Saturday, April 21, 2007

Transparancy Secret Of Yahoo Widget Engine Revealed

Well recently I moved one of my yahoo widgets to a new location and guess what i noticed! It revealed the yahoo widget's transparency secret...It uses the same old method that we use in java,the robot method("The method that most of the people did not like")!! and thats the truth here are the sequence of images:

1) before I hit the start button
2)I hit the start button
3)Upon press the start button again(notice that the captured image of the menu bar on the upper left widget):
4)After refreshing:
Should I conclude that the robot method is not that bad after all!huh?

7 comments:

Unknown said...

The problem is the Robot class, not the method - though dump on modern hardware accelerated desktops (Xgl, Vista).

Robot.createScreenCapture creates/allocates a new image for every captured frame, which is very inefficient compared to updating a existing one.

Further, I'm not 100% convinced that the yahoo widget engine uses screen-capuring to achieve transparency. The described behavior also occurs, if the backbuffer is cleared..

Matt Raible said...

I dig the transparent dock and taskbar. Are you running XP or is this a Vista thing.

Anonymous said...

Cool!
What do you think bout new youtube assistant at www.mxnu.com? :-)

Ashish Lijhara said...

well Matt it xp sp2 itself i have just modified to the way i want it to look...the dock is by rocket dock(www.crystalxp.net)and for transparent taskbar i would like to thank nvidia graphics card

Ashish Lijhara said...

michael thats the truth the dock you see on my desktop does not show such a behavior and more over each of the widgets show the same behavior every time i try to do that and the backbuffer was not cleared

Anonymous said...

We use Layered Windows. That's all. No magic. Well, at least no magic that we do ourselves. We let the OS do it.

Ashish Lijhara said...

yup Ed i know that it aint no magic