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Today, we interviewed Quinn Storm, the initiator of the Beryl project.

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What does Beryl do? For those of you who are only recently entering our marvelous free software world, Beryl is a window manager — it’s a program in charge of drawing window borders on your computer screen. Now, you’ll probably be saying to yourself Window borders? Isn’t that idiotic or a job for the operating system?. In Linux-land, it isn’t, because everything is modular.

As it turns out, being a window manager means Beryl is in the perfect position to exploit the latest technology, namely ubiquitous accelerated 3D rendering. Aside from drawing window borders (helped by its trusty companions Emerald, Heliodor and Aquamarine), Beryl also commands how windows are drawn on the screen. This lets Beryl implement fantastic animation effects.

If you don’t believe me, we’ve got proof: we shot a couple of videos for earlier articles, and we’ve got them right here:

• Beryl, window miniatures, transparent video vs. old PC,
• Beryl 0.2.0 on a low-end computer,
• Beryl magic: watching TV while installing software, and
• The coolness factor of Linux

But don’t click them just yet, because we’ve got something better. We have an exclusive interview with Quinn Storm, the lead developer of the Beryl project.

What did Quinn Storm tell us? Keep reading to find out!

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This entry was posted on Thursday, April 26th, 2007 at 13:06 and is filed under Free software, Interviews, Linux, Software bacán. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.