Your Cube is nice and all, but...

[Oasisgames]

... how about a sphere?
I was thinking about this whilst walking home from school one day.
The first possibility is the deformed cube sphere.
A good example of this is here (http://www.math.umn.edu/~rogness/mathlets/cubeSphere.html).
You take a cube and morph it into a sphere. It would operate the same way as the current cube, only morphed. The 3d plugin can be modified to also morph the stacked windows in the same manner, creating a massive set of concentric spherical window layers.
The other option is a massive geosphere. Tons of people have voiced their wishes for a cube with useable tops and bottoms, this would be that only to the extreme. Since using a square / rectangular shape for each side of our psuedosphere would be an impossibility (geometrically speaking, anyway), the prime candidate is a massive dodecahedron, which can be expanded to have as many sides as you want (only we'd probably just use the 12 that the shape provides) this can then be subdivided and morphed in the same manner as the cube.

It's just an idea to think about.

[TB2]

1. This won't be possible until input redirection
2. Besides of being a nice gag I don't see how this would improve usability. The thing with the concetric layers would look pretty neat, but I don't see how I would want to write letters or surf the web on a deformed layer of a sphere

[Oasisgames]

1. This won't be possible until input redirection
I don't see how as it would act the same as the cube, only it would "fold"/"morph" into a sphere when rotated.
2. Besides of being a nice gag I don't see how this would improve usability. The thing with the concetric layers would look pretty neat, but I don't see how I would want to write letters or surf the web on a deformed layer of a sphere
Same as above, it would morph back into a flat surface when focused on a workspace.

[TB2]

I see, you were only talking about it being a sphere when rotating, I misunderstood that ;) Nice idea then ^^

[delfick]

I once asked the devs in irc about this

they aren't too willing to do this

whole problem of making sure resources are spread over tasks wisely
aka too much effort, for too little return.

Though there was a slightly more positive response to making the cube cylindrical...

though there's issues with that as well.....

[Oasisgames]

Bump.

With the addition of the Cylinder, this is a lot closer to being a possibility. Just needs a vertical vertex stride and some simple pinching and we can have a sphere.

[Oasisgames]

Little bump/double-post to respond to something delfick said in another thread:

OasisGames : going from what I asked in irc a while back about implementing a sphere, or even a cylinder atleast.
There are problems with sphere that make it quite a problem to implement.
though specifics of those problems I can't remember, and I'm not a dev, so I wouldn't really know....
Last time the discussion came up, the only major problems were implementing a full grid desktop (which we've done, if I'm reading the code for the vertex-stride stuff correctly), being able to warp everything (which we clearly can), and finally, to truly get the effect, you'd want to draw windows on the top and bottom of the sphere, so the problems that have been discussed with cube tops come into play (which is really just "they'll stretch too much when rotated", but that can be fixed with an automatic rotation so that they're always oriented facing the viewer).
Technically, all we need to implement the sphere now is to change the way the vertices for the viewports and windows are moved as shown in the demo I linked to in the main post. If we do it this way, we'd also want to draw a round cap, but that's not really a problem.

[some-guy]

What if the sphere looks like this?
http://somelinuxguy94.googlepages.com/spinning_cube.gif
so that the top and bottom are the cubcaps which are used like the existing way?

[Oasisgames]

That would simplify things, and in fact is what I'm looking for as a start. I don't expect the top/bottom to have desktops until after we've (re-)implemented it in the cube itself. I'll go start up my virus infestation (read: old XP machine), which has 3ds Max (professional 3d modeling program) on it, I can do a simple cube->sphere deformation and render it with desktop images as the side textures to show everyone exactly what it'd look like. (Said program crashes with RPC errors in Wine.)

http://random.ogunderground.com/compiz/sphere_render.png

It may not actually look that distorted, we could probably do something with the aspect ratio to fix it up (ie., make the sphere tall in the OpenGL world so that it appears square on the output, letting the user select the ratio, like with Expo)

[some-guy]

yeah, that could work...
I actually noticed that using 3D fixes some bugs with cylinder...

[Oasisgames]

If we just go with the standard sphere as shown in the pic, we can always just call it "Desktop Egg". Works for me.

[techno-mole]

i wondered about (and sorry if this has been mentioned) changing the cube so it looks like the tardis ? (i like doctor who) maybe have it so that if you use the screen saver plugin it will zoom the cube out and change it to the tardis (insert some kind of transitional effect here......) and hey presto you have the tardis revolving on your desktop !

i know this may well be a little much to expect from the people who build these plugins and compiz etc etc (but one can hope)