Re: Timelapsed backgrounds

["Owen Taylor" <otaylor redhat com>]

On 26 Sep 2007 08:44:16 +0200, Soeren Sandmann <sandmann daimi au dk> wrote:
> A long time ago I wrote code to do timelapsed backgrounds. I missed
> the freeze for 2.20, so now I am submitting it for 2.22.
>
> The idea is that the background gradually fades between a number of
> images over the course of a day. One example would be a set of images
> taken at the same location at different times of the day.
>
> >From an artist's point of view, the timelapsed background is an XML
> file containing filenames of the images to fade between and
> indications of how long to show each image.

My first reaction to this is "cool!" But then, I think.... how much of
the time is the desktop actually visible? It seems a bit of a wasteful
thing to spend CPU cycles animating something that's entirely obscured
by my full-screen web-browser/evolution/eclipse/etc.

Maybe it makes sense to actually monitor desktop visibility in some
fashion so that you could still get the "cool, my desktop is matching
my time of day" effect without doing a full frame blend every 14
seconds when nobody is looking at it. (This would probably require  a
property exported by the CM, since only the CM really knows if the
desktop is currently visible)

- Owen