Dash blur is grainy

[George Karavasilev]

While this is incredibly easy to fix issue, it's also a small details that matters.
The Dash blur (no matter active or static) has that grainy texture (see the top part of the screenshot), which is a bit too hard on the eyes.
Now, this is easily fixable by applying gaussian blur to the file "dash-noise.png" in /usr/share/unity/5/.
I've been playing with that and here is the result with 10px gaussian blur on the file (see the bottom part of the screenshot).
Ideally it should look like the blur here:
http://www.markshuttleworth.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/08/dash_home_11.10.png

[John Lea (johnlea)]

@kokoto-java; there may be performance limitations that get in the way of applying this change, but I know that Robert Carr (racarr) is looking into dash blur improvements in is free time, so you might want to contact him on IRC (try #ubuntu-unity or #ubuntu-desktop on Freenode)

[George Karavasilev (kokoto-java)]

Thanks for the info John, I will contact Robert ASAP :)
Now performance wise - the smaller the file size of the texture image - the better the performance and you will be happy to know that my "dash_noise.png" is just 9.8kb whilst the original one is 30.1kb (that's cuz I've saved it as indexed PNG and not as RGB one).
There is also the factor - the more detailed the texture - the worse the performance and it's needless to say that applying gaussian blur reduces the detail of the image :)

[Omer Akram (om26er)]

This is not good

[George Karavasilev (kokoto-java)]

o.O What happened to ur BFB, Omer? :D
Now seriously, me and Richard has a nice discussion about the Dash blur texture and Dash Sheen and we came to the conclusion that the blur texture needs refinement, but it should not be random noise (blurred or not) like the current one. I am working on new texture and I'll keep in touch with Robert :)