- Previously the transparent hexagon was too slow to deploy over remote display, especially when you had software packages on the 6 sides. It's much faster now. Spinning the hexagon barely shows up as a blip on the server, seems like it would scale just fine.
- It's so much faster now in fact that I was able to enable the new spinning gears plugin for testing. Eye candy for sure, but the user community loves that kind of stuff.
- The new cubecap plugin is awesome. It gives you a lot more control over the image, and correctly supports transparent PNGs. It also works correctly if you have more than 4 sides.
To everyone that is working on this project, Thank You.
16 comments:
One question: "why"? At least Apple had the decency to discard most of their pointless visual effects before including the more useful ones in their actual product (and most of those aren't very useful either, so I can only imagine how pointless the other ones were!). I'm really becoming kind of embarrassed that the GNOME project is making a big song and dance about the sort of stuff that other desktop players have already had the sense to kill off behind closed doors.
re anonymous-
"kill off behind closed doors" is exactly why most of us are not using those other platforms.
3d integration is going to have lots of silliness and things leading nowhere but it's already head and shoulders above the competition because of that playfulness.
I understand your thoughts. I agree that the gears are just eye candy and there right now for performance testing. Very likely that will be turned off when we go live.
All of the other eye candy plugins have been turned off. But the things that are enabled are helping greatly and the feedback is very positive. Remember, it's not important what *we* can do as experienced users. It's the rest of the bell curve that we are addressing.
1) People have no idea how to use workspaces and could not picture how they work in their heads even after training. The hexagon provides them with a conceptual image of using workspaces and use has increased greatly. Everyone on the 3D desktop is spinning and putting software on the sides.
2) Users lose stuff in their window stacks all the time. They lose dialog windows, and launch multiple instances of software because they can't find them. The mouse over of task list showing running software has helped them greatly with this issue.
3) The ability to see all running software using the corner hot spot is a huge hit. They like being able to watch multiple packages running at the same time, and waiting for reports to finish without having to flip through workspaces.
4) The Expo plugin helps them move items between workspaces. Previously they would close a window, flip to a new workspace and then relaunch because they didn't know how to move it otherwise.
People that are longtime Windows users are sending me messages and telling me how nice this is and how much it's helping them.
When it comes to eye candy only, I agree with you 100%. But the 3D desktop also has a lot of other benefits. I'm testing these things and trying to find the right balance. So far, there has been no performance problems on the network or servers.
@ -anonymous- (1ยช post)
anyone that does not understand the potential market that 3D enviromments are leading towards, is brain dead.
Come on, why on earth java had this on going 3D desktop for 2~3 years.
Huh?? 9_9 which is going to be the difference btwn a blackberry, iphone, or a nokia n-800 ??.. let's say in 5 years, they can do browsing, p2p messaging, games.
By that time it will eventually connect over an Iplasma below your toilete or something similar... # @|@ #
Eventually something has to step towards, and highlight the track between these cheese mobiles and whatever is to come.
I say that in some time (less than you imagine..) everythin' will be 3D dimensional, browsers will, and every tiny app, anyone else that doesn't make that move, will be out of the game just by the simple fact, that they couln't draw the _THICK_ line between an Iphone, N800, N1200..(or whatever).
***cough***good luck m$!!, I'm so sorry you cannot do Decent 3D!! ; (
c ya on your next re-incarnation!! ...maybe running on a microwave oven will be great for you... something too bloated has always fit you.
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