January 27, 2009 – 12:00 pm
GNOME bug 504729 suggests that switching with alt-tab, while using compositing, is too slow. This is because all the images of the windows are scaled on the client side before the window is displayed.
There are two possible answers to this problem.
Firstly, we can check for key release while scaling is happening, and if [...]
January 26, 2009 – 12:00 pm
In GNOME bug 502491 someone is asking for an effect like Exposé on OS X. Iain, who wrote the compositor and ought to know, believes it would be better done as a separate program. There was an attempt to do this a while back, called Expocity, but nothing much came of it. Does this [...]
January 25, 2009 – 11:05 pm
True to my promise, here’s the first bug/squib of the day.
In GNOME bug 567757 someone is asking for live previews in the alt-tab window. I can’t think why this would actually be useful, as opposed to pretty, and it sounds like a lot of work and a source of new bugs. I am therefore [...]
It seems, from reading blogs and forums, that many people like the idea of using Metacity’s compositor but are scared of changing the deep magic of gconf. In addition, there is nothing in the “–help” text to show that we have a compositor at all. Therefore, I propose a new switch to override [...]
December 20, 2007 – 12:27 pm
So, now that the compositor is in trunk and everyone is excited, this might be a good time to mention some “issues”.
Firstly, it seems that there are some weird shadow redrawing problems…these just appeared recently, so it shouldn’t be hard to find the offending commit. I think I know what it is, I just need [...]
December 19, 2007 – 12:39 pm
Thanks to Iain Holmes and Thomas Thurman for improvements in this version. This is the first unstable release to contain the new compositor; please try it out and let us know how it goes for you. Downstream maintainers should note that its GConf key is initially turned off in src/metacity.schemas.in and consider whether to turn [...]
December 19, 2007 – 3:54 am
Iain’s compositor is now on trunk since it now meets every requirement I wrote about here. It looks gorgeous. It will be in the next unstable release, which will happen before the weekend. Do not use bucket-o-bling any more; it is a dead branch. Work will continue on trunk. This closes GNOME bug 499081. [...]
December 13, 2007 – 8:06 pm
Someone asked about this and I was going to tell them, but then I thought I’d say it here. I will merge Iain’s compositor branch when:
there are no known
large memory leaks
security holes
crashes
it can be turned off entirely from ./configure and GConf
when it is turned off in GConf or ./configure, the code paths are substantially the [...]
November 29, 2007 – 7:38 pm
Useful uses for a compositor #1
Some videos this time, they’re not particularly good quality but that doesn’t matter. First – http://folks.o-hand.com/iain/watch-updates.ogg
Its like acid, but cheaper!
So what exactly are we seeing?
Well, everytime a section of the screen needs to be redrawn, the compositor draws it correctly, and then picks a random colour and overlays that [...]
November 28, 2007 – 8:12 pm
Some recent changes to the compositor made it feel kinda slow and laggy. Not in a noticable way but more in a subconscious something feels wrong way. I tested xfwm and it seemed fine running as a compositor, and given that Metacity’s compositor has the same heritage as xfwm’s and I’ve been checking the xfwm [...]
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