Some compositor issues

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 to work out why its not working.

Next: Now that some windows have argb visuals some buggy themes may have translucent parts where there weren’t translucent parts before. Gilouche was one of these themes and Jimmac fixed it up recently. So if you start seeing through the window title bars, tell your theme author.

Also, I’ve been getting reports of terrible performance and rendering issues with xgl. It seems xgl doesn’t like any of the non-GL compositors, so I don’t know what to do about that.

Finally, on a happier note – a big thank you to whoever bought me stuff from my wishlist. Its much appreciated, even if it did take me two days before I noticed my parents had piled up my mail in a weird place while I was away…

Trip the light fantastic

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 colour on the region that was redrawn. So you can watch screen updates as they happen. Just by watching the colours change.

Besides being a cheap night in, what use is it?

Well, here is video #2 – http://folks.o-hand.com/iain/totem-button.ogg

Again, crap quality, but down in the bottom left corner of the screen, we can see that something is constantly redrawing itself. That something is the totem-mozilla play button. It seems to be constantly redrawing itself for no apparent reason. Bastien got a bug for you.

By popular request

Some people have expressed concern about the panel drop shadows. At least three people didn’t like that they drew the shadows over the windows close to them. So in response I’ve just committed a change that makes the panel drop shadows only draw on the desktop. I think it looks quite neat and tidy actually. One person said “Oh cute”

Here’s a now obligatory screenshot

Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported.