Former Compiz Developer Creating New Window Animation Library

Sam Spilsbury who was the former Compiz lead developer at Canonical and involved in the Unity desktop shell development is creating a new library spun out of Compiz.

Since leaving Canonical six years, he's spent a good portion of that time since working for Endless Computer on their GNOME Shell driven Linux desktop environment. Initially he wrote a "libwobbly" library at Endless for implementing support for "wobbly windows" and other animation logic spun out of the former Compiz code.

But now he's been working on "libanimation" as a new animation library written in C++ for C++ programs as well as C support and language bindings for GObject-supported languages. Libanimation is aiming just not to provide wobbly windows but also other window effects like zoom, bounce, glide, and magic lamp.

The original Compiz days on Ubuntu in 2006...

Libanimation isn't going to handle the rendering/compositing or scene graph management itself but rather just implement "the math" for handling these window animations.

The "desktop cube" likely isn't to make a comeback considering this library is just focused on window animation math.

Libanimation will simply return the transformations / coordinates needed for say the GNOME/Mutter to render the desktop as desired.

"Over time, more animations will be added. I hope that the library will be useful to authors of other compositors or applications and help to preserve some of the more magical parts of Compiz as technology itself matches forward," wrote Sam Spilsbury.

Libanimation is hosted on GitHub.