Clear as mud...

Tue, 01/06/2004, 03:33
I'll openly admit that I'm just grasping for content here, but nVidia's latest 53.x series drivers have a pretty neat little transparency feature included. Though being able to make transparent selected windows is of limited use, the aesthetics are undeniably nice...

It's interesting to note that Trillian (the window to the right) has for the longest time had transparency capabilities. It's rather useful (and usable) in transparency mode, because it's not an application you normally have to pay attention to, but still want to keep an eye on. A bit of a balancing act.

With a tool like your computer, though, prettiness should be strictly secondary to usability. Frank Llyod Wright and all that stuff. Having a focused window be transparent is murder on productivity, and its really just dumb to be a slave to vanity. With reported extensive usage of alpha-channel controls in MS' upcoming Longhorn, I hope they'll keep this in mind. Ideally, I'd like to see all background (unfocused) windows set to something like 60% transparency,. then spring to 100% visibility when clicked. This should be done at a native system level, too, not some company's hack.

Of course, if I used linux, I'm sure I could cobble something up to that effect. But I'm too unmotivated.

Getting old sucks.
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