XGL/Compiz Goodness: now with video!
So, what’s better than a still screenshot of the XGL/Compiz eye-candy running on my linux desktop? Why, a video, of course! I finally figured out how to record desktop movies using VLC, so I recorded this short (about 28 seconds) video of some of the neat visual effects, such as the bendy windows, Multiple desktops on different faces of a cube, transparency, videos continuing to play whie being moved and bended, Expose-like effects, and more. Can your Windows or Mac desktop do this? 
May 14th, 2006 at 3:41 am
The bendi windows are disturbing, the multiple desktops on a cube can be duplicated without putting them on a cube and just using multiple desktops … more effective, less hardware intesive, and easier on the eyes. Easy stacking and unstacking of windows is also possible in XP, same as the transparencies. So, nope, nothing new.
May 14th, 2006 at 11:13 am
Way to be a wet blanket.
I do think you’re missing the point, though. Yes, XGL/Compiz is, in large part, pure eye-candy. But after a while of using it, it becomes quite a bit more. The video doesn’t show all the things that it does, that I’ve come to rely on after a while.
I’ve found that the things it does are, in many ways, enhancements to the things you can already do. Let’s run them down:
Bendy windows: while the general ‘wobble’ effect is pure eye-candy, and can be turned off if it distracts you, having the windows themselves be bendable has become second nature to me. Grabbing a corner or side of a window and bending it back for a quick peek at how another program is doing becomes second nature after a short while, and is a surprisingly intuitive motion, much like you’d peek back at another page on a book or newspaper. Yes, you could always have just switched to the other window to look at it, then switched back, but I find the peeking motion to be more natural in many ways.
Multiple desktops on a cube. Again, large part is eye candy, but it has its uses. First off, Windows doesn’t even *have* multiple desktops to begin with, without installing additional software, and, in my experience, most WIndows multiple desktop software isn’t terribly responsive. If that has improved in the 2 or so years since the last time I tried to implement them on XP, then I stand corrected. In any case, the cube: from an education standpoint, I’ve found that explaining multiple desktops to folk can be a bit harrowing: coming from the ‘one desktop’ Windows world, they just don’t *get* it. However, put some windows on each side of the cube, and spin it around a bit, showing each desktop as a contiguous side on a physical cube, and suddenly it *clicks*. The human mind is generally better at graping concepts that seem even semi-physical rather than completely abstract ones, it seems. Also, the cube can encourage the same time of ‘peeking’ behavior as the bendy windows, where you grab a side of the cube and pull it slightly towards you, just enough to see what the programs on the next side of the cube are up to, then let go and the cube snaps back into place. Very intuitive way of dealing with leaving programs running on other desktops.
Expose and Switcher: Both of these are huge improvements in usability, to me, not just eye candy (thought they are pretty). Move the mouse to a corner of the screen, and all the windows in you desktop fly about and stack themselves so you can pick the one you want. Beautiful, simple, and the windows themselves keep doing what they were doing before: pages keep downloading, videos keep playing, text keeps scrolling, which is great, because if one window does something interesting while you’re switching, you see it happen right there and can give attention to it immediately. Same thing with the Alt-Tab Switcher: you see a miniature of the active window, and can quickly tell if there’s something there you need to attend to.
Transparencies and fades: Semi transparent window borders, making windows transparent when you move them, adjusting window transparency on the fly, fading windows out as you switch to another to give the active window more prominence, all of this quickly becomes a kind of low-bandwith visual shorthand. It becomes a natural and non-intrusive way of telling, at a glance, which windows are where, which are currently selected, which have been in the background for a while, etc. Yes, we have a lot of this information already in Windows and other regular desktops, but this way of presenting it strikes me as more elegant and intuitive.
So it’s not all just eye candy. And if you find any particular effect too distractnig, turning it off or toning it down is quite easy. But once you really get to play with it, you see that a lot of it also presents some interesting usability improvements hidden there with all the eye candy.
And let’s not forget, that a *bunch* of those eye candy effects that you’re dismissing as unnecesary, are being trumpeted by Microsoft as reasons to pick up Vista when it comes out, since it will have many of these same effects. And they’ve already stated that Vista will require very high-end graphics cards and/or special monitors to display these effects fully, while XGL/Compiz runs on any GeForce 4 or higher video card (and those are a buck a dozen nowadays). You may dismiss some of these improvements out of hand, and that’s fine, but not even MS or Apple are doing so. Upcoming versions of both OS’s have already been announced as including the same, or similar eye-candy-cum-usability improvements. I just get them a bit earlier, on hardware and software *I* can control.
May 14th, 2006 at 1:04 pm
But I hate Vista too.
May 14th, 2006 at 2:24 pm
Hehe.. in that case, I’ll say no more.
May 15th, 2006 at 7:44 am
Interesting, K. I saw your video and thought, “And the point of this *is*?” Now that you bring up intuituion and interfaces, it makes more sense. I have been thinking about design lately, and user interfaces, although I was not focused on software at the time. I still odn;t understabd the multiple desktops concept though. Why would I wnat multiple desktops? To categorize/segregate the various window functions?
May 15th, 2006 at 4:49 pm
When I was in the Air Force multiple desktops were a must. I had two monitors set up, on one I had all the incoming messages and a map of the mission area with all the intel feeds on it. On my other monitors I had different desktops set up, one with all the apps for writting, and sending reports, another desktop for tracking reports that have been sent out and reading incoming reports. And a third desktop with an internet browser for doing research. All of them were set up so that immediate information that was mission critical would always be vissible, some programs were displayed on all the desktops.
May 17th, 2006 at 9:48 am
Hey looks cool. I’m also a kubuntu user but have had problem setting it up. Which How-to did you use?