I've had the privilege to see this in action, it's quite nice, and fast
enough for regular use.

When a window loses focus, it smoothly becomes transparant. You can
double-click on the title bar and that rotates the window, where you'll
find a sticky note that you can write stuff on :).

The bar at the bottom contains live snapshots of the running windows.

I wonder how they do the rendering, perhaps with some directfb
lookalike. In any case, Java is used for everything, except maybe the X
server itself.

As for the patents: I don't know, but I don't think making something
transparant when it loses focus is such a whoop-ti-do idea that they
should go and patent it. I'd prefer shrinking the window anyway. And I'm
pretty sure you'll find prior art for most of the stuff they do.

I looked at the freedesktop.org xserver, and it has the transparancy and
live thumbnailing of windows as well, although some work is needed on a
window manager to actually make these features nice to use.

But still a very nice project. I was surprised that Sun had this in the
works, since they seemed to have dropped the ball on the desktop imho.
Happy to see them making efforts like this :)

Wout.

Today at 15:03, Ralf Nolden sat down and wrote:

> Hi,
>
> I know coolo will accuse me again for polluting this mailinglist with
> unimportant information :) though I nevertheless want to take the risk.
>
> http://wwws.sun.com/software/looking_glass/demo.html
>
> has a real video demo of Sun's research project looking glass, more or less a
> 3d window manager. It might give you some ideas and hints of what can be done
> with Qt 4 and things like transparency and postscript capabilities found in
> the MacOS desktop. It's certainly something we should be interested in, in
> particular as the research demo has been made to work on Sun's Java Desktop
> primarily.
>
> Ralf
> --
> We're not a company, we just produce better code at less costs.
> --------------------------------------------------------------------
> Ralf Nolden
> nolden@kde.org
>
> The K Desktop Environment       The KDevelop Project
> http://www.kde.org              http://www.kdevelop.org
>
 
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