digital home of MacSlow

Hyunjin Moon was so kind to package cairo-clock 0.3.1 for Fedora Core 5 test3. You can grab source- and binary-RPMs here.

Big thanks go to Samuli “drac” Suominen for making an overlay for gentoo-users, who want to easily install the newest release of cairo-clock on their system. Grab it here.

I just added the 0.3.1 release to the project-page. A short summary of the main changes…

• added four new themes (zen, antique, radium, funky)
• fixed desktop-menu entry
• added man-page
• shaped input via XShape 1.1 added
• more robust command-line handling
• sticky-option added

Right now there are only the source tarball and a .deb for Ubuntu Dapper Drake available. But a .rpm for FC5test3 and a gentoo-overlay are likely to follow very shortly. I have good faith in Milosz and Alex

And finally the obligatory screenshot:

Do you want fully dynamic vector-based graphics alongside with a non-trival shape for masking out input-events for your application-window? Then this is it! I’ve done this for my cairo-clock release 0.3.1 due “real soon now ™”. The example I extracted from this work on the cairo-clock uses one - and only one - single function to draw the user-visible graphics and the input-shape mask. Thus you get ultra-precise arbitrary shaped window-borders that match the visible graphics up to the pixel, because all the drawing is done with cairo. How’s that ladies and gentlemen?! *g* Of course everything is finely anti-aliased, no jagged frame-borders or anything like that. Here’s the example program at work:

To have it look like this you need some compositing-manager running (tested with xcompmgr and compiz) and a recent version of gtk+ (tested with gtk+-2.8.11 and gtk+ from CVS-head). You can try it yourself by grabbing the source here. Take a look at the source for further information. Use at your own risk! Placed under the GPL. Share and enjoy!

Yesterday I had the idea about this (a not so dull background for compiz, when rotating the desktop-cube/hexagon/whatever) and a nights sleep over it helped me figure out what I would want to achieve with such a thing. Some early screenshots will give you a rough idea of the thing I have in mind:

“Hm… mesh-resolution is ok.” (click for high-res)	“Damn! Where is the texture?” (click for high-res)
“Don’t try this at home, kids!” (click for high-res)	“By day.” (click for high-res)
“By night.” (click for high-res)

To be honest about it, it will not increase productivity by any means. But I’m sure you’ll rotate your desktop one time more than necessary EDIT: The only thing missing is the lighting of the desktop-cube sides.

Ok, I could not resist and gave in to my curiosity regarding Xgl. Now this is fun! With a ton of HOWTOs and ultra-prompt help on IRC getting Xgl/compiz up and running was much easier than expected… also considering the 0.0.2 version number of compiz (its CVS home).

some tests (click for video)	wobbling clock (click for video)
(click for high-res version)

Plugin-love I would like to see coming to compiz is for example a slight shading of the cube-surfaces when rotating (maybe different colored lights depending on day/night-time). I would have done that myself already if I’d found the time to figure out the inner workings of compiz-plugins. Reading a bit on planet Gnome I found a pretty interesing idea for fine-tuneing the scale- and switcher-plugins sugguested by Philip Langdale here.

In the next couple of days I will move my site from http://macslow.mine.nu to this spot here.