Re: Daydreaming (was: Re: 1.3a1)
Re: Daydreaming (was: Re: 1.3a1)
- Subject: Re: Daydreaming (was: Re: 1.3a1)
- From: "Andrew J. Hesford" <email@hidden>
- Date: Tue, 20 Nov 2007 14:36:15 -0600
On Nov 20, 2007, at 2:09 PM, Jordan K. Hubbard wrote:
On Nov 20, 2007, at 11:25 AM, Andrew J. Hesford wrote:
The only thing I wish Quartz would do is provide network
transparency. I think DPS used to do that in NeXTSTEP, but I never
used NeXTSTEP. It would be awesome if I could open iCal on my home
Mac from my iBook, without using VNC to give me the whole desktop!
Screen sharing in Leopard makes that pretty much a no-brainer, and
you don't have to buy Apple Remote Desktop (which is still a viable
option for Tiger users).
The whole network transparency feature of X is one of those "ideas
which sounded really good at the time" but, in practice, is now
gotten around by just about every desktop / 3D application that
matters through various direct rendering extensions which have been
formulated to deal with all the shortcomings of network transparency
(inability to do 2D compositing, inability to do 3D rendering with
any speed, performance penalties with complex font rendering, etc
etc etc). This means, of course, that a number of X11 apps don't
even support network transparency anymore.
Yes, this is a valid point. I make good use of screen sharing with my
Leopard systems, although I tunnel it over SSH instead of using Back
to My Mac or a direct VNC connection. I just wonder: since windows are
renderered as bitmaps before passing them to the compositor, shouldn't
it be straightforward to pass the rendered bitmaps to a compositor on
another system? This would give you network transparency almost for
free... except you might have version incompatibilities if you decide
to modify the compositor. Maybe not so straightforward after all... it
would make it difficult for Apple to improve these things down the road.
--
Andrew J. Hesford <email@hidden>
Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
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