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palfrey at 02:36pm on 05/05/2004
palfrey at 02:36pm on 05/05/2004Brief non-geeky interlude: It's Liberation Day here in the Netherlands, and as my employers are a pair of quasi-govermental agencies, I have a day off! Yay!
High geekiness within, I know a fair number of you will glaze over completely at this sort of thing, so it's been cut
For those of us who have been following Redhat's attempts at a pseudo-Debian clone, I bring a wonderful explanation of what they're trying to do
Just saw a screenshot for Xchat-gnome last night, and it looks like someone's finally found a lot better model for showing multiple IRC windows. It's a perfect example of what the Gnome HIG can do when properly applied.
We've been seeing a lot of waffling around recently about Longhorn, and one thing that had a fair amount interest was Avalon (despite stories that MS are going to have to trim it just get Longhorn out in 2006... but anyways). Now, on the face of it, it's a Quartz clone. They both look nice, but there's not that much of real interest IMNSHO. Then, I looked at Cairo. It can be thought of as the open-source version of all of that. Except, with one major difference. The backends make all the difference (there's apparently a Windows-targeting one in the works as well). So, we get OpenGL accelerated 2D stuff, true-WYSIWYG printing, and all with backwards-compatability to bog-standard X servers... now here's a fun idea - imagine using a persistent Cairo-data-storage server to save your current application's graphical state, and to be able to export that state to another computer - like VNC, but properly integrated, and not just in the sense of doing X exports. AFAIK there's no way to switch the DISPLAY of a currently running X program, but Cairo can do it. Coolest bit about this is that it's already here (as opposed to MS vapourware), there's already code. Heck, I've been using Cairo-based GTK themes on my desktop :-) The next year or so is going to be very interesting for Linux desktops.
High geekiness within, I know a fair number of you will glaze over completely at this sort of thing, so it's been cut
For those of us who have been following Redhat's attempts at a pseudo-Debian clone, I bring a wonderful explanation of what they're trying to do
Just saw a screenshot for Xchat-gnome last night, and it looks like someone's finally found a lot better model for showing multiple IRC windows. It's a perfect example of what the Gnome HIG can do when properly applied.
We've been seeing a lot of waffling around recently about Longhorn, and one thing that had a fair amount interest was Avalon (despite stories that MS are going to have to trim it just get Longhorn out in 2006... but anyways). Now, on the face of it, it's a Quartz clone. They both look nice, but there's not that much of real interest IMNSHO. Then, I looked at Cairo. It can be thought of as the open-source version of all of that. Except, with one major difference. The backends make all the difference (there's apparently a Windows-targeting one in the works as well). So, we get OpenGL accelerated 2D stuff, true-WYSIWYG printing, and all with backwards-compatability to bog-standard X servers... now here's a fun idea - imagine using a persistent Cairo-data-storage server to save your current application's graphical state, and to be able to export that state to another computer - like VNC, but properly integrated, and not just in the sense of doing X exports. AFAIK there's no way to switch the DISPLAY of a currently running X program, but Cairo can do it. Coolest bit about this is that it's already here (as opposed to MS vapourware), there's already code. Heck, I've been using Cairo-based GTK themes on my desktop :-) The next year or so is going to be very interesting for Linux desktops.