Feb 08 2006

Xgl and the future of Virtue

Wow. Holy goddamn crap.

http://​www​.nov​ell​.com/​l​i​n​u​x​/​x​g​l​r​e​l​ease/

Watch the movies. Especially the cube. I’m sorry guys, but it will be a while before I can make a desktop manager that will do that on the mac. As I mentioned in my earlier posts about Virtue, I’m just starting out with mac programming — if people want to see a desktop manager similar to the one Nat and co demoed, I’m going to need guru help. Virtue has basically hit a wall in terms of visuals — we’re limited to what Apple decides to include in the CoreGraphics/​Dock code, and even then, they could pull all the transitions at any point. We need a way forward.

Here’s a list of things I’m looking into, but would appreciate advice on from anyone in the know:

  • The internals of how Mac OS is presently managing the existence of two user accounts logged in at the same time in relation to NSWorkspace/​desktops. You may have noticed that Virtue presently changes desktops and then the desktop picture changes, whereas in fast user switching the desktop picture is part of the transition. I’m sure I’m missing something small in the entirely undocumented, entirely unsupported calls I’m making (:P), but if anybody else has ever looked at this code, and has any ideas, I’m all ears!
  • OpenGL vs. CoreImage. As much as I’d love to use CoreImage as the basis for whatever effect/​transition engine this new desktop manager uses, from what I’ve seen CI transitions are slow. Especially for large images. Am I right in assuming that OpenGL is likely to be more efficient? What is being used in Keynote? I would love to have the extensibility of CoreImage though…

Don’t count this as being an announcement of an actual product yet — I want to make this happen, but I’m not even sure it’s possible. Chances are that I’ll spend the next 7 months writing something, and 10.5 will include everything we’re looking for (fingers crossed!).

Am I nuts? Wait… don’t answer that…

Comments

Generic user icon.

Well, I do have one word on this: WOW!! :o

Posted by pgrilo on

Generic user icon.

thanks for keep­ing this alive!

Posted by chris on

Generic user icon.

Tony,

Virtue already looks bet­ter than almost every other multi-​desktop util­ity — for any plat­form. Per­son­ally, what I'd like from virtue is not bet­ter visu­als, but more func­tion­al­ity: I'm still unable to send win­dows to other desk­tops, and I can't set hotkeys for more than 4 desk­tops for some rea­son. Some sort of expose type mode for all desk­tops could be really cool, too.

Thanks for con­tin­u­ing to work on virtue, and I hope you had a great time in Vietnam.

Posted by Henry on

Generic user icon.

Really, I have to agree with Henry… although I'm still on 10.3.x (on a Pismo!!), I expect to be on new hard­ware, and thus 10.4, within a month or 2… all I'll want at that time is a work­ing equiv­a­lent of .5r2.

(Ok, I also want to fig­ure out what has cmd-​opt-​7 mapped already so that I can't hotkey to desk­top 7, but that's a seper­ate issue. :)

Thanks for the work!

Posted by JB Segal on

Generic user icon.

Hey,

Thanks for con­tin­u­ing the work with Virtue, it is awsome.
Though I had some prob­lems with Virtue in the begin­ning. It didn't start, and when I looked in the con­sole it said some­thing about “Excep­tion raised dur­ing post­ing of noti­fi­ca­tion” and it just wouldn't start after that. Well, it did start since I had to quit it through the activ­ity mon­i­tor, but I couldn't use it.

This is how it started work­ing for me atleast:
I recently rein­stalled Tiger on my Power­Book G4 and since I couldn't really live with­out some vir­tual desk­tops, but I couldn't down­load Desk­top Man­ager for some rea­son, so I started to look for some­thing else. And I found Virtue and it looked great and every­thing, but it was kinda out­dated. So I found your updated build and got my hopes up, but then it didn't start like I described above.

Any­way, I could finally down­load Desk­top Man­ager after a cou­ple of days. I installed it and started to use it, but then I fig­ured I'd test Virtue one last time before throw­ing it away. Said and done, and whoops — Virtue is now work­ing like a charm. I know this might be a long­shot but it's cer­tainly is work­ing for me after I tried Desk­top Manager.

Cheers
Alexander

Posted by Alexan­der on

Sorry, this conversation has finished.

This post is a bit old now, so I've closed the conversation. If you're keen to keep talking about it, please email me directly.