February 08, 2006

Xgl and the future of Virtue

Wow. Holy goddamn crap.

http://www.novell.com/linux/xglrelease/

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…

Xgl and the future of Virtue

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