Metisse

Olivier Chapuis and Nicolas Roussel of the In Situ group at INRIA wanted to try new ways of handling windows, and X11 offered none: a window manager could move and stack, not redraw. Their answer was to chain three parts together. A modified X server, Xwnc, a cross between Xvnc and Xnest, drew every window into memory instead of onto the screen. FVWM managed them as usual, with a module that reported geometry. And a compositor, built on the group's Núcleo toolkit and OpenGL, assembled the screen from the window images as textures. A window could thus be rotated, shrunk, made translucent or folded away like the corner of a page, with the program behind it none the wiser.

The UIST 2005 paper was titled "Metisse is not a 3D desktop!" and the point was that the effects were an instrument for studying interaction, not entertainment. That did not stop Mandriva from shipping Metisse in Linux 2007 as an alternative to Compiz and Xgl, with rotatable windows as the selling point. The idea of windows as textures then became common property in every compositing window manager; Metisse itself stayed in the lab.