Almost a week ago I added blur effect to KWin. It's purpose is to blur background of translucent windows to make text in such windows more readable. With standard translucency, if there's a window containing text below a translucent window, then the text in the translucent window is hardly readable. The effect blurs out fine details such as text, resulting in much better and usable transparency. While the background windows are blurred, they're still visible enough to see movement or changes, making transparency useful for e.g. monitoring activity of Konsole windows.
I've made two videos as well. First one (YouTube link, direct link) shows just a silly demo effect that applies some waves to your desktop. It's not physical simulation of liquid, though that would now be possible as well in case anyone's interested ;-)
The second one (YouTube, direct) shows the blur effect itself. Also note that in conjunction with the fade effect, which makes windows smoothly fade in/out when they're created/destroyed, it blurs out background of new windows when they fade in. It's subtle, but you can see it with menus in the video.
Update: added YouTube links for both videos.
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10 comments:
is there any updated live cd to test some of these effects?
Thanks!
Wow, this is awesome! Thank you for your work!
I don't think live cds exist yet as last features shown in the video went into SVN less than 12 hours ago :-)
oops, I got things confused. There _might_ be some cds which already have blur effect and earlier features, but I really don't know any
From what I see your already at parity with Beryl/Compiz yet alone and with less time. Is there something I'm missing or are you just as good as it appears?
you, sir, are a genius.
I have *so* got to get kde4 on this comp again.
Rivo, first: great great work! Second: what about applying transparency only to the actual window content, and not to everything (menus, toolbar, windeco etc)? This would be really nice for konsole and other softwares as well (kopete, konversation and every software focused on text)
What's your take about this?
Thanks, but I'm not really the only one who has been working on this. Much of the lower-level work as well as many effects were done by Luboš Luňák. Philip Falkner has also contributed, e.g. the BoxSwitch effect and some texture handling code.
vide: this needs to be done by the application itself (how would KWin know which parts of the window need transparency) and I think KDE 4's Konsole already supports that.
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