Graphics stack (GUI) improvements

[Jakub Jermář]

The HelenOS native GUI environment should be further improved and extended.

Details

HelenOS features a compositing GUI described in Petr Koupy's master thesis (see below). The GUI is fairly basic and offers vast room for improvements. The goal of this project is to implement a reasonable subset of the following.

• support for direct rendering in graphic driver infrastructure
• more drawing operations in drawing library (lines, curves, polygons, circles, etc.)
• retained scene description in drawing library
• hardware acceleration of drawing library
• better quality of drawing library output (advanced filtering, antialiasing)
• better precision of drawing library output (floating point coordinates and pixels)
• support for more image and font formats in drawing library
• more widgets in widget toolkit (menu bars, scrolls bars, edit boxes, list boxes, etc.)
• support to minimize and maximize windows
• desktop environment (task bar, icons)
• improvements of terminal emulator (resizing, scrolling, history)
• console applications awareness of resizing and termination of their terminal emulator

What Gains and Benefits will this bring?

HelenOS will become more usable and more user-friendly and visually appealing.

Difficulty

medium

Required skills

A successful applicant will have good skills of programming in the C language and the ability to survive in a non-standard non-POSIX environment. Previous experience with a graphics stack implementation would be beneficial.

Documentation

• Graphics Stack for HelenOS
• GUI's Users Guide

Possible mentors

HelenOS Core Team, Martin Decky