Ecere Blogging

After much wrestling with X, XRender, XShape & GLX, here they are: the Linux versions of the desktop toys.

Here is a screen shot of them in action:

The Linux Ecere SDK now supports alpha blending window contents through the “bool alphaBlend” property of the window class. When set to true, the window has its own alpha channel which a proper composite manager such as xcompmgr will happily use to make parts of the window translucent or completely transparent. The SDK will also automatically redefine the input region through the XShape extension so that clicks in transparent areas will click through on the underneath windows.

To render non opaque contents on the window, use a value smaller than 255 for the surface’s foreground and background while calling drawing methods (Proper support through both XRender and OpenGL in this release). You can also use a value between 0 and 1.0 (exclusively) for the window’s opacity to automatically have a translucent background drawn for you.

A few fixes were also done to the X OpenGL driver and it should now properly run anti-aliased if possible. Here is a binary version of Chess for those who do not yet wish to install the SDK.

Feel free to let me know if you get these running nicely on your system, and I’ll appreciate if you send me nice screen shots of those in action on your own favorite Linux desktop environment. The above screenshot is lacking hiragana characters on the cube as a CJK enabled Unicode font was not found by fontconfig. Ensure you have one of those (see previous post) if you wish to see them.

Download Ecere SDK 0.41.17.5 for Linux

Download Ecere Chess for Linux

Download Windowless Hiragana Cube and Color Spheres for Linux

This entry was posted on Wednesday, November 14th, 2007 at 12:50 am and is filed under Ongoing Efforts, Releases, Samples. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.