pleased precariously

I’m surprised so few people knew about it up until Alex’s keynote. It was pretty much the worst kept secret ever. We were constantly asking ourselves “should we just announce it?” because so many people already knew. There were also the vague blog posts about it, which did nothing to help keep things quiet

Go here to see one of the two projects that has eaten up my life lately.

If you’re lazy and don’t want to click on links and read a bunch of text: Pyro is a pseudo-compositing window manager/desktop environment. I say “pseudo-” because unlike compiz/beryl/metacity/xfce/etc, it doesn’t do the compositing itself. Instead, it reflects window contents into the firefox DOM as canvas elements, and firefox composites them as it does an HTML page. Simply put, pyro uses the X damage and composite extensions to turn firefox into your desktop. From there everything you can do to a dom element can be done to native window contents.

It has nice window frames (from the nice folks over at meebo) and easy (as easy as CSS can be theming.

All the desktop effects (expose, the alt-tab picker, minimization/maximization) are written in javascript and can make use of whatever javascript animation library you want to use. Multiple views of native windows are possible so expose and the window picker window contents are live and update as you’d expect.

It also provides a way for javascript components to be written that appear as toplevel windows (such as the entirely javascript+html flickr feed viewer and debug window seen here).

Anyway, download it, build it, try it out, and let us know what you think!