Alpha Compositing - Applications

Applications

Alpha blending is used in a variety of applications. It is natively supported by most operating systems/GUIs for drawing windows (where applicable) or widgets:

  • AmigaOS 4.1
  • Android
  • BeOS, magnussoft ZETA, Haiku
  • Inferno
  • Mac OS X, iOS
  • MorphOS
  • Plan 9
  • QNX Neutrino
  • RISC OS Adjust
  • Syllable
  • webOS
  • Windows 2000 or later, CE, Mobile
  • The XRender extension to the X Window System (this includes modern UNIX and Linux systems)
  • GNOME 3.0
  • Unity
  • KDE Plasma Workspaces (4.0 or later)
  • Xfce
  • Aura interface on Google Chrome OS

Other software may use alpha blended transparent elements in the GUI independently of OS provided APIs by precomposing elements in an off-screen memory buffer before displaying them. (Such as when displaying partially transparent composited elements in an embedded system which provides only a simple frame buffer.) Compositing software is used to combine images, and makes extensive use of alpha compositing techniques.

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