New Blurring

David has posted to the mailing list to say that he has got his blur plugin to a 'reasonable state':

Some additional options have been added to the decorators which allow
you to make any translucent decorations blur what's behind them.
Applications can also use the hint recognized by the blur plugin to
specify blurred regions.

Which sounds mighty cool

He has made two example plugins at
http://git.compiz.org/

blurset, is similar to transset except that it allow you turn on/off
blur behind translucent parts of any application window.

blurdemo, is just a simple gtk example app that uses the blur support
provided by the blur plugin.

So all the hard work needed for a proper blur plugin should be done now
and the fun and easy part with adding additional filters is left. I only
put the simplest possible filter I could come up with in there for now
and it doesn't do much blurring at all. I'm interested in patches that
add additional filters.

So now we have a really thorough solution!

Application developers, get going!

I'm currently disconnected form my PC - so if anyone wants to mail in or comment with a link to a screenshot of the blurring and the blurdemo then please do!

Input Transformation Work

The exciting news that David has done some work on allowing input translations (a feature needed to cleanly implement a whole load of interesting and desired features like interacting with scaled windows and potenially having thumbnails of minimised windows) has spurred me on to a post. I hope I can start updating the blog again - but I'm still incredibly pushed for time.

His post to the compiz list can be read here:

His message states "I have a local branch of compiz with
some input transformation hacks, I'll clean it up and push it out in the
next couple of days." - so you'll be able to try it in the next few days.