Told’ya I wouldn’t be gone for long…

Well, two months ago I told you I was taking exam leave and now …. 3 … 2 … 1… EXAMS ARE OVER, WOOOT!!!

And now I’m back again. After two long months of doing study and development in my spare time. Expect to see me around a little more now! I’m not going to do a full news post today as the local time is approaching 12:00AM and I have to go back to school tommorrow to get my exams back, but here are a few tidbits which you should be aware of:

Animation Addon:

You’ve probably all seen cornelius‘ post on the forums now about animation being split into two plugins, animation and animationaddon. Not exactly a big deal in itself, but it does have huge implications for the future:

• Animations plus is no longer a copy of animation with more animations, instead it provides those animations to animation
• Creating an animation for the animation plugin is a lot easier as you don’t need to modify the entire plugin just to add an animation
• All plugins can now insert options into other plugins where supported and defined (only animation does this right now). This means, however, than an extendable elements plugin may be on the way

Chroma-Keying plugin, in development:

PatrickFisher has created with the help of a few other developers, a chroma-keying plugin or ‘green-screen’ plugin as he calls it. It has similar functionality to FakeARGB, but you can configure which colors to key-out.

Forum Link

What I’ve been doing:

Well, I told you that I’d be working on three things, Compiz MPX and IR patches, A framework for windows to animate themselves through compiz and the aformentions ’secret’ which some of you have already figured out. Bad news is that I haven’t had time to work on all three. Good news is that I have had time to work on the first one and sequentially port every plugin to MPX / IR Compiz. Here is a teaser video for you.

Notes:

• This is far from ready, I have yet to port all the plugins (I’m working on mag now), it should be by about November, but I can’t guaruntee anything
• It requires patches to your X Server
• The thumbnail plugin might be particularly buggy, mainly because I can’t get enterNotify events to work in MPX and there are a few memory management issues
• I am in no way seeking for these to be accepted into compiz. Rather, I am providing a base so that porting plugins to the MPX spec can be easier if and when the compiz guys get around to doing it
• The Move, Resize, Annotate plugins and core MPX stuff was written by Peter Hutterer. I did the patches to firepaint, mousepoll, thumbnail, showmouse and freewins.
• Thanks to b0le for reviving the input redirection patches.

See you all soon!

SmSpillaz