Posted on 2007-04-29
Recently, Guillaume (Known to most as iXce) and myself got accepted by Ubuntu to work on Compiz/Beryl in Google's Summer of Code program. I'm thrilled myself, and can barely wait to get started.
We'll both be working on accessibility features, Guillaume on color filtering and I'll be focusing on zoom enhancements. As the situation with Beryl's input zoom is a bit dodgy, one of my main goals will be to both provide input enabled zoom with the current technologies, and prepare for the future with input transformation. Some of the main new features to look forward to will be:
The idea is to make this as generic as possible, so there won't be a need to implement major changes when input transformation is available to most users, and ideally it should work both with and without input transformation even when it is available. This will mean I'll probably write a new plugin, which isn't really all that much work. I'll be using some of the existing accessibility technologies available, but still want this to work for users that otherwise don't have to use accessibility technologies.
It'll be interesting working on this, but it has also been interesting in a very diffrent way to see this merge between the Compiz community and Beryl. I don't want to spark up any new flames here, there are enough of them allready, but I hope we can get something presentable out to our users soon, but it's not looking too good. The work on core is going quite well, and there hasn't really been any plugin issues either, it's everything else that is causing delays. And I also belive this is causing us to loose a lot of development time. I know I haven't been very active myself, though I've done a little work on porting/merging my multiscreen stuff.
I've been putting together a compiz-manager script which is far from finished, which I hope can help people start Compiz in their favorite way, autodetecting many of the options that Beryl does in core, but compiz doesn't. Beyond that, I also intend to get a build-script out there for users wanting to use the git versions, but don't know where to begin. I'm more or less just waiting for bset to get to a point where I'm happy with it, and you would be too.
My last post kinda looks strange with the merge going on, but at least something big is happening, and we're going somewhere.