Michael Dolan Dot Com

Wednesday, December 20th, 2006

Project Looking Glass Releases v1.0

I used Project Looking Glass a few years ago (boy was it unstable…) but it looks like they’ve made it to a stable v1.0 and I can’t wait to try it on my OpenSuse desktop. This is a Sun project that was open sourced way back although I don’t believe it picked up much community development interest. Seeing a 1.0 release shows Sun has chugged along with it though and I think that’s a good thing for Java.

I know GoMonkey has been using it for this cool, futuristic 3D Wii like control system. Looking Glass is a cool, fresh look at interfaces. It’s different from XGL/AIGLX b/c those make the environment 3D with a 2D desktop/windows, but looking glass makes the desktop itself (windows, backgrounds) all 3D. It’s a different perspective - so with Looking Glass you can post notes on the back of your window, your application switcher is 3D, and you can get Mac OS X Tiger / Vista type effects.

I won’t say it’s the best desktop environment out there for everyone, but it definitely has some unique characteristics other environments could adopt. In the grand scheme of things, all these innovations are Microsoft innovations anyway right so I’m sure some folks up in the Northwest have some reason to say why LG is just a clone of Vista ;-)    (I hope you know that was a joke)

Anyway, check it out if you have some time over the holiday. It appears Ubuntu is their distro of choice (shocking, I know).