Ah, I was assuming you were thinking of the technical side. From this point of view you're right, having a compositor doesn't necessarily mean having effects. But if the user turns off effects even when running a compositor, he certainly doesn't want an effect ...?

Greetings!

Just be cautious with those animations. On OSX, everything what can be animated is animated. The resoult:
https://www.google.com/search?q=osx+animations&ie=UTF-8

Animations can be annoying when they simply makes you wait longer for action to complete. Simple crossfade with fast animation setting makes KDE look a little bit more slick, without pisting of users

Animation mockups is coming... need to get to bed soon.

jensreuterberg wrote:Whether wayland comes "soonish" and with no way to turn of heavier desktop effects is a completely different matter I think. Lets plan for it and think about it.

Who said that there is no way to turn off heavier desktop effects with Wayland? That sounds weird to me. The only thing I understood from what Martin G. said is that it will always be composited. Turning individual effects on or off should still be possible.

Btw: What about the mockups you promised?

They disappeared when my work tripled

Seriously I have a list of things and its on there - this is the time for anyone to step up and make a sketchy gif of animation suggestions. (We could really use it in general.

Personally I'd love for a project like Minimal Klyde to kick off again (A scraped version of Plasma) - the issue is that there simply isn't enough devs. Same if there was a Plasma Lego thing - where you get to experiment with help on what to edit and not with CPU/Ram savings displayed next to it or something.

I'll be looking forward to the tutorials you promised on the website. With them maybe I can create animation sketches, too. I think teaching that mayself would take 10 times as long as it would take you to create the those sketches...

Oh its not tricky - its not ment to be fancy - you can do them quickly as GIF's in Gimp or in Synfig Studio (which is a tad trickier but also kinda fun).

And they will come - we just need every man/woman on deck for the two weeks to come for Plasma related work.

As it is I'm gonna get someone to do a tutorial on Inkscape and icon design (things to think about), then perhaps something on sketch work and mockups and what to think about there, after that maybe something on theme's and themeing? Someone suggested an illustration tutorial too - don't know how helpful that may be for design but it can be fun I guess. Maybe something on layout? There are plenty of subjects but precious little time to do them in.

In this case you can probably also create the mockups as actual programs
Especially slide and fade would be quite simple, like

Code: Select all

import QtQuick 1.0

Rectangle {
    width: 1280
    height: 1024
    id: root
    property int slidepos: 0
    focus: true
    Image {
        source: "/usr/share/wallpapers/Grass/contents/images/1280x1024.jpg"
        x: -root.slidepos
    }
    Image {
        source: "/usr/share/wallpapers/Blue_Wood/contents/images/1280x1024.jpg"
        x: root.width - root.slidepos
    }
    NumberAnimation on slidepos { running: false; id: anim; to: 1280; duration: 180; loops: 1 }
    Keys.onSpacePressed: anim.running = true;
}

Now just put in screenshots of the UI you want to slide and there you have it
For the fade one, just replace NumberAnimation on slidepos by a ParallelAnimation on both images' opacity.

The flip animation is more difficult, that's potentially easier to do in some image editing program.

Cross-fade: it means re-painting the entire surface at a high framerate. If this is hardware accelerated (openGL on GPU) it can work, otherwise the framerate will be low. I also agree that it does not communicate forward/back very well. It's a different sort of transition "verb".

(On a personal aesthetics note, I'm not a huge fan of blurring multiple UIs into each other ... it looks messy to my eyes, but that is a personal aesthetic.)

Flip: only works "nicely" for full windows (we'll assume compositing is always there and works smoothly). It looks sort of odd on full screen windows, more so as you get to smaller screens (where full-screen flips tend to mean things like "your screen is now rotating" or "this window is going away"). On the technical side, it means having support in the window compositor for the effect (to do it properly, anyways; assuming we aren't using client-side-decorations), so this will render applications run outside of Plasma transition-less.

Slide: works well on small screens, fits with touch gestures, works on whole window contents / parts of windows, does not rely on compositor features and can be made quite performant as it is just sliding a pixmap around.

If you just slide a pixmap around, you can also just crossfade a pixmap, so technically I don't think there would be much of a difference, no?

scummos wrote:If you just slide a pixmap around, you can also just crossfade a pixmap, so technically I don't think there would be much of a difference, no?

Sliding a pixmap is a simple translation operation (with a blit from each pixmap, worst case scenario); crossfading requires blending two pixmaps with opacities that are variable over time. The latter is significantly more computationally intensive. If it is done on GPU using openGL calls (and the GPU is sufficiently non-stupid) then it's affordable (though still more expensive in absolute terms).

Ah okay, I see. Thanks for explaining.

Technicalities aside again, I'm thinking that entering another section in system settings doesn't necessarily mean going forward. It may as well mean going up or down in a hierarchy, or at least feel like it, so a curtain-like animation (eg. previous section going up or down) may also be a viable option. It may present a pretty cool sensation if going up again would drop down the previous window in an almost squishing manner . //Just brainstorming

(sneaking back since I haven't had time to do the damn animation)
But the cool thing with your idea, Mintlars, is that it would play well if we start messing with the system settings! I mean if you can visually see where you're moving within the settings you can add say areas and cordon bits off without it becoming too spread out and confusing...

Animations are an excellent way to let people get a spatial sense and make sense of large amounts of info.

jensreuterberg wrote:Animations are an excellent way to let people get a spatial sense and make sense of large amounts of info.

Exactly! And that's where animations are indeed useful instead of just being eye-candy.