Scale-zoom-scale

Throughnothing has posted a patch that allows zooming of scaled windows when they are right clicked

From the forum post here

Here is something i made that lets you zoom in on a window during a scale out. Just right click on one of the scaled windows and it will zoom into the center for a better look. Let me know if you guys have any other suggestions/comments 126 This patch also has playerX's code for the organic window palcement in it (but it is disabled by default in case you dont want it) with the gconf option organic to turn on/off.

You will get screenshots tomorrow night when I have actually had time to apply the patch. now, because throughnothing submitted one :)


Note that this patch includes PlayerX's Organic Scale patch

More blurring

Another partly complete blur plugin has been posted to the forums by pixel (the orignal incomplete blur plugin can be found here)

originally I wanted to develop a blur plugin myself, but unfortunately compiz, xgl, fglrx or my xorg.conf settings are pretty unstable for me so it's not possible right now.

What I got already is a the blur fragment- and vertexshader, so maybe someone will find it useful.
They still have to be tailored and optimized. A ShaderDesigner project file is included too.

iXce has already suggested he'll look at it, so there could be great things to come.Perhaps it could be used as a model for some new cool effects?

Coupled with the information that Tommie-Lie is close to completing his themeable window borders, things could soon get even more exciting!

Switch and Rotate

Throughnothing has provided a patch that doesn't show the window behind the switcher when using Alt+Tab - it just fades/highlights the windows and rotates the cube to any window on another desktop - by all accounts it looks very cool.

What if, as an option for the switched plugin, we could disable the pop-up window in front that slides the windows around to show you a mini preview of the window. I think it would be cool to have just the windows fade in and out (highlighting the one im switching too). Sometimes i find the bar with the sliding windows gets in the way when im trying to see an app as i alt + tab. Does anyone else think this would be useful?

The patch is here

Throughnothing has released a new version here
Latest version that fixes handling of minimised windows so now you can get a preview of them! (it unminimises them while they are the 'current' window.

Organic Scale

After an 'open call' for algorithms in the compiz.net forums there PlayerX has posted an 'organic' scale algorithm.

Original version here:

Ok, this is the first version, at the moment this replaces the algorithm for scaling the current screen, scaling the whole thing will also be possible, as for scaling only windows which are "like" the currently selected I think the old method should be kept, because we want those windows to be easily seen.

The latest version is here: , and a Xinerama patch is here

throughnothing has posted a patch to give us the choice of 'organic' or normal

Here is a patch that gives an option in gconf-editor to use organic or not, along with the compiz.schema file. The option is called organic

Here is a swap in lib by throughnothing:

... this one actually has something im working on where right clicking a window while scaled out will zoom in on that window...its not very refined yet but i didnt have an .so without that...

Finally, here are some screenshots to allow you to compare the old and new versions
Organic


And Normal

More DBus

PlayerX and iXce have been doing some more DBus magic

RotateUp and RotateDown cube bindings for cube plugin (iXce) can be found here

And PlayerX's bindings for the zoom plugin here

Here they are, bindings for zoom, 3 methods at the moment:
- zoomIn and zoomOut
- zoomTerminate

Calling them is similar to the previous ones,

dbus-send --dest=org.compiz.dbus --type=method_call /org/compiz/dbus/screen0 org.compiz.rotate.zoomIn
dbus-send --dest=org.compiz.dbus --type=method_call /org/compiz/dbus/screen0 org.compiz.zoom.zoomOut
dbus-send --dest=org.compiz.dbus --type=method_call /org/compiz/dbus/screen0 org.compiz.zoom.zoomTerminate

It should now be easier to write a bash/whatever script which rotates the cube when as a screensaver or something like that, please do so and post it

A screensaver that zooms and rotates! now would be cool :)

It was also put forward that there could be a visualisation (I.E for Totem or Xmms, etc) written that manipulates the cube. It wouldn't make working easy - but if the cube zoomed to the bass, I wouldn't mind :P

Enable KB and Mouse while zoomed

This "quick and dirty hack" by moppsy allows the user to interact with windows while zoomed in. I must confess I haven't tried it - so if I have misdescribed it I'd like to know :)

From Moppsy's post:

It still has all the same quirks.
You need to zoom in a little before you can zoom out, and you need to be grabbed to cancel it.
So when your zoomed, in or out, grab the cube as to rotate it and press ESC.
Initiating the switcher also adds a grab, so while it's displaying you can drag the cube around, ESC works here too.
Initiating scale is another way to drag the cube and ESC cancel.

The code and whole post can be found here. Be sure to note the instructions on configuring it

On DBUS

From http://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Software/dbus

D-BUS is a message bus system, a simple way for applications to talk to one another.

And now, thanks to iXce, they can talk to Compiz too.

http://www.compiz.net/viewtopic.php?id=1173

Gives the details of what he has done.

There are now patches to allow calling of methods from

• Cube (from iXce, original post)
• Scale (PlayerX, here, and an update here)
  
• More Cube (PlayerX) here
  
• Water (PlayerX) here
  
• One to activate a window: here (PlayerX again!)
• And finally one for replace by iXce:
  

There are other patches in that thread, it is best you read it to get their context and purpose

See the wiki for a dbus howto:

Window Menu

DavidR patched libwnck to allow Compiz to have a proper window menu

We now have such things as ‘move to viewport’ and ‘always visible’!

Note that these patches are not to compiz, so if you need to get a special version of libwnck, Reggaemanu and Quinn can do that for you...

Quinn posted them to the forum aswell as putting them in her repo:

Widgets!

David R implemented widgets, an application can be set as a ‘widget’ and that makes it hideable/showable by pressing F9.

QuinnStorm made a patch for Cairoclock (by MacSlow) to turn it into a widget – as an example of how it ought to be done. Her patch is here:

ToDo on the Cube

This tool, by mattdev121, allows a to-do list to be displayed on the top of the cube:
from http://www.compiz.net/viewtopic.php?id=793:

You need to store template.svg somewhere in $RUNPATH, and make sure the settings are set properly (as you can see, i used .xgl/todo in my home directory and pico as my editor )

It should work fine on most systems, you just need gconf-tool2 (and a compiz that reads from gconf), plus rsvg-convert that comes with any svg-enabled system

Get the code here:

Centre Window

Moppsy strikes again!

A little patch to centre a window
http://www.compiz.net/viewtopic.php?id=733

Compiz Without Borders

Moppsy has a plugin to remove the border from a window:

I found myself wanting a way to remove the frame window from an application, so I created this.
Here is is for anyone that might find this useful.

Get it here: http://www.compiz.net/viewtopic.php?id=721

The Dock

Miniwin got split into two plugins – dock and miniwin. Still doing all the fantastical stuff as before, but now you can have one without the other:

As people have been requesting them, here is a screenshot:
You can see all my windows, plus a 'group' of Nautilus windows that is 'expanded'. You can see the Gimp as an unexpanded group


There is a thread discussing it here

there are many ideas dealing with what one can do with mindows, and the first realised was the dock/taskbar/panel thing you might know.
I've extracted the dock code and decided to make it a new plugin itself, the dock plugin.
As the latest versions of miniwin were rather stable, I recently added some animation and eye candy.
changes from miniwin-0.1.0 alpha to dock-0.1.0-rc1:
- code cleaning
- sane defaults
- animation fixes
- panel shows program name on mouse over
- panel is now colored
- panel can now have another position on the screen (bottom, top, left, right)

The most recent version, including a patch by iXce (and I think one by PlayerX too – can someone confirm?) is here

The thread is a useful resource, as always, as ddave leaves good changelogs…

Brightness and Saturation

BS - a plugin by Moppsy to change the brightness and saturation of windows, like transset, but less transparent. The post is here:

http://www.compiz.net/viewtopic.php?id=629

Negative Windows

Does what it says on the tin

http://www.compiz.net/viewtopic.php?id=1163

Credit: Moppsy

Scale Enhancements

The scale plugin has had a lot of love recently! Here is an attempt to summarise all that has gone on. Please tell me if I've missed anything...

Scale now places icons on the bottom of the window (I don’t yet know who did this, I guess Quinn, as she did it on the switcher).

And thanks tot the work by arturh (or perhaps PlayerX – they both seemed to be working on it at the same time…) now ‘scale from all viewports’ exists
It has been committed to Quinn’s CVS

PlayerX has done some work documented here:

I've started by writing a very simple patch which changes the way windows are sorted, so that instead of showing the active window first, and then the last active windows and then the window before, it shows the windows such as to minimize the distance they move.

and in the same thread arturh posted a patch to allow deactivation of scale with mouse corners

I really don’t know who did it, but I am currently using the fact that if you click on the desktop in scale mode, all the other windows are minimised! It’s like ‘show desktop’!

And iXce did some Xinerama helping things to allow selection of which screen the scale happens on:

Here's the patch. It features a new option for scale, called "head". It's an integer that can be 0 (scale on current cursor position head) 1 (scale on whole screen) or n (n > 1), which scales on n-1'th screen. Hope it'll work.

Window Shading

For anyone who is still reading this blog, I am going to try to get it back off the ground... Sorry that I've been so lax

The good news is that David R has implemented window shading, responding to requests on the mailing list.

Here is the article. It, and some recent fixes, are in QuinnCVS and QuinnDebs

For those of you confused, as I was, as to how to turn this on: in Gnome go to System-->Administration-->Windows and change the double click action to shade.

There are already new commits to fix some bugs, so this looks like it'll be polished soon