Transparent windows

Attila

Registered
Greetings, ya'll

TinkerTool is, as most of us know, capable of making the Terminal transparent. When using the preview option in TinkerTool, it opens a separate window that looks like any other one with maximize buttons etc.

Now, is there any way of making ALL windows in X transparent in some degree?

Cheers

/Attila
 
Yes. No.

Or No. Yes, if you prefer.

As far as anyone can tell, opacity must be supported by the application. It cannot be pushed on it from an outside hack.

Hope someone figures out how to prove me wrong some day.

-Rob
 
... doesn't Finder support transparency? It does, doesn't it? :confused:
Transparent Finder windows would be really practical...
 
I doubt that the finder supports window transparnecy because I doubt that carbon supports it very easily. Cocoa on the other hand supports it by default. The application can tell any of its NSWindows to have a transparency of a certain value and it will become transparent. The way TinkerTool does this to the Terminal.app is because Terminal.app has a preference for it, that is just hidden, if othere apps (I don't know of any yet) have a preference that does the same thing you could make the transparent too.

For those that don't know, preferenes in OS X are handeled a diffrent way than in 9 (idealy that is), basicaly there is a big database, NSUserDefaults, that handles the prefs and syncs them out to disk in your ~/Library/Preferences dir. You can use the command line app, 'defaults' to read and write from this database.
 
I believe the finder in 10.1 uses cocoa api, as I can use my mouse wheel to scroll. I could be wrong though :confused:

-jdog
 
The Finder is actually carbon. Instead of Apple trying to get developers to do everything in Cocoa (which certainly wouldn't serve everyone's needs), they are raising the bar with what can be done with Carbon app's. Notice that the Finder has a services menu option now? As for the mouse wheel working, this is something that has to be added in each Carbon app, whereas it's automatically recognized in Cocoa applications.
 
Back
Top