Whither DWT?

[Daniel Keep]

Jari-Matti Mäkelä wrote:
> freeagle wrote:
>> Daniel Keep wrote:
>>> What is worse, what are you going to do about Vista?  When that comes
>>> out, all your work on the XP skin has to be re-done from scratch.  And
>>> even then, given that Vista uses all those transparency effects, will it
>>> even be possible without a major rewrite?
>> - actually, with a good design, it could be possible to add modify skins
>> and themes with just a different set of images, maybe small code
>> rewrite. Id never accept a toolkit that need to rewrite whole widget set
>> for every available theme/skin it supports. About those transparency
>> effects, OpenGL has alpha blending, so i dont see what major rewrites
>> you are talking about. But i must say i havent tried vista yet, so im
>> not even absolutely sure what transparency effects you are talking about.
> 
> AFAIK application windows in Vista have a < 50% alpha value and a lame
> distortion effect on the window title bars by default. It's easy to do
> these things in OpenGL. You can even create animated, multitextured
> backgrounds with bump mapping without any greater problems - even with a
> terrible widget set design.
> 

You most certainly can do those things in OpenGL.

Except Vista's desktop is composited using DirectX, so you can't simply
"render" the window using OpenGL and expect it to blend with everything
else.  Which means you would have to work out some way to grab all the
pixels underneath the current window, and I'm not entirely sure how you
would do that.

Of course, once you've done that, you can load the pixels into OpenGL,
then render, and then... oh wait, Vista turns off desktop compositing as
soon as you try to use OpenGL.  Which means as soon as you fire up your
windowed OpenGL app... all the desktop compositing and Vista theme
disappears.  Oops.  Now your program looks out of place anyway >_<

Unless of course Microsoft changes their mind about OpenGL... bloody
monopolists... stupid DirectX...

Anyway, my original motive was more directed to the "we should make a
self-rendered toolkit" vs "no!  we should make a native toolkit!"
comments.  I think we need at least once of each, since there are things
each toolkit can't really do.

	-- Daniel

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