In article <u685h.50608$r61.35758@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>,
Mareeba <mareeba@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> > A must-see video:
> >
> > http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PpIhoLzDOTY
> >
> > Beryl 3D Window Layer Plugin
> >
> > High-quality versions and screenshots at:
> >
> > http://www.saguratus.com/nick/beryl/layers/
>
>
> All very nice, not sure if it does anything for usability, but it looks
> fun enough. It's a shame that the Intel GMA series of integrated
A big question is what the developer support will be like. Is this
mostly just going to be something used to write really cool window
managers, or will it be easily available to any application?
If the later, it could become extremely useful and usable. Look at Core
Animation, which will be in the next version of OS X, to see where this
kind of thing can go if it is available to developers. There's a little
demo of it on this page, being used to animate a very large number of
images of album covers from a music library:
<http://www.apple.com/macosx/leopard/coreanimation.html>
Note that with Core Animation, each of the things being animated can be
text, an image, an OpenGL scene, or video, and (this is the really cool
part) the Core Image filters and effects can be applied to any of these.
There's a list of the standard Core Image processing units here:
<http://www.apple.com/macosx/features/coreimage/>
I haven't seen any demos yet on Linux that show anywhere near the power
and flexibility of what OS X Tiger now has, let alone what Leopard will
have. But even if the Linux stuff never acquires all the features of
the OS X stuff, if it is made available in such a way that developers
can easily use it in their apps, great things will come of it.
I'm not sure where Vista is in this space. (No pun intended!). I don't
think Aero comes anywhere near Tiger in this area, and have no idea
where it stands compared to the Linux offerings. Anyone know?
--
--Tim Smith
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