Re: Timelapsed backgrounds

[Soeren Sandmann <sandmann daimi au dk>]

"Owen Taylor" <otaylor redhat com> writes:

> 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.

Well, people don't have to use it if they are always going to have a
full-screen window covering it.

> 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)

If GNOME at some point blesses a compositing manager, it would
probably make sense to have the compositing manager draw the
background itself and then either have the nautilus window be mostly
transparent, or have some way of communicating to the CM what icons
etc. should be drawn on top of the root.


Soren