One of Apple's upcoming operating system feature is called Time Machine. It is a fully eye-candied back-up utility that comes bundled, for free, with 10.5 a.k.a. Leopard.
Whilst Time Machine is still vaporware until it gets into the hands of the consumers, its benefits is surely recognized. Linux users, however, will no longer envy the Mac crowd because there is a linux version of this nifty tool and it is called TimeVault. It is not as "mature" as Time Machine but hey, if more people help to develop and test it, it will surely be out a few weeks after Time Machine is released.
Do you think it is worth the effort?
Only if a Compiz-Fusion+Cairo GUI is added. Time Machine uses Leopard’s Core Animation API to generate the “time continuum” graphic (which reminds me of this older picture http://media.arstechnica.com/journals/apple.media/steve_rdf.jpg ). However, the FOSS folks don’t really have an equivalent to Core Animation: Compiz/Fusion is most equal to Quartz Compositor (both being window managers), and Cairo is equal to Quartz 2D (both being 2D graphics libraries). And of course they both have their own versions of OpenGL. But if the Compiz Fusion folks want to turn their transparent cubes into fish bowls ( http://dev.beryl-project.org/~cyberorg/suse/44/compiz-fusion-cube-aquarium-first-look/ ), then I would suggest that someone should start with constructing an X Window Animation API as soon as possible.
Thanks, Rayne! I agree with you that there should be an open source equivalent for Core Animation. I wonder how long it will take before these same “Time Machine” effects can be achieved using Compiz, etc.
Back. After looking through Google some more, I would say that Core Animation’s most-referenced equivalent on Windows is the WPF/Silverlight platform in Vista ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_Presentation_Foundation ), which is Microsoft’s answer to Adobe’s Flash+Flex+AIR platform. Hence, the FOSS folks might have to refer to SVG (which is supported by Cairo) as a user interface platform, something which is already being incorporated in baby steps by KDE4 ( http://dot.kde.org/1167723426/ ). Whether SVG can be scalable enough to employ the same techniques and generate the same effects as Silverlight, Flex, or Sun’s JavaFX has hardly been discussed in recent years, and only popped up recently because of the facts that most of these animated graphic application runtimes are closed-source in some form or another. So, unless Linux’s answer to Core Animation is based off of, or incorporates some sort of SVG, I don’t think that it will be efficient enough to match toe to toe with these other APIs and runtimes.