Small post, just for the guys who don’t follow me on twitter.
For Ubuntu Lucid the desktop team started working on a patch which enables RGBA colormap by default, and adds client-side window decorations capabilities as well.
That means transparency to your applications and much more 
Murrine will try to follow this trend, maybe slowly because I’m busy with other things, but something will happen.
For the braves, here’s the link to the bug.
Of course, donations to Murrine are always welcome! 
Posted in Compiz, English, GNOME, GTK, Murrine, Themes | 10 Comments »
After reading Aruiz and Dylan I think I could ask your attention on that topic.
I like Dylan’s idea of a Do-ified GTK+ 3.0, it seems innovative, making user interaction more accessible and faster. At least, this is my personal opinion.
From Dylan:
@Cimi: it would be great to see Do-like functionality incorporated in Gnome 3, not just on the desktop, but also at the application level. Programs like the Gimp or Inkscape use a lot of keyboard shortcuts that may be hard to memorize all-at-once. Using the Do-metaphor *within* the application will let you invoke functions quickly, and discover keyboard shortcuts in the process.
I don’t have anything against Mono, but for Do to become an integral part of the Gnome Desktop, I think it would almost have to be part of GTK+, because it needs to communicate with other parts of the interface to know which functions are applicable given the situation (it makes no sense to list ‘Crop to selection’ as an option when nothing has been selected).
I must agree with him, sometimes keyboard shortcuts are complicated to use: how can I remember alt+g, alt+k, alt+y, alt+s, ctrl+alt+h, ctrl+alt+h+super+t+f12+enter+backspace? (omg I’m not playing the piano 
I just want to use my computer!!!)
Typing “fullscreen” is easier than remembering Totem is using “F11″, Banshee “F”, another application “Ctrl+Alt+F” and so on… And while “fullscreen” is something known and famous, what about exotic shortcuts that almost each application has? Those are just useless… and dangerous! Imagine if I press “Ctrl+W” on an important document because I forgot the right command…
Now, your thoughts please
Posted in Compiz, English, GNOME, GTK, Icons, Murrine | 73 Comments »
29 January 2009 will be another great day for our free software desktops, GNOME Do 0.8 is released!
This is a fantastic release: it’s not just few bugfixes, it’s much much much more! Jason Smith did an amazing job rewriting the whole graphical interface code, allowing Do to feature shiny animated interfaces… for all your tastes!
Send to pastebin, imageshack, manage your music collection, access files, browse google docs, open conversations, add bookmarks, control your jedi lightsaber… EVERYTHING: just with one simple key!
GNOME Do 0.8 will dramatically change the way you interact with your desktop, saving a lot of time for better moments with your girlfriend (or your lightsaber!) I would really love to see GNOME Do or something similar in our GNOME 3.0 shell. This is the key, the Do key.
While I mentioned Jason for the graphical part, I can’t forget David Siegel, Alex Launi, Chris Halse Rogers and every contributor!!! They did an amazing job, they *are* an amazing team.
So, that’s all folks: go and spread the voice
It’s time to rock on for 1.0!
Posted in Compiz, English, GNOME, GNOME Do, GTK | 28 Comments »
Unfortunately many people don’t use bugreports, maybe because they came from Windows where bugreports are not present and not encouraged. This post is just about this: please use bugreports.
If you find something that you don’t like, something that you think that can be improved, or if you just have an idea, use the bugzilla!
For example: there are some glitches when using a dark gtk+ theme with the murrine/clearlooks engine and…I’ll attach a screenshot…
Or: I would like to have an option to change the progressbar style on my murrine themes…
Or even more: I have made a mockup for the tabs/notebook of murrine, here it is…
So, please click here to send a new bugreport for murrine (development version, svn).
Eheheh… I love the GNOME’s bugzilla logo from andreasn (ops) alberto
Posted in ArchLinux, Compiz, English, GNOME, GTK, Icons, Metacity, Murrine, Themes | 12 Comments »
Call for coders: I’m search few developers, check out the new post on this blog. I will release the new version when we’ll have a new murrine configurator (pygtk could be a simple solution)
Update 2: Complete alpha support, see GtkEntry for example and have fun
Update 1: Screenshot showing quodlibet with alpha-capable window.
Since there’s a lot of confusion on the web, in the last week I’ve seen a lot of people claiming about “lacks” of Gtk+ capabilities.
Some of them still think that Gtk+ doesn’t have RGBA support. And if it has, it’s related to Cairo rendering just for special (custom) widgets. Or it will require nasty hacks.
This is absolutely false.
And I will show you
Murrine with RGBA support
Yes, buttons have few problems with the contrast… but this is an alpha quality software!
Ehm… how we can get it?
First of all there’s the application support:
The application must set an rgba colormap (for example for the main window).
This will take 2 lines of code per widget (depending on the programming language).
Then you need the support of the Gtk+ engine:
The engine must be RGBA capable, like my development version of Murrine (not released and not available to the public, don’t ask for a release date now).
10 to 20 lines of code, and no hacks are required, just pure Gtk+ API!
And the good thing is that if you stop your composite window manager, the application will automatically looks like any other non-transparent app!
And of course a composite capable window-manager, like Compiz, future Metacity etc etc…
Conclusions
This could open a world of alpha-capable gtk+ applications with no-need of draw custom widgets, as the Gtk engine already draws them
And yes, it is FAST!
Posted in Compiz, English, GNOME, GTK, Murrine, Themes | 140 Comments »
Ho aggiunto il pacchetto metacity-compositor-svn, con cui potete provare il nuovo branch di metacity, con prestazioni 30% superiori su tutti i temi e supporto ad un compositor basato su Xrender!!! Ora la velocità, grazie al boost del 30%, è paragonabile se non maggiore a quella di Kwin, con l’incredibile vantaggio dell’imbarazzante maggior numero di temi a disposizione e la facilità nel creali!
Link alla notizia del boost prestazionale
Per attivare le ombre basta abilitare l’estensione Composite in xorg.conf, lanciare gnome, e dare il seguente comando da terminale (oppure usare gconf-editor):
gconftool-2 --set /apps/metacity/general/compositing_manager --type bool true
Importante, Leggere
Con questa versione (in sviluppo, ricordo) non funziona più il gestore dei temi, quindi questi vanno specificati a mano con l’editor di configurazione.
Pertanto potete scegliere fra:
- Non aggiornare finchè questo problema non viene risolto (vi avviserò qui nel blog quando tutto sarà ok).
- Aggiornare e modificare le impostazioni dell’interfaccia tramite gconf-editor
- Se dovete cambiar tema e non volete rinunciare all’interfaccia grafica date un “pacman -S metacity”, lanciate la gui, poi un “pacman -S metacity-compositor-svn”
Piccole Considerazione
Questo branch di metacity non si pone come alternativa a Compiz (come invece fa il compositor di Kde4), bensì come un supporto stabile e funzionante su praticamente tutti i computer all’estensione composite (che permetti di usare le trasparenze come avant-window-navigator, screenlets, etc etc).
Usa Xrender e non OpenGL, quindi le prestazioni talvolta possono essere peggiori (nel caso abbiate una scheda video con un rendering OpenGL abbastanza veloce).
Insomma usate Compiz se avete un pc che ve lo supporta, se vi piace dannarvi l’animo con mille configurazioni e se non vi sembra troppo giocattoloso
Posted in ArchLinux, Compiz, GNOME, Italian, Metacity | 31 Comments »
“Se quello che abbiamo adesso si fosse chiamato 1.0, allora adesso saremo di fronte a qualcosa classificabile come 2.0″
Il signor DavidR (David Reveman) parla (scrive eheheh) in mailing list sullo stato attuale di compiz e gli sviluppi futuri.
Non contento infatti della architettura attuale e della difficoltà nell’apportarne miglioramenti, sembra che abbia pronto in cantiere una completa riscrittura che proprio per i miglioramenti potrebbe benissimo essere chiamata 2.0. Dico “potrebbe” perchè è più probabile che il nome sarà in realtà 1.0 per seguire la solita logica del versioning in linux, ciò nonostante questa nuova versione costituirà una base eccezionale per gli sviluppi futuri.
Proprio ieri dicevo ad un mio amico che lo sviluppo di compiz sembrava rallentare in modo preoccupante, che DavidR fosse sparito, eccetera eccetera… Ebbene a distanza di poche ore è lui stesso a smentirmi…
…e sono contento che l’abbia fatto
Vi riporto il testo della mail originale, che è meglio di averne una mia traduzione. Se non capite posso tradurne dei pezzi.
I’d like to start with apologizing for my lack of response to the
mailing list for the last couple of months. I’m working my way through
all posts right now…
Here’s what I’ve been up to lately..
I did a critical review of the state of compiz about 6 months ago. I
realized it was pretty bad (not that there’s actually anything better
out there but still), it’s hard to maintain, hard to write proper code
for and in some ways not dynamic enough for people to do what they want.
None of the features I need to implement can be done properly in the
current architecture.
I spent a lot of time trying to come up with a way for us to re-engineer
the core of compiz and fix all the issues that exist in the current
architecture. I did a fair amount of research and experimenting before I
got an idea of what would be a good future architecture. What’s emerging
in the object-framework branch is the result of this work and what I
believe to be the best way forward. There’s still some important pieces
missing before I consider merging it to master a good idea but it’s now
at least at a stage where I’m comfortable with people starting to look
at it and start discussing merging it to master.
Even though I’ve made sure that the rewrite allows existing plugins to
be fairly easily ported, it’s still going to be the most significant
change to compiz since the initial version was realized. If we ever had
released a 1.0, this would definitely qualify for a 2.0.
Most of the ground work for this new architecture has already been done
in the object-framework branch but even when we’ve gotten it to a state
where it can be merged, there’s still a lot of work left to make the
existing core functionality and plugins take advantage of it. However,
the considerably more modularized nature of this new architecture would
allow us to move to a much smaller core and get it ready for a 1.0
release in a short amount of time.
I’m going to send a series of posts to the list that explains the
different parts of the new architecture in more detail (hopefully the
first one during the weekend) but here’s a few key features of the new
architecture:
A strict hierarchical structure. A very well-defined way for how the
different parts of the system communicate with each other (it’s obvious
when some code is doing something inappropriate and it’s also hard to
write code that is doing something inappropriate). Whether the code is
in the core or in a plugin is of no significant importance, which means
that pretty much anything can be modularized. Plugins can be inserted
into different parts of the object tree and only affect a sub-tree of
objects. An internal communication system that maps efficiently and
conveniently to various IPC systems.
-David
Posted in Compiz, Italian | 7 Comments »
Vista la bontà del repository di nesl247, ho deciso di non disperdere troppo le mie risorse, fermando gli aggiornamenti del mio repository e suggerendo quello di nesl247 (da usare con il repository testing abilitato):
[compiz-fusion]
Server = http://arch.nesl247.org/compiz-fusion/i686
[compiz-fusion]
Server = http://arch.nesl247.org/compiz-fusion/x86_64
La qualità è ottima (anche se viene aggiornato un pelino di meno), quindi d’ora in avanti usate pure questo.
gnome-svn
gnome-svn continuerà invece ad essere aggiornato. Ricordo il link:
[gnome-svn]
Server = http://cimi.netsons.org/arch/i686
Saluti. Cimi
Posted in ArchLinux, Compiz, Italian | 7 Comments »
Il repository per gnome 2.19 per arch è stata una delle sorprese più gradite ed inaspettate che mi potessi aspettare, e così vi annuncio che i miei repository si allineeranno con quest’ultimo.
il repository per gnome diverrà gnome-svn (per non far casino di nomi), mentre quello di compiz, rinominato compiz-fusion risulterà compatibile soltanto con l’ultima versione di gnome: 2.19/2.20, quindi:
NON FATE L’UPGRADE SE NON STATE UTILIZZANDO GNOME 2.19/2.20
[compiz-fusion]
Server = http://cimi.netsons.org/arch/i686
[gnome-svn]
Server = http://cimi.netsons.org/arch/i686
Posted in ArchLinux, Compiz, GNOME, GTK, Italian | 20 Comments »
Ho aggiornato la repository di compiz, utilizzando i pkgbuild di nesl247, che ringrazio (thanks!)
Avvertenza
Ho scelto di usare i pkgbuild di nesl247, quindi a questo punto il mio repo diventa quasi un mirror del suo, solo aggiornato in giorni differenti e con un supporto italiano (io) nel caso qualcuno abbia bisogno
Se volete potete usare il suo, se volete il supporto italiano fate qui
Elenco Pacchetti
ccsm-git
compiz-bcop-git
compiz-fusion-plugins-3d-git
compiz-fusion-plugins-atlantis-git
compiz-fusion-plugins-extra-git
compiz-fusion-plugins-main-git
compiz-fusion-plugins-screensaver-git
compiz-fusion-plugins-unsupported-git
compiz-git
compiz-kde-git
compizconfig-python-git
emerald-git
emerald-themes-git
fusion-icon-git
libcompizconfig-git
libx11-xcb
Posted in ArchLinux, Compiz, Italian | 5 Comments »
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