Compiz Fusion Community News for May 7th, 2008: An edition of bling and subtlty (nice contrasts!)

More CF news is down the tubes this week, major highlights being

• A FULL sphere deformation mode for cubeaddon (rock on onestone! \o/)
• A subtler static applications switcher
• A subtler set a viewport switching plugins
• New features for dodge, freewins, etc
• Progress on a new decorator
  

Bug News

• ‘Deform only on manual rotate’ option fixed in cubeaddon
• Option added to override windows that set the USPosition or PPosition hint in the place plugin
• Fix ‘Grey and White windows of death’ on some cards by working around a bug in drivers
• Windows which don’t have the minimize action set can now only be minimized externally by the same program if it is minimized (i.e gobby)
• Only show the window menu if there isn’t a screengrab set to avoid screengrab deadlocks (freezes)
• Optimised cube addons a little
• The main plugin view in CCSM now updates when any plugin changes
• Action conflicts are checked for when enabling a plugin, for example, having ring enabled with default settings then enabling shift will trigger a conflict
• Wall now initiates when the switcher plugin is active (so if you switch to another window on another desktop, wall should now flip to that desktop while the switcher is active)
• Options now change while the dodge plugin is active
• Unmatched windows no longer moved in the ‘dodge’ animation
• Inside cube plugins now deform with the cube when the cube is deformed (no more cylinder / sphere cube and square atlantis )
• Wiimote plugin actually split into files
• Simple-CCSM works without any ‘effects’ plugins installed

News in Features

The bling:

onestone has once again waved his openGL wand for us once again and has merged the cubecaps plugin into the cubeaddon plugin, so now we are able to deform the cube caps as well. Like most of his work, it’s only ever explainable with screenshots - here goes!

I apologise for some of the VSync issues I am experiencing. As you can see from the screenshots, the cube caps are rounded off as with the rest of the cube - so if you have a 4:3 screen, you will see a ’sphere’ - as for the rest of us .. we’ll see a 3D oval But still awesome nonetheless

Simpler Stuff

maniac has whipped up another simple-but-useful plugin this week too, called staticswitcher. Staticswitcher is a lot like the old switcher, but instead of rotating between thumbnails, it displays all thumbnails and the box selects each one. Below is a screenshot

User yogensha has created two simple viewport switching plugins which use subtle transitions instead of spinning cubes and sliding panes etc. The two plugins are called vpsswitch and vpsfade, the first just switching viewports whereas the second just fades windows between them. I’m really hoping that these two plugins can be the framework for more plugins like this to come, check out Mac OS X VirtueDesktops to see what I mean. The two plugins can be found here

New window decorator, codename JASPER

b0le has temporarily suspended work on the cubedbus plugin (which I intend to write the code to the GUI to my manager for) to work on a new window decorator, codenamed jasper. He is taking into consideration some of the considerations found in this thread to replace the aging emerald window decorator. It’s currently in a pre-alpha stage at the moment, I’ve found that it wont work for me on my nvidia card, so here is a hotlinked screenshot from b0le:

Jasper

If it displays properly, you’ll notice that there are tabs the come out of the window. The decoration is shaped so that only the tabs are clickable and not what would be the square border around them. It has full support for svg themes too, although the implementation is quite basic. More at b0le’s bl0g (sorry for the pun :/)

Installation instructions:

git-clone git://anongit.compiz-fusion.org/users/b0le/jasper
cd jasper
./build
./jasper –replace
(only need the second one if it doesn’t work first time)
./jasper –replace
Other improvements

• Freewins has an ‘invert key’ hold down the key to invert the current rotation mode and toggle on/off snapping.
• Dodge can now be activated with a screencorner

Tip of the Week

This sound rather lame, but if you are a newcomer and are eager to get in more on the bleeding edge of compiz, I would suggest heading down to the feature requests and plugin development. That is where most of the ideas and development start before things end up on gitweb

Conclusion

Well that’s it for this week’s edition of Compiz Fusion Community News. Keep an eye on those forums as there is a lot of new stuff coming up which will be good news material for next week

EDIT: Fixed link for b0le’s blog.

- SmSpillaz

Got my new laptop … Finally

Finally got my XPS m1530. It was freed from vice-ta as iXce called it within 30 minutes. Runs compiz like a dream, A little hint would be to turn of anti-aliasing in nvidia-settings and turn on blur so that the built-in 8600GT clocks up to it’s best speed. You won’t believe the next screenshot:

I have yet to see any choppyness when I’ve got rain, blur, motion blur, tons of windows open, transparent cube & 3D, cube deformations and 3 videos and 4 redirected (beat that OasisGames) GL apps running.

Only problems I’ve run into so far with this laptop is the expresscard slot not being recognised, so I can’t watch TV, the internal mic not working, eject touch-button being locked and the fact that it is missing from the sleep whitelist, so it can’t sleep yet (it can hibernate though!)

Also, it runs at a nice and cool 40C when compiling software, so I wont have overheating wasting my time anymore (Juts a lot more drooling and gaming!)

Overall, I’d certainly recommend this laptop to linux users - runs like a dream!

Compiz White & Black Frozen screen fix

Hi,

If you are getting a freeze and black & white screen ever since the latest compiz-git, just issue a:

git revert 0c1fc202acbfdc66751b97a59d3a962ed66579b9

in your compiz sources directory.

EDIT: onestone has added a workaround. Just update compiz.

If you are not experiencing this issue, IGNORE this post.

- SmSpillaz

Compiz Fusion Community News for Friday April 25th, 2008: Sphere-like cubes cairo-text!

Hello!

More and more improvements to the Compiz Fusion codebase this week, some highlights including: Sphere-like cube deformation, cairo text backgrounds and workspace naming.

Compiz Fusion Community News for April 17, 2008

I’m back!

Alright, it seems like a very long time since I’ve written this and over the past couple of days I’ve been itching to write something about all the cool new features, bugfixes and community plugins out there over the past month or so. All the web themes and stuff are now up too, Huge thanks to iXce and the Web Team for that - now Compiz-Fusion.org has a more integrated look to it.

Highlights for this entry are The new and wonderful Cube Cylinder deformation, More and More improvements to Freely Transformable Windows with a good roadmap ahead of us, The beginnings of a Compiz Fusion Live CD and the springy and fun Dodge Window plugin.

Ugh

Dear Interwobs

Can someone give me a pre-compiled for SUSE 10.3 version of the X Server with DRI2. My laptop overheats the minute I try to compile anything :/

Freewins

So I’ve been working on Freewins over the past few days.

Basically, here is a nice little changelog for you:

• Input prevention that actually works (Unlike the previous broken method which had some problems regarding initial window size), Thanks to Danny Baumann and Kristian Lyngstol for making this an example in the shelf plugin - which is largely what most of this work is based on.
• A more fluid animation.
• Auto-Zooming

TODO List:

• Window Hover-Over info
• Resize on input-prevented windows

- SmSpillaz

Compiz Fusion Community News for 25th March 2008: Webgits, Curved Expo, Wallpaper Re-Write!

Hello There!

Welcome to yet another edition of the Compiz Fusion Community News, lots of cool new things for you to try out this time (and even more for users of those other OS’s to be jealous of). This time we’ve got a few bugfixes, a sleek new curved expo mode, screenlets supporting web-based widgets and a re-write of the Wallpaper plugin.

Also new, but not covered in this post because I already covered it is the new Freewins damage and shaping engine.

News in Bugs

• Core now updates window types before applying states (preventing it from applying a window state to a potentially incorrect window)
• Windows that have no minimize action associated with them will no longer minimize
• Animations now finish correctly in freewins (preventing duplicate windows from being shown due a mask being set)
• Atlantis2 now renders slightly faster
• Fix potential crash when using simple-ccsm with another language
• Windows which were minimized when compiz first starts are now unminimized with the minimize animation and not the opening animation.

News in Features

Webgits!

Well, whise (The main developer of screenlets) has added functionality to the main screenlets branch which allows you to use web-based HTML widgets and gadgets as screenlets! Unfortunately, I’m not able to grab screenshots, but it allows you to grab the widget’s code location from Google Gadgets, Spring Widgets, WidgetBox and Yourminis Widgets and display that web widget as a screenlet. Darknesssssskrad makes a great video tutorial on how to grab a widget from the web and turn it into a screenlet

Web Widgets are certainly my Screenlet of the Week!

Curved Expo Mode

Onestone has woven his magic coding wand and brings us another eye-popping cool effect, now to the Expo plugin with the Curved Expo Display!

This is a normal mode with and without reflection

Or you can make the curves very intense!

Of course, all the other expo configuration options apply; distance, reflection and also two new options to configure the brightness and saturation of unused viewports.

Wallpaper Re-Write

Thanks to a re-write of the wallpaper plugin, brightness and saturation changes are now applied no matter what plugin paints the desktop window. Here is an example with multiple wallpapers with expo - before and after:

Oh no!

It works!

And finally the compulsory ‘Shiny Desktop With Expo’ pic

It still requires that you patch your desktop manager for Compiz Wallpaper support , or if you have a recent version of KDE, it should work anways. Finally, you also need the new BCOP to build it as that has the PLUGIN_DISPLAY/SCREEN/WINDOW macros built in.

Other Stuff

Wiimote Plugin Video

Alright, so I said I would make this last week, but I’ve been swamped with real life recently, so I only got around to doing this now. Here it is =)

Tip of the Week

If you’re trying to get support and are sick of all those

“A handler is already registered for the path starting with path[0] = “org”"

getting in the way of your really important debug output then simply disable the DBUS plugin

Well., thats it for this week. I’m off to go and fix bugs in freewins now - which have bee annoying me for a while. Hope they are fixed soon! Bye!

Freewins

So over the past week and a half, I set out to finally rid freewins of it’s CPU usage due to window rotation. On the day that I tried it out, I found it much harder than I thought it would be. Let’s start with some background first:

Freewins is quite a simple plugin, just get some cursor movement events and rotate and scale some windows around. As you may recall, I added features like scaling, shaping and key-movement a while back. The problem with freewins was that it tells compiz to redraw the entire screen every single time a window is rotated and the screen needs to be updated. Thing is, that we don’t  need to update the whole screen - usually only a little bit has changed, like a carat blinking on your terminal. Updating parts of the screen has been around in compiz for a while, but freewins hasn’t made use of it until now.

Using some somewhat complicated mathematics and OpenGL code, I’ve managed to get Freewins to update only the necessary areas of the screen by tracking 4 points in 3D, projecting them into 2D and then drawing a box based on those points. The resulting box fully covers the window while transformed in any way and only the window is refreshed, not the whole screen.

But it doesn’t stop there! Remember how I added input shaping a while back? Well, it had one big problem. Rotate a window 180 degress in either X or Y and you have this huge input shape blocking your desktop!

I don’t like it!

The other side to this problem is that you could seem to click on a window, but you’ll click right through it, to the next window - which you can’t see! What happens if it was a hypothetical ’sudo rm -rf /*’ (Don’t try that at home) button!

Thankfully, I’ve solved that problem and now the input region is at a somewhat sane size:

That blue region is drawn in real-time.

Where to from here? Well, I’ve got a couple of things on my TODO list, such as

• Auto-Zooming of windows to make them fit their original box
• Better axis-help (3D rotated containment circles)
• Input prevention and better input shaping (looking on shelf and group)

For those who are interested, I’ll post the code if you just read more =)

Unfail blag for planet

Planet Compiz Fusion no longer displays the last image used in this post in the title name anymore. I did some poking around and realized the normal RSS feed had gone bad, so iXce and I found the atom feed and are now using that (I couldn’t find it at first!). If your shiny RSS reader is displaying random image names instead of actual post names from my blag, please update your feeds and add this one:

http://smspillaz.wordpress.com/feeds/atom

Just one of the many reasons to host a blag these days. Of couse, I really can’t be bothered to pay for hosting, handle the digg effect, and fight spam as it floods in. Oh well