Oct 30, 2014

Animations are a large part of what makes the desktop from Tron Legacy board room (gif) stimulating. Things flicker and ease into place in a mesmerizing fashion, instead of just appearing instantly. Having this level of smooth animation is critical in creating a more cinematic desktop, so I’ve spent the better part of the last week looking into this.

To create the animations themselves, I’ve turned to experimenting with OpenGL/openFrameworks/Processing. The larger implementation obstacle however is making these animations appear as a seamless component of the desktop environment, when in reality they are constrained to windows. The idea is to limit the usable screen space to a portion of the screen and have the interface animations occur behind the windows as an animated “wallpaper”. If this is kept visually seamless with the windows in front, the animations will appear to be a part of the desktop environment.

Unfortunately I haven’t found a way to encapsulate an arbitrary program into the root window (what acts as your wallpaper in the X Window System), only how to set the pixel contents like programs such as xsetroot and feh do. So instead I added a mode to my window manger BSPWM that pushes a program window to the back of all other windows, keeps it full screen and ensures it persists across desktops, essentially making it visually be functioning as the root window. This is an awesome first step as now I can implant any custom interface into the desktop and move onto designing and animating the interfaces.