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by mananaysiempre 372 days ago
It’s almost certain to be a fairly cheap thing, at least for a GPU that can sling pixels at the gigabytes per second necessary to get smooth touch scrolling at these screen resolutions.

The demos only show a very limited array of shapes. Precompute the refraction, store the result in a texture, and the gist should be sample(blur(background), sample(refraction, point)). Probably a bit more complicated than this—I’m no magician of the kind that’s needed to devise cheap graphics tricks like this—but the computational effort should be in that ballpark. Compared to on-device language models and such, I wouldn’t be worried.

(Also, do I need to remind you of the absolute disdain directed by 95/98/Me/2000 users at the “toy” default theme of XP? And it was a bit silly, to be honest. It’s just that major software outfits don’t dare to be silly anymore, and that way lies blandness.)
3 comments
lodovic 372 days ago
> It’s just that major software outfits don’t dare to be silly anymore, and that way lies blandness

Great observation! We need some of that sillyness back. Everything is all serious and corporate nowadays, even 'fun' stuff like social media or games. Even movies can't be silly anymore.

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stereolambda 371 days ago
Not sure about 'serious and corporate', the big corps like to appear cute, folksy etc. and recently we even saw new Google Material Design advertised as judged more "rebellious" by focus groups. Maybe bland and toothless is just a general direction of contemporary culture and style that they follow.

Myself, I can appreciate corporate stuff presenting corporate. More truthful, feels a little less manipulative.

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Hamuko 371 days ago
>It’s almost certain to be a fairly cheap thing, at least for a GPU that can sling pixels at the gigabytes per second

Okay, but what about the battery connected to the GPU? The battery in my iPhone has already degraded below 80% health in the 2.7 years I've had it, so I'd rather not waste its charge on low-contrast glass effects.

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jitl 371 days ago
You’ll be able to turn them off with “reduce transparency” setting like you’ve been able to since iOS 7
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UltraSane 371 days ago
the Winamp GUI and skins are "silly". This is just boring and bland.
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