Quasar

Does working on the 3D stack make me look fat? Give it to me straight. I promised myself I won't cry no matter what the answer is. As I mentioned in my last blog I'll be getting awfully kinky with our 3D stack and people wondered whether my work on it affects Quasar. Well, just as me moving didn't affect my habits with regards to taking showers (which I do frequently, i.e. every christmas or so), smoking (never ever), being awake (at least once per day) it also didn't affect my spare time habits (except the "starving" thing which was one of my favorite past-times in Norway). Since Quasar was always my spare time project, my move affected it as much as me buying new sneakers affects temperature in Japan (which it doesn't, assuming of course that the folks in Japan won't find the vision of me in the new sneakers so insanely hot to increase the temperature of the whole country).

Aaaanyway, so what is Quasar? Besides being a word that starts with a Q, has some other letters in the middle and sounds funky. It's a dynamic rendering framework, which in turn begs the question "what the hell is that?" ("the hell" being an optional part of this sentence).

Let me lead you through the evolution of Quasar and hopefully at end of this trip we'll be on the same page with regards to what we really need in terms of a graphical framework on the desktop.

Quasar started as a pretty basic image manipulation framework. I wanted to make sure that people can chain filters e.g. read-image->scale image->blur image->render image. It was a linear pipeline. The thing that made it important to me was that it was focused on hardware acceleration. This is a very important point which I want to underline.

I'm not interested in software based effects. This is not to say that the software versions of all of them shouldn't work, I just refuse to bother. It's 2007, even phones come out with some kind of gpu in them, worrying about software based graphical effects does to your time what listening to financial advises from blogs of Open Source engineers does to your money - wastes it (which reminds me, I also have some financial tips for you. Well, tip, just one. It's not the quantity but quality as they say. Invest money in winning lottery tickets. Note that I said "winning", buying any other kind would be silly. You're welcome). With the work we're doing right now at Tungsten Graphics our graphics stack will be extremely good at it.

When I was a kid we didn't have fancy graphics. We had crackheads, alcoholics, pimps, thugs and plenty of other shady characters none of which, I'm fairly certain, did computer graphics (childhood memories warm your heart, don't they?). If my years of working on a vector graphics framework taught me anything (besides how to write a vector graphics framework) it's that the most fundamental part of a high level graphics framework isn't the framework at all. It's the way in which you let people design their applications, their interfaces. What use are blurred perspective transformations if two people know how to use them? What's the point of 20 composition modes if people can't be bothered to understand the basic 2.

So I started seeing effects as a step, a very crucial one, on the way to very appealing interfaces, but not my ultimate goal. In a desktop world we're dealing with graphics on a fairly abstract level, because we're doing graphics for non-graphics people. Good effects framework is not one that has every possible effect ever invented but one that makes it possible to quickly add those effects to ones application/interface and end up with something usable and pretty.

Finally inherent complexity of graphics bothered me. Maybe not even the complexity itself (especially since it's where my job security stems from), but the fact that it takes a lot of knowledge to understand and know the fast paths. The knowledge necessary to extract that logic can be easily abstracted in a graph like structure. That's what I started doing in Quasar.

Quasar is a dynamic graph. One that can rearrange itself to produce the output in the fastest possible way.
Those are the three basic tenants of Quasar, to rehash, they are:
- hardware accelerated,
- easy to incorporate and produce good looking results,
- smart enough to produce the results in the quickest possible way, no matter how little knowledge its users posses.

The way it works is that one creates the rendering in a graphical builder (which at the moment looks very much like Quartz Composer), loads it up in application and, well, that's it.

Of course, the graph can be created or modified at run-time just well. It follows the "tell me what you'd like and I'll give you that in the best way possible" principle.
Having said that Quasar is still far from complete but I just posted where to get it from on the relevant KDE list (if you don't know which one, trust me you want to wait a little bit longer before trying it out). Oh, and of course Quasar will support full effects pipelines on top of movies (integrated with Phonon).