August 23, 2002. That’s how long it’s been since we’ve had hardware accelerated compositing on the desktop, introduced in Mac OS X 10.2. Xwindows first received 3D compositing via Compiz in January 2006. In January 2007 Redmond joined the party with the release of the much maligned Windows Vista, which finally allocated desktop rendering duty to the graphics hardware.
So now that all the major players are on board and offering advanced desktop rendering, what’s really changed?
Not much, really. Initially OS X’s hardware accelerated desktop offered little more that a cool minimize/maximize window effect, in addition to freeing up cpu cycles for more important tasks. A year later with the release of Mac OS X 10.3, Expose was added. Expose is one of those truly brilliant ideas, and for those of you who aren’t Mac users, Expose allows you, either via keyboard or through a hot corner on your desktop, to tile all of your open windows on the desktop. This allows you to quickly scan for the application you are looking for and bring it into focus with a mouse click. It’s a great feature, as evidenced by the fact that Compiz copied the feature, and so did Vista, although Vista’s interpretation isn’t quite as functional as the Mac or Compiz flavor.
As much as Apple is based on innovation, they apparently haven’t been able to figure out anything else useful to do with a hardware accelerated desktop in the last five years. Microsoft, as they always do, copied what Apple had, and doesn’t have any fresh ideas of their own. I imagine we’ll see the next great idea for 3d compositing added to the Windows desktop about a year after Apple comes up with it.
Compiz and Compiz Fusion run on Xwindows, which means they will run on any operating system that utilizes Xwindows for the GUI environment. This means linux, the BSDs and Solaris for the most part. Compiz rewards those who have mad unix skills (it can be difficult to get working depending on your os and hardware) with a fairly advanced hardware accelerated desktop, at least in terms of the eye candy factor. The guys making Compiz figured that in lieu of actually coming up with a new, useful thing to do with 3D on the desktop, they would at least get it to do a lot of cool tricks, and Compiz delivers in that area.
Compiz has a neat way of cycling through virtual workspaces or desktops called Skydome. Skydome presents your virtual workspaces as a 3D cube, and allows you to cycle through them and pick the workspace you want. It looks neat, but I never liked multiple desktops to begin with.
One thing that I do have fun with is the minimize/maximize/close effects that Compiz has. You have several choices with Compiz, some that explode your window into hundreds of fragments when you close a window, and reassemble when you mazimize. My two favorites are the one that folds my window into a paper airplane and flies it to my taskbar and then flies it back into focus and unfolds it, and the one that burns my windows to the ground and has them emerge again from the flames. Hey, I can set how many milliseconds the animations use, and frankly, I don’t mind waiting half a second for the eye candy when the effects are that friggin’ cool.
Aside from one or two good ideas and some really neat eye candy, we aren’t getting much from having our high powered graphics hardware draw our desktops for us. I’m all for paper airplanes and raindrops on my desktop, but aside from Expose, I haven’t seen anything that was an addition I couldn’t live without.
So, while we wait for the rocket scientists in Cupertino and Redmond to figure out something useful to do with this stuff, what would you like to see your desktop do?
