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Third Generation Display Layers Other than OS X? 33

Posted by Cliff from the breaking-out-of-the-pixel-paradigm dept.
jayegirl asks: "The display subsystem in MacOS X seems like a 'really good thing'(tm), and so, I was wondering, what other third generation display layers -- using screen representations based on shapes, rather than pixels -- exist or are under development. Are there any open source projects in this direction?"
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Third Generation Display Layers Other than OS X? More

Third Generation Display Layers Other than OS X?

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  • I see.

    So NeWS was technically superior to the alternatives, but failed for business and marketing reasons.

    Java is technically inferior to almost all of the alternatives, but succeeded for business and marketing reasons.

    Good point AtrN!

  • Re:Of course, Berlin (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward

    Berlin [berlin-consortium.org] is the most advanced GUI system I know of.

    It's network transparent (uses CORBA), resolution independent (windows stay the same size, when you switch resolutions: Zoom in/out to change the size of windows), device independent (you can print everything on the screen in the best possible quality, it just gets rendered again with the printer resolution and color depth), programming-language independent (use any language with CORBA bindings for clients), easy to adapt to your locale (uses Unicode throughout), configurable (just plug in the widgets and stuff you like... all applications will use those from then on), 3D, and generaly buzzword compliant:-)

    Some of the issues broght up so far:

    • It's LGPL: It's supposed to be a success, so we must be able to allow for commercial applications. Besides the whole CORBA-'binding' issue is rather sticky, so it is probably OK to use GPLed CORBA objects in commercial apps anyway. At least this was how I understood RMS's explainations about this issue at the LinuxTag in Stuttgart last year. I'm no legal expert, so I might be wrong here.
    • It's developing slowly: Yes that's true. But it is doing amazing leaps right now. And the emphasize is to do it right, so there is a lot of talk about design issues on the IRC channel. Feel free to join:-)
    • It's slow: That's sadly true too. We have no HW acceleration right now. But despite that we are getting faster! Berlin runs on GGI (so you can display on fbdev, X, svgalib, ...), but we are independent of that. We should be able to run on GLUT and SDL today (both are still somewhat experimental) and DirectFB support is in the works. All those should get us the needed HW acceleration. Oh, we have somewhat outdated support for CAVElib too, for those of you with a 3D walkin environmant at home;-)
    • Why not Postscript? Reinventing the wheel again? Simple answer: Postscript is 2D while berlin objects are 3D.
    • Berlin is stuck with MVC: Yes, that*s right. We use it through out our design. It is a very nice approach for a GUI system! At least I have not reached the limit of it during the last three years. Feel free to program clients like you see fit though.

  • Re:Hardware Acceleration... (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    We don't write HW drivers, we just use what other people provide (GGI, SDL, DirectFB, GLUT, ...). They are good at hacking hardware, so why should we reimplement their code again?

  • I am pretty sure that NeWS post-dates the public availability of X. It may predate X11, but X version 10 was out there quite early on and at the time Sun had its own windowing system (as did all vendors at the time). It appears that NeWS came out around 1987; X goes back to at least 1986 and I believe the original Project Athena work is probably from even earlier (and thus known, if not yet distributed).

    The core causes of NeWS's failure are probably highly debateable, but I think a good part of it is that Sun wanted to make as much money from NeWS as possible, which meant they charged per-seat license costs early on. Given there was a free alternative, it's not hard to see how various vendors made the choices that they did.

    Other failures were partly technical; for example, apparently NeWS did not have a fast, functional terminal emulator (ala xterm) for a quite long time. Since this is an important part of early use of any windowing system on X, most of the time, there were some knock-on effects in people's interest in using NeWS.

    The major workstation vendors (DEC, HP, IBM, etc) funded various university projects to build large scale environments for workstations because it was pretty likely that they would get quite useful technology out of it. (Although in the end it didn't quite work out that way.) MIT's Project Athena is only one example; Project Andrew at CMU gave us AFS, for example. Direct rivalry with Sun's general products (NFS, for example) was not really a priority, although it was probably a factor.

  • Same difference: PDF stands for Postscript Display Format.


    --
  • Actually Quartz uses PDF.
  • Advanced? Are you kidding? Berlin is stuck on the MVC way of doing things, originally advanced by Smalltalk 30 years ago and subsequently abandoned by Smalltalk's originators in favor of Morphic.

    Quartz wasn't even done a year ago. It's pretty impressive, considering it has to support legacy Mac apps, and also undergoes continual improvement.

    A lot of free-software geeks have lost their old time religion because of Mac OS X. It's pretty amazing, and deserves more investigation than a year-old Ars Technica article. Would you want people to judge Linux / Berlin / insert-your-favorite-open-source-project-here based on where it was a year ago? I doubt it.
  • Did Sun keep developing NeWS until very late or did they drop it and pick up X pretty quickly?
  • I sometimes call Java "Gosling's Revenge". But remember the Blit came before.
  • PDF is just PostScript with hyperlinks, as far as I know. Both were conceived at Adobe.
    (Picture PS wearing black, holding a lightsaber saying "I'm your father, PDF" ;)
  • Just because it's based on Postscript(PDF), does not mean that everything is expressed in vectors or splines... there are "pixel" based postscript images with proper rendering requiring the proper device resolution...

    Insert a TIFF in an adobe illustrator document and you are there...
  • My understanding is, all modern graphical OS environments have a rendering scheme which comprises vectors, splines, fonts, and 3d rendering techniques... they are all somewhat alike... and all a lot like postscript.
  • you imply that since PDF has been "used for three independant windowing systems... [that it] ...provides a pretty powerful argument for further consideration..."

    I hope the fact that none of these windowing systems have been wildly popular does not indicate the contrary. I personally worship NeXT... but it was kind of a flop. Even though it was beautiful and superior technology.

    I hope there were other reasons NeXT flopped; and those factors will not cause the same end for OSX. Because, so far, I like what I see in OSX. I have never owned a Mac in my life. After playing with OSX at CompUSA, I'm seriously considering purchasing one of those new ibooks...

    although I wish OSX was more "theme-able"...
  • Same difference: PDF stands for Postscript Display Format.
    some might say "portable document format"
    ---------------------------
  • Check out the Berlin project. Their main page is HERE [berlin-consortium.org]. It looks like a very exciting project, although it seems to be moving *very* slowly.
  • moderators, mod the parent of this all the way up. after 4 replies, he is the first one to get this simple fact right... good job, pressman.
  • Also PDF is designed to allow a single page
    to be rendered without rendering *every*
    preceding page. This is a must for providing
    random-access to pages within large documents.
    There are Postscript conventions that allow
    you to do this, but some applications/printer
    drivers produce non-compliant Postscript.
  • It's a bit sad that it's under the LGPL isn't it? Stallman says (many many times) that LGPL is meant for those libraries where there is a readily avaliable alternative anyway, and this doesn't seem the case with Berlin. So it's a missed opportunity to push the copyleft cause (of course, not everyone is sad about that)
  • The display in OS X is still pixel-based, from what I can tell, and it's annoyingly candy-like. I'm having a hard time taking it seriously so far. One of my biggest annoyances is the lack of proper window borders. You can only drag windows by their title-bars...

  • MIT was developing Athena with the then #2 computer company, Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC.) DEC along with many others provided lots of hardware, software, licenses, staff, and in some cases money to Athena.

    MIT wanted a pervasive universal distributed hardware-independent networking environment supplying a large number of versatile tools for use in research & coursework. DEC & others wanted a breakthrough product they could sell to large corporations, universities, and government departments.

    Clearly a windowing system was the way to go and all were familiar with NeWS. However MIT already has an in-house project with DEC where'd they'd already begun development of X.

    X won out for a bunch of reasons over NeWS:

    1. X was in-house
    2. MIT/DEC were looking forward to putting Athena on lots of platforms and Sun wouldn't likely be open to that
    3. There were licensing issues - licensing NeWS, the non-license from Adobe, etc.
    4. NeWS was perceived as slow (if they'd only known...)
    5. NeWS had a funky interpretation of PS that was problematic when it was used outside of NeWS (it rarely printed properly.)
    6. The basic Sun/DEC rivalry and the fact the DEC was already heavily involved.
    Was NeWS better then X? Mebbe, mebbbe not. NeWS was slow and resource-hungry and prone to weirdness. On the other hand X turned out much the same way. Had NeWS been better supported or even made available off of Sun products it likely would have at least given X a good run for it's money.

    Interestingly most of the NeWS lovers (and they were legion) were really excited about NeXT. Having already grown to appreciate a unified rendering model they also found many of the Next widgets and conventions to echo their beloved NeWS.

    As to Athena - I believe UNC-Chapel Hill (?) bought a Athena-package and of course lots of vendors including DEC made much lucre selling X. Sun finally killed NeWS completely in the mid-90's.

  • PDF stands for Postscript Display Format.

    No, PDF stands for Portable Document Format, at least according to Adobe.

    Furthermore while PDF is PostScript-based it's got a bunch of additionial features like encryption and greater support for embedded bitmaps and other objects, internal & external linking, color-spaces, up & downsampling hints & support, etc.

    Actually the best way to think of PDF is as a chunky somewhat object-oriented PostScript derivitive.

    Aside from being a cross-platform document format Adobe is positioning PDF as a universal-container for all sorts of document-related presentation & printing information.

  • you imply that since PDF has been "used for three independant windowing systems... [that it] ...provides a pretty powerful argument for further consideration..."
    That's what you got from my posting? You misimplied me.

    First off they're all PostScript-derived implementations, not PDF. Personally I'm not particularly fond of PDF and would prefer a much more OO design, more like what Gosling's PostScript was looking somewhat like. I'd rather see yet another PostScript derivative used for a next-generation windowing system then the awkwardness that is PDF.

    As to the conditions that led to the end of NextStep I think that they were unrelated to its windowing system. Next was hobbled by a number of factors including its original steep hardware prices and an endemic shortage of applications. Unable ever to ever really gain momentum it lasted remarkably long considering it's off-the-radar status.

    Apple seems to have finally taken that lesson to heart after developers refused to support Rhapsody and has now provided exemplarily support for both modified & unmodified MacOS-before-X applications. That should get it through the new-OS shortage until developers start shipping native ones.

    Actually in a very real way Next & NextStep are now Apple & MacOS X: What else can you call it when a business buys it's multi-billion-dollar competition for -400 million, takes over their operations and makes their product the basis for all future products?

    As to popularity, as windowing systems its true they haven't been wildly successful. On the other hand look at the ones that are: MS GDI, Apple QuickDraw and X Windows; a small set that isn't particularly impressive these days. X Windows remains problematic, QuickDraw is EOL'd and MS GDI is the only one undergoing rapid development.

    In their day the first two PostScript windowing implementations made strong showings in spite of the odds against them and MacOS X looks strong so far. Also PostScript itself remains dominant in printing, PDF is now the cross-platform document standard and SVG has W3C support - these all provide a strong synergy for any more future unified display/printing implementations.

    Finally, and a bit off the topic but it does appear that MacOS X is *very* themable - there are already ones available. The UI elements are all standard bitmap formats in easy-to-edit packages. Here are a few MacOS X themes [fwi.com]

  • Well, what you see are pixels but MacOS X's quartz is a third generation display that uses Postscript. You'll notice that resized icons don't become pixelated (well, stuff that takes advantage of postscript won't appear pixelated, but older stuff from the legacy MacOS will still use the older pixmap rendering)

    http://arstechnica.com/reviews/1q00/macos-x-gui/ma cos-x-gui-1.html [arstechnica.com]

  • I must admit that I've never actually used NeWS myself, but when I glaced at the UNIX Hater's Handbook [catalog.com], the chapter complaining about X Window talked about NeWS.

    Here's a snippet:

    Sounds like science fiction? An extensible window server was precisely the strategy taken by the NeWS (Network extensible Window System) window system written by James Gosling at Sun. With such an extensible system, the user interfae toolkit becomes an extensible server library of classes that clients download directly into the server (the approach taken by Sun's TNT Toolkit). Toolkit objects in different applications share common objects in the server, saving both time and memory, and reating a look-and-feel that is both consistent aross applications and customizable. With NeWS, the window manager itself was implemented inside the server, eliminating network overhead for window manipulation operations -- and along with it the race conditions, context switching overhead, and interaction problems that plague X toolkits and window manager.

    I disagreed with a good amount of things I read in that text though, so I'd take it with a grain of salt. Interesting, anyway, though.


    --harlan
  • I have actually used NeWS myself and found it to be quite nice. In fact, the story I heard was that X was created because Sun wouldn't license NeWS to any other workstation vendors! Andy van Dam, Certified Graphics God at Brown University, explained his disgust with Sun's attitude on NeWS (likening it to Xerox's idiocy in not disseminating windowing in general and leaving it to the Mac). He said he told Sun that they had a "bullet train", but because of their licensing attitudes, every other vendor was teaming up behind a "steam locomotive" called X. :-)

    Some of the features that were nice in NeWS (aside from general 3rd-gen coolness like, oh floating point coordinates, and the pure niftyness of sending PostScript over Ethernet for drawing :-) included its object model (the PostScript dialect in NeWS was object-oriented!), its support for pre-emptive threading, and arbitrarily shaped windows (in the eighties!). All in all it was a nice piece of work.

    Yet another example of superior technology dying for business reasons.


    -----

  • First off, I agree - OpenGL would be a place to start, except for printing and text. This is where Berlin [berlin-consortium.org] starts, after all.
    Postscript/PDF is pretty unwieldy, from what i have seen,
    I'm curious as to what you find unwieldy.

    Is it just the postfix notation that PostScript uses (i.e., 4 5 + instead of 4 + 5)? That's certainly irritating, unless you're used to a postfix calculator. But I didn't find it any more irritating than using prefix notation in Lisp or Scheme or the mix of prefix (for functions) and infix (for math) in C, C++, and Java.

    Or is it the low-level nature of it? Good use of procedures (in PostScript) or objects (in Quartz) helps tremendously there. I know one guy who wrote a ray tracer in PostScript! He had to limit the data size, but only because (at the time - 1991) he couldn't find a printer with enough RAM :-)

    Certainly, PostScript is no more low level than OpenGL. In some ways, it is higher (PDF/Quartz even more so - check out the color model). I'll admit that PDF's tendency to use one-letter commands is dense, but it isn't really meant for human consumption. Quartz is an API, so it has full words for method names.

    but is obviously quite flexible with good typography support, which is the biggest missing element in all the others.
    Absolutely - and it's been that way for years. Ten years ago, researchers at Xerox PARC (Card, Mackinlay, Robertson) were doing 3D info visualization and pointed out poor text support as one of their biggest problems. And nothing much has changed.


    -----

  • I heard was that X was created because Sun wouldn't license NeWS to any other workstation vendors!

    Not so. I was there, though the memories are getting fuzzy. Sun was aggressively trying to license NeWS and promote it as an "open" standard (it implemented most of the Adobe Red book PostScript definition, hence Open). Sun had licensed the Network File System with huge success, with every other UNIX vendor adopting it, and Sun (somewhat naively in retrospect) thought the world would likewise adopt the next brilliant technical invention provided to them.

    Remember at the time Windows 1.0 had tiled windows, and Macs were still monochrome. NeWS was a resolution-independent window system with arbitrarily-shaped canvases that you dynamically reprogrammed by defining new PostScript dictionary elements and then sending your own primitives over the wire!! It was far too advanced for people to grok. However the competition did not want yet another part of their technology coming from Sun, so the so-called Hamilton group (named after a street in Palo Alto) cast around for an alternative and settled on X which was developed primarily at MIT. Although a few companies did license NeWS (SCO and SGI demo'd it, a company implemented it for OS/2, etc.), every other workstation vendor declaring X a standard pretty much killed NeWS. (There were other factors, mentioned in the fine technical summary [google.com].)

    NeWS might not have taken over the world anyway. James Gosling, Jerry Farrell, Owen Densmore, and others did amazing work turning stacks of PostScript dictionaries into an object-oriented UI class system (that later turned into the fine TNT toolkit), but PostScript is still an odd language in which to program a UI. I venture that the realization that language is crucial led Gosling on the path to Java.

    Elsewhere, maggard says NeWS is released ~1985. I'm looking at the NeWS 1.0 release notes what I rote dated 10 July 1987. James Gosling joined Sun from the Andrew project and had been working on project SunDew for a while, and that became NeWS.

    Cheers from Sun's Programming Environments documentation writer at the time.
    --

  • In fact, the story I heard was that X was created because Sun wouldn't license NeWS to any other workstation vendors!

    I think (but am not totally sure) that X was created independantly, because MIT wanted everything in Athena to be in-house stuff. However, the reason X is used everywhere now, and not NeWS or one of it's decendants, is because X was and is non-proprietary.

    Yet another example of superior technology dying for business reasons.

    Yeah, it really seems to happen a lot. I wonder if there's a webpage with a list of such techs. It would be interesting to see.
  • Pick a single card to accelerate. That should make life MUCH easier on development. I realize the desire to support everything, but you'll do better with a single card.

    People can run it w/o acceleration to play around, and if they want to use it, drop $100-$200 on the supported card. Hell, it's easier to try than MacOS X and less of a cost to adopt.

    I don't know if there is a Qt port, but if you're going to actual go places, Trolltech seems to want to succeed where Java failled. (Yes, Java is doing well... Java replacing native apps failled miserably, and that WAS the hype 5 years ago, back when applications still existed and weren't all web pages).

    Alex

  • Of course, Berlin (Score:3)

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday May 24, 2001 @06:29PM (#199723)
    Berlin [berlin-consortium.org] - an open source (LGPL) windowing system - has a ThIrD-GeNeRaTiOn display layer. It's far more advanced than Apple's quartz too (quartz is not at all elegant though it shows promise). Arstechnica compared Berlin to Quartz about a year ago and found Berlin to be much more logical. But wait! Don't acuse Berlin of being slowly developed! It's been rocketing along lately - see screenshots [berlin-consortium.org]). Most of the perceived slowness of development in "Berlin" is that it (appropriately) relies on many other developing softwares: Freetype, OmniORB, and GGI [ggi-project.org]. Many Berlin developers also write for GGI which serves the same purpose as X (as in the kludgy framebuffer).

    Berlin is resolution independent, uses CORBA, blah blah blah. All the good stuff.

    The main issues now are getting hardware acceleration for Berlin. It can run in an X window, or on SVGAlib - which isn't fun for anyone.

  • Timeline (Score:3)

    by maggard ( 5579 ) <michael@michaelmaggard.com> on Saturday May 26, 2001 @12:19AM (#199724) Homepage Journal
    • PostScript [belgacom.net] hits the market ~1982
    • Project Athena [mit.edu] announced 1983
    • Project Athena starts [sunyit.edu] 1984
    • X (X1) [motifzone.com] released June 19, 1984
    • NeWS [postscript.org] is released ~1985
    • X11R1 [motifzone.com] released September 15, 1987
    • Be evaluates NeWS [bebox.nu] as the windowing system for their intended OS in 1991
    Interesting posting [google.com] regarding NeWS & it's history from someone involved

  • OpenGL (Score:3)

    by ikekrull ( 59661 ) on Thursday May 24, 2001 @05:39PM (#199725) Homepage
    OpenGL would be one possible base on which to build a resolution independent GUI, with support for hardware acceleration of many operations, including evaluator functions - for curves etc., and vertex level operations using NVidia and others' geometry processors.

    This is happening slowly on a number of fronts, the most widely known being E's EVAS.

    Other options might include HTML/CSS, SVG or even Flash/Shockwave formats.

    Postscript/PDF is pretty unwieldy, from what i have seen, but is obviously quite flexible with good typography support, which is the biggest missing element in all the others.

  • PostScript (Score:4)

    by maggard ( 5579 ) <michael@michaelmaggard.com> on Friday May 25, 2001 @12:24AM (#199726) Homepage Journal
    PostScript [belgacom.net] is generally though of as a Page Display Language however it's been applied as a display rendering layer also.

    Sun Microsystems' James Gosling created a displayed PostScript as the basis for NeWS [postscript.org] around 1985. This implementation was never particularly Adobe/Apple-PostScript compatible and was only licensed from Adobe shortly before Sun abandoned it. However it was the first use of PostScript for a windowing system.

    NeXT then licensed & underwrote development of PostScript into Display PostScript (no direct relation to displayed PostScript.) This was the basis for NeXT's NextStep [faqs.org] interface and lives on today in GNUstep [gnustep.org].

    Apple has recently independantly implemented the PostScript-derived PDF [adobe.com] from public specifications for it's Quartz [apple.com] rendering layer in it's recently released MacOS X.

    Thus you've a single well known, well documented language that's been used for three independant windowing systems over the course of 15 years, two of them independant of the language's licensors. Add that to it's direct application to printing and it's a pretty powerful argument for further consideration as an X-Window alternative/successor.

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