An enhancement to the Mac OS X operating system under development by Apple looks to pave the way for active desktop pictures, or desktop backgrounds that can include motion graphics and alter themselves based on user actions or the time of the day.
Active Desktop Feature for Mac OS X Leopard?
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Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSNews.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
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I sure “loved” Active Desktop in Windows!
[EDIT: Added sarcastic aura to comment]
Edited 2007-04-19 18:24 UTC
Yeah, especially the frequent crashes and useless “channels,” haha!
So, like… widgets, then, but on the desktop?
…exactly the feature Steve Jobs talked about last year, and there have been hacks to make available on Tiger forever?
*Edit* Okay, having read TFA, it’s not like that… it’s a patent filing (and nothing more) for using the GPU to deal with desktop backgrounds.
How many Apple patents get filed that we never see anything more of?
Edited 2007-04-19 18:33
How many Apple patents get filed that we never see anything more of?
Most of them.
Using GPU for rendering desktop wallpaper? This patent is likely invalid. Have a look at http://www.gnome.org/~seth/blog/xrendering (written over 2 years ago) and search for “savanna”.
Active desktop is basicaly about being able to use the IE COM object as background. This allows to use a web page with a full-screen WMP-powered video as background.
The Apple patent looks about recipes that will tell the GPU how a image must be “transformed”. This means they can create different “recipes” that will generate different images from a single source image, or they may use recipes to tell teh GPU how to mix two images, to make transitions between images nicer. Or at least that’s what I understand from the article.
It doesn’t even looks related to Active Desktop.
I think it would be very interesting to see how this could be put to practical use. I can’t think of anything right off hand, but I’m sure somebody else could.
IIRC there are programs like Earth/XEarth that did a very similar effect. Computing something to have a time sensitive background. Something similar existed for SGI machines if I am not mistaken (please anyone with better memory correct me). I think that taking this idea and using the GPU instead of the CPU with some tiny differences (in the details) is not something new. It IS the next logical step. It is based on something and it is the obvious next step. Just one more company patenting something in America…. Well done. I hope Apple won’t be allowed to patent the user in the future. It is getting boring.
PS. It really kills creativity.
“I think that taking this idea and using the GPU instead of the CPU with some tiny differences (in the details) is not something new. It IS the next logical step. It is based on something and it is the obvious next step. Just one more company patenting something in America…. Well done. I hope Apple won’t be allowed to patent the user in the future. It is getting boring.”
You probably aren’t old enough to remember when Microsoft copied Mac OS with Windows.
Apple didn’t patent the look and feel of their desktop so Microsoft copied it. Apple sued and Microsoft won.
Advance a few years and check out all the patents that Microsoft has and how they go after companies with them. You rarely hear about but if you look you can find way more than you ever wanted to know.
So how do companies protect themselves? In American they HAVE to patent software before Microsoft does. Even then Microsoft abuses their position and money by stalling in courts when companies have outright evidence of Microsoft stealing programming code.
THAT’S WHY Apple is patenting this. Change the laws and these problems go away.
“You probably aren’t old enough to remember when Microsoft copied Mac OS with Windows.”
You must not be old enough to remember that Mac copied Xerox. Actually, everyone copied Xerox.
Everybody copied Xerox because they were showing off their inventions by giving other companies tours at PARC.
Especially with Apple, it seems that Xerox wanted to be copied because;
“Convinced that the technology at PARC could help Apple usher in the eighties, Steve Jobs offered Xerox a killer deal. Apple, which was privately owned at the time, would allow Xerox to invest $1 million in Apple, which was sure to soar in value when the company went public in 1981 – in exchange for two guided tours of PARC’s technology. Xerox happily accepted and gave Steve and a team of engineers from the Lisa project a tour.”
http://lowendmac.com/orchard/05/1005.html
That said, the similarities between the Palo Alto and the Macintosh are not that big, actually they’re far, far smaller than between MacOS, Windows, BeOS, RiscOS, etc, etc.
http://folklore.org/StoryView.py?story=On_Xerox,_Apple_and_Progress…
What Steve Jobs got from Xerox PARC was the very idea of a graphical user interface, operated using a mouse – that’s about it! Sooner or later this had to be the dominating paradigm, but Apple was the company that made great things happen – even with far less resources than the big guys, like IBM.
Actually, Microsoft is lobbying to weaken patent law, and set limits on the damages that can be awarded in a patent case.
The damages will be too expensive for the little guy and a drop in the bucket for MS and other big guys.
I know the stories even if I don’t remember most of them. But my point wasn’t against Apple only. It is just getting worse and worse and I don’t mean Apple but the whole patent thing. I ‘ve heard the stories about Microsoft, read the history of computing several times by different persons with different views on the subject, used many OSes, machines and products and as far as I care patents are rubbish. I can understand that some people want to protect their creations and make them closed source for example, but to patent something (anything) is plain stupid. If you want good example you might need to go to the extreme to make it look crystal clear but make an assumption that someone named Einstein could patent his theoretic discoveries for example. You think computing would be the same? If you think then maybe you don’t remember CRT displays. Google it. Not to mention other human achievements.
In my way of thinking I don’t give a damn about Microsoft != Apple
PS. Excuse my (ab)use of English language. Not a native speaker.
Considering that Xerox Parc invented all the GUI goodness that we have now, and everyone, including Apple copied them, your post is rather uninformed.
This sounds to me like it’s a lot more than just Active Desktop IMO. Sounds like it’s an entirely new way of compositing the desktop background. Regardless of how cool it may look if/when its implemented, the most important thing is that it will consume less system resources which is always good. That is one thing I have to give Apple credit for is that they don’t just add features with each new release, they also fine tune the OS so that its faster and more stable.
This sounds similar to e17 animated backgrounds and Edje:
http://www4.get-e.org/Backgrounds/Animated/
http://enlightenment.sourceforge.net/Enlightenment/DR17/
It might be not the same, but sounds similar.
This sounds a lot like Windows DreamScene (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dreamscene) in Vista, which allows for video or dynamic 3d scenes as desktop wallpaper.
Perhaps another example that the idea exchange between Windows and OS X goes both ways more than Apple might want to admit. 😉
Actually this pre-existed Windows also, so they both copied it.
People can argue technical merits of if ideas are different, but not really much new these days.
If you have a Mac, run this in the Terminal (all in one line):
/System/Library/Frameworks/ScreenSaver.framework/Resources/ScreenSaver Engine.app/Contents/MacOS/ScreenSaverEngine -background
There you go. Animated background picture in Tiger: it will run the currently selected screen saver, which can be a Quartz Composer, dynamically GPU generated animation as your background “picture” – just as that patent application (from 2005 btw) describes.
Some links:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quartz_Composer
Some nice compositions:
http://www.quartzcompositions.com/phpBB2/upload/index.php?cmd=top
(This one is really nice as a background, for a while at least. It isn’t a QC, but being OpenGL-based is also mostly GPU bound: http://wakaba.c3.cx/s/lotsablankers/lotsawater.html )
edit: added quote tags
Edited 2007-04-20 01:20
That is freaking awesome.
Take current frame from camera stationed on remote South Pacific Beach and display on my background. Repeat 30 times per second.
As far as animated graphics goes you can just download Quartz desktop to run Quartz Composition in your background.
Well, having a 3D Rss screensaver as your background is cool to play, but rather unstandable in real-life.
And how exactly this feature going to makes up productive?
“I just stare at my desk. But it looks like I’m working.”
Will it crash the file manager like Active Desktop did in 9x back then ?
I guess it still won’t be on par with xearth -root
“I guess it still won’t be on par with xearth -root
“
You can even run mplayer in the root window to have a “movie desktop”. 🙂
But please let me get it right: First, we have an animated background. On top of it, we have tons of icons, widgets, and other little stuff (like dancing elephants). Furthermore, we have application windows. And if we run applications in fullscreen (I think most people with less than 21″ CRTs do this), we see… nothing of our animated background? Is this correct so far? Or maybe I’m wrong and the window is transparent, and its content too, so we can watch a nice cartoon while working on our monthly sales report, then work would be fun and joy. One could argument that serious work is done using MICROS~1 products, while Apple and its Mac OS X are for playing only, and, ah yes, it does not have any oh praise oh market share blah… I won’t do this. 🙂
I’d like to see how neurotypical persons in diffference to people with attention deficite syndroms will react, would be an interesting study… but the last ones usually have a PC and not a Mac. 🙂
It’s worth noting (I think this piece of software was mentioned in one of the previous comments) that Quartz Desktop does exactly what this patent describes: http://www.fourminutemilesoftware.com/quartzdesktop/
It uses Apple’s Quartz engine to render a background (which the OS already offloads to the GPU, I believe), and anybody can create compositions using Apple’s own Quartz Composer utility (which can also be used as screensavers, incidentally).
Mac OS X Tiger basically provides all of this functionality for you; Quartz Desktop just makes it available as a desktop backdrop.
I loved Active Desktop! It was wonderful having Web pages as wallpaper replacing the stupid desktop icons. Its cool having Java applets and other cool Web pages as items on the desktop. You can do a lot in a Web page, much of it can’t be done in widgets or gagets.
It about time Apple decided to copy… oh wait… they’re copying Dreamscape 🙁
1. From what I understand, Apple “allowed” Xerox to invest in Apple, with the agreement that Steve could tour the PARC facility several times.
I wasn’t there, but I doubt this involved “you can ogle, Steve, but under no circumstances may you use anything you see here,” or what good would the opportunity to tour the research facility be?
The Xerox (Star, wasn’t it?) wasn’t a production machine, it was an R&D demonstration model whose price would make the Lisa look like a kid’s toy.
2. Apple gave Microsoft permission to use aspects of the Mac OS in Windows 1.0. They decided they’d continue to make every new Windows version more Mac-like (I’m still waiting for that to actually happen) and Apple didn’t fight it properly, and they lost.
Actually, they sued MS over overlapping windows in Win 2.0 in the late 80’s, something taken directly from the Star. The courts agreed with MS that you cannot patent look and feel, and Apple lost. Cest la vie
Any old NeXTSTEP users around who remember its popular shareware screensaver app BackSpace?
You could use its screensaver animations as an animated desktop background, and some had interactive elements. For example I remember being quite charmed by a ‘roaches’ module, where the creatures would hide behind your open windows, then run around the screen when the window was removed.
Of course the novelty wore off pretty quickly, it wasn’t worth the use of resources when there was work to be done. It may have looked cool, especially more than 15 years ago, but in my opinion animated backdrops were just a pointless visual distraction. Having said that, it’s quite impressive how fast it ran on a 25Mhz 68040 NeXTstation.
If Apple do implement something like an Active Desktop, hopefully they can find a way to make it more than an eye-candy gimmick.
“For example I remember being quite charmed by a ‘roaches’ module, where the creatures would hide behind your open windows, then run around the screen when the window was removed.”
You can have this essential feature on X by installing xroach. 🙂
“It may have looked cool, especially more than 15 years ago, but in my opinion animated backdrops were just a pointless visual distraction.”
Especially if they are covered by plenty of icons, windows and other GUI elements.
“If Apple do implement something like an Active Desktop, hopefully they can find a way to make it more than an eye-candy gimmick.”
Actually, you can use some applications that display status diagrams on the root window (“animated background”) in order to have a look at system statistics, such as CPU temperature, system load or memory usage. I’d find this useful. I really hope Apple finds a way to make the animated background useful so people use it in fact, more than seeing it as a replacement for a fullscreen movie player. 🙂
Microsoft creates “Flip3D”, and everyone starts whining about how it’s a rip-off of Exposé, and now Apple patent something which is EXACTLY what Microsoft is already providing to its customers, and only 2 people out of 28 even notice?
What the hell is this world coming to?
Because Apple’s Patent isn’t “Active Desktop”, it’s a way of generating hi-res wallpaper using the GPU.
Because Microsoft has created a lot of hard feeling in the world. A lot of people don’t like Microsoft.
As of today Apple is viewed by many (not all) as a true innovator while Microsoft is view as an 800 pound gorilla who steals ideas and treats it’s user base as thieves.
It’s probably not a fair assessment, but then again most things rarely are.
Personally, I look at innovation as either creating something useful from nothing or taking something and making it more useful. I don’t see how animated backgrounds are useful, but then again I can’t see how blurry backgrounds through transparent windows is useful either. My guess is that OS makers are running out of legit ideas and are turning to eye candy as a way of selling new OS.
When i read this,
“This sounds a lot like Windows DreamScene (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dreamscene) in Vista, which allows for video or dynamic 3d scenes as desktop wallpaper.
Perhaps another example that the idea exchange between Windows and OS X goes both ways more than Apple might want to admit. ;-)”
or
“Microsoft creates “Flip3D”, and everyone starts whining about how it’s a rip-off of Exposé, and now Apple patent something which is EXACTLY what Microsoft is already providing to its customers, and only 2 people out of 28 even notice?
What the hell is this world coming to?”
i really wonder whether some people really read what it is about before to post anything. If so, do they try to understand before posting crap?
What this patent describes has nothing to do with whatever Micorosft does with DreamScene, which is loading a file (e17 works the same way) and put it as a scene as wallpaper. That’s what DreamScene does, with some GPU based accelerattion (well maybe given that it does quite take some processor ressource and slow down the system)!!!
What the Apple patent describes is a GPU on the fly generated scene from a recipe containing small instructions to render the scene. This is totally different aproach as it does not depend on loading a file to process it but it creates the scene in real time as defined by the instruction. But the real point about the patent is that the invention is designed to create interactive user interface that will execute a set of instructions to create a given scene depending on what the user does or the system is doing. The invention is then able to generate a given scene for a given usage of the system which gives a much more dynamic interface. This has nothing to do with DreamScene, it just sounds lot more sexy!!!!! and more important it sounds lot more useful.
Now if you want to speak about who copy who, well we can…..
The DreamScene in Vista that Microsoft gives is nothing more than a feature that OS X has been able to do back to Mac OS 10.2, aka Jaguar, yes you read well Mac OS 10.2 was already able to put a animated wall paper (it loaded the screensaver set by the user). It did leverage Quatz Extrem, so the idea is not new at all and you could put animated 3D scenes as wall paper. So sorry cowboy Microsoft was not the first in this one too (the IE COM based active desktop was limited to crappy videos…)……. You don’t believe me well recall this
http://forums.macosxhints.com/archive/index.php/t-4971.html
This is the same terminal command given by PowerMacX, the difference is that Tiger adds the beauty of quartz composer as loadable files.
Well ok this feature is a hiden feature which is not activated by Apple and we know why now, they are thinking about something much better according to this patent, as the current implementation is not ressource friendly and to be fair having a way to just load some animated background is quickly boring.
Does anyone here think this is in any way innovative?
So fast forward 10 years, and they are finally thinking that Active Desktop’s time has come? Active Desktop sucked in ’95, it still sucked in 2000 and (surprise) it’s still totally irrelevant today.
I’ve seen a ton of desktops since Win95 and not ONE ever utilized the boat anchor known as Active Desktop.
But, I suppose since we have goo-gobs of CPU power now, the software companies feel the burning need to use up those cycles by running crap infested OS’s. Sorry Apple…..this is a mistake now as it was in 95 when BG tried pushing it.
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I used Active Desktop! There was a brief period in 2000 when Windows customizers would compete to come up with the best Active Desktop design.
It wss in Windows from 1997 (via IE4 shell -the good old days 🙂 )-2007