On Fri, Aug 29, 2003 at 02:41:39PM +0300, Tzafrir Cohen wrote: > On Fri, Aug 29, 2003 at 10:13:03AM +0300, Oded Arbel wrote: > > On Monday 25 August 2003 10:05, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: > > > The things I think are the most useful in the OS-X interface are: > > > > > > 1. The ability to sort of "zoom out" where all the application windows > > > are resized to be small enough so they don't overlap, in that state you > > > can pick the window you want to switch to, then all windows resize > > > back to their normal state. They'll keep updating in that "smaller" state > > > too.
How about putting windows in decent places in the first place? OS-X does not have virtual desktops. When you have virtual desktops you don't urgently need all of those workarounds just to clear some space. In addition, my window manager (IceWM) helps me to avoid overlapping windows as much as possible. This is done by: * initial placement avoids overlapping in the first place * edge resistance: I can't easily drag one window on-top of another: I'll be blocked on the border > > > > The reason you can do that, and all other neat things OS-X does, is what apple > > calls "Quartz Extreme". its very simple concept and not far from other things > > people are playing with on Linux: they map each window as a texture map over > > a rectangular 3D object using the graphic's hardware 3D acceleration mode. > > after you do that, you can manipulate the window in hardware - resize it, > > make it translucent, swipe it here and there, etc' all in hardware and as > > long as you keep updating the texture bitmap that represents the actual > > content of the window, users' will be non the wiser. > > > > Only problem is : you can't do it in X, because X was designed a long time > > before any decent 3D hardware acceleration was even thought of, and as a > > result X sucks. > > Sorry, this is not a good argument. There are quite a few technologies > that were merged into X that were not known at 1985. > > What would it take to extend X in that direction? And just to give two examples: It was claimed that X is inefficient because everithing is carried on top of network connections. The XFree folks didn't think that this is an inherent problem of X. They added an extention to the X protocol to allow clients that connect from the same host to use shared memory in addition to sockets. The result is that the network overhead was practically eliminated for local clients. Some other folks believed that efficiant graphics subsystem could only be implemented in the kernel. Remember Windows NT4? Aparantly once in a while someone asks why it shouldn't be the same for linux. And that one is given the standard answer: "Sorry, it won't help, and only bloat the kernel". -- Tzafrir Cohen +---------------------------+ http://www.technion.ac.il/~tzafrir/ |vim is a mutt's best friend| mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] +---------------------------+ ================================================================= To unsubscribe, send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the word "unsubscribe" in the message body, e.g., run the command echo unsubscribe | mail [EMAIL PROTECTED]
