am flying along at 50/60fps with minimal wasted resources and no graphical glitches.
The GeForce 7 series is currently the best family you can have at the moment, all the real nVidia “issues” only occur with the GeForce 8s and higher and the GeForce 6s and lower are becoming unmaintained legacy.
22nd September, 2008Michael
Hmm … you are doing cool things with KWin! But with this particular effect I’m not sure I like this. I mean it’s definitly cool to show off, like wobbly windows. However, while I like eye candy I found this to be a wee bit annoying in everyday use (like wobbly), back when I experimented with Beryl. In Beryl you couldn’t switch it off (IIRC). So please make it configurable (tm) and possibly off by default :) While present windows IMO has definitly a value in terms of usability, for serious work this bouncing could be the bit too much.
22nd September, 2008Lucas Murray
One step ahead of your Michael. It’s already possible to change the animation duration of all effects, you can even completely disable the animations if you want. As for the little “bounce” at the end it’s configurable in code but currently no front-end, I don’t really see why we can’t add it in though.
I use present windows as my main method of navigating the desktop (Which makes the panel completely redundant allowing it to be removed, increasing the available screen real estate) and when I have a lot of windows the animations actually help me work out which windows are which and allow me to select the one I want even before the animation is complete. If there was no animation then I wouldn’t have a clue of where the window I want moved to.
22nd September, 2008Michael
@Lucas: Yes of course, the animation is important to keep your orientation! That wasn’t what I meant, though. I was talking only about the bouncing. As I noted I used it with Beryl (So I can only talk about that, but from your video I gather that it’s more or less the same). I found the bouncing to be confusing, as it was no direct motion any more, but adding extra twists or shooting over. It also made the animation longer, by the time it took for the bounce to complete. As naturally one waits until it stops and doesn’t try to hit moving windows. Also the bounce is pure eye candy and adds no value (in terms of usability), contrary to the animation itself. It’s compareable to wobbly windows, just eye candy. That’s why I think it makes sense to let the user turn it off, or rather not turn it on by default (even though I can understand, if you want to show it to the world:)
PS: I feel a bit bad criticising you without actually having tried it, but well it’s not really meant as critics, it’s more that I’m concerned, based on my experience with Beryl :)
22nd September, 2008tbscope
Great stuff.
But watching the video, I think I’ll become sick if I use it too much. But I also have slight form of “car sickness”.
It might be a good idea to warn users that some effects might cause nausea or might not be suitable for people suffering from epilepsy.
22nd September, 2008mikmach
I have very, very old GeForce 2 MX 400 and KWin effects fly :)
I also don’t like bounce effect very much. Why? Quality of window rendering in previews is so high that I can already start “work” with its contents before it will gain real focus and reach its real size - bounce will make it harder or even impossible. See? - praise and criticism in one sentence ;)
22nd September, 2008Martin
Just decided that there are more important things than learning. For example trying out new KWin features :-D
First of all: I like it. But you have to add a configuration for the amount of bouncing ;-) For my taste the default is too aggressive (especially if you use presentwindows for alt+tab).
And well, I had to fix a crash :-D
22nd September, 2008Lucas Murray
For all those disliking the bouncing I also agree, it’s annoying. I’ve just looked back over the code and noticed a little mistake that makes the window bounce more the worse your framerate is. In reality there is no bounce at all, but when I was recording it forced my framerate down to 25fps which of course, due to the bug, made it really bouncy. I can’t believe I didn’t notice it before.
Rest assured, everything will be fine by release time. =)
22nd September, 2008kwilliam
Very cool! (Glad to hear the bouncing is a bug though!) I notice two different Present Window behaviors in the video; one like what I’m using with KDE 4.1.1, where the windows are put in a grid and sized all about the same, and another where relative size is respected. (And maybe even position? I notice they’re not in a grid.) I’m really looking forward to trying the new behavior, as window size is a key element (at least for me) in identifying a window. Important windows are usually maximized, yet with the old Present Windows, little dialog boxes were inflated to the same size, which made distinguishing windows more difficult. Awesome job on implementing relative size before I even requested such an option!
23rd September, 2008Daniel
Hallo Lucas,
you said that you are using present windows as your main method of navigating the desktop. I am also using this effect as alt+tab replacement (together with dim-inactive). But i find it really hard to determine my chosen window, means the one that will get the focus after releasing strg+tab.
Maybe it would be a good idea to highlight the selected window a bit more or to add another visual distinctive feature.
Best Regards, Daniel
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