Hi, Nothing staggeringly important here , so ignore this mail if you want :) On Thu, Nov 23, 2000 at 04:44:21PM +0100, Guillermo S. Romero / Familia Romero wrote: > robsc dingoblue net au (2000-11-23 at 1159.13 +1100): > > 1) I joined the list yesterday, and theres been no signs of life! is > > anyone out there? > > It depends. Some weeks there are lot of activity, others nothing. > > > Anyway, Whistler had a nice idea (which, was later clarified in posts, > > as a 'stole-from-BeOS' feature) regarding its tasklist. > > If there were numerous copies of a windows open (e.g. in their > > screenshots , IE) - instead of having a clutter of them, it made a > > single entry in the tasklist, that was a drop-up list with more > > details (presumeably - I didn't find a screenshot where it was > > actually dropped up) about the program. > > I wonder if people use viewports / desktops and organize window using > that. Maybe we should advertise that feature more. Another thing that > should be give more publicity is that you can change task bar size... > and in general, that you can configure your interface to suit your > needs (I hope this to keep on in the future as new options are added, > not new fixed things). Yes, I do. Problem is that the human memory isn't perfect, and as such - well - I have to search all viewports workspaces to find something, or middle click sawfish. But that is a little annoying as I have to decouple from the Keyboard, and go to a mouse. (I'm not an average user though, so mousing isn't a problem) > > That is the current solution, and it seems to work, let suppose we use > the drop down one, what happens if I have 30 windows of the same (I do > not, I think my record for one viewport is 15 and of two or three > types)? You still have problems choosing which one... but you can at > least read the titles. Not bad, but also fixable if your task bar is > set to pratical sizes (mine is 256 pixels wide, and height as needed, > placed in a side panel). Gosh, 256 pixels wide - thats 1/4 of my screen width (and probably 1/4 of the width of a lot of individuals) . Also, what if someone likes knowing about all their windows - i.e. the taskbar is really big. The other problem with keeping it simple-taskbared is as follows. Suppose I have 27 windows happening, 23 of them netscape, 3 of them xterms and say, one of them an emacs window with some source code in it. How do I get to the emacs window using the taskbar? Well, even assuming that it's visible on an enormous taskbar, I have to scan my eyes of 27 different items. not pleasant. However, if all the netscapes were 'compressed' into a singly entry, and the same for the xterms - and we only have 3 items on our taskbar - Not a problem! Do you see what i mean? Granted, having 23 netscapes open at a time is quite silly - and I haven't done it, but you see my point, I hope. > > The Whistler bar can also be seen in Sawfish menu (taken from BeOS > too, IIRC), and it is nice when you have few windows, when you have > lots, you are still hunting down which window you want. I Love it - but the sawfish menu isn't availble permanently on my window! > > So I think the idea is nice, at least when you have more than a few > window but not a lot. I guess that covers most users. I would still > preffer no to use that, so as option (and maybe default one) would be > nice. Agreed :) Adding it as an option is good. Keeping the semantics correct, though, is difficult. I think the issues are when things should become drop downs (i.e. what triggers a drop-down menu in a tasklist? more than a certain number of entries in the tasklist? more than a certain number of entries about a certain program? the devil is always in the detail. > > > Personally, I think this would be a great addition to the > > deskguide/tasklist: It takes a while to find windows now, if you have > > several workspaces going on (flipping through each window). Any > > suggestions, replies to this Idea? > > Maybe you should use workspace in a logical manner, ie: this for > Netscape, that one for wordprocessing (or any other system your mind > like: colors, first letter of window title, order of launch...). > I do: but it's difficult to remember. it's nice to have as pleasant a fallback as possible. > > Also, can we make the gnome panel more keyboard friendly? (Thats a > > really ambiguous question, but I don't know any way of using they > > keyboard to get at a panel). > > GNOME panel"s", some people have multiple... so not only how to > navigate the applets, buttons and such, but how to choose which panel. > Make the panels focusable like the rest of windows? > Yes - there is a problem with keyboarding as you described. The problem is that it's no excuse. I'm going to go have a think about how to keyboard enable a panel - it's a tough issue, but one well worth it, i'd say. More on this from me soon :-) -- Robert Schonberger robsc cse unsw edu au 2nd Year Software Engineering Student Computing 1A tutor send email with subject exactly "get pgp key" to get my public key. Flanders: They're not perfect, but the Lord says love they neighbor -- Homer: Shut up, Flanders. Flanders: Okely-dokely-do. Hurricane Neddy
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