On Mon, 2007-01-08 at 19:34 +0100, Stjepan Glavina wrote: > Hi, > > With some help from Quinn_Storm, iXce, maniac103, mikedee and > KristianLy :), I've managed to modify switcher.c and make a new plugin: > thumbnail. > The plugin shows thumbnails of windows when cursor is moved over a task > button in taskbar. > > Screenshot: > http://pix.nofrag.com/b0/7a/051d45e25bfffed09eeb9b00e383.jpeg > Download: > http://forum.go-compiz.org/viewtopic.php?t=377&postdays=0&postorder=asc&start=0 > > David, what do you think about it? Is it good enough to be moved into > official compiz repository?
I had a quick look at the forum thread. The appropriate way to do thumbnails like that would be have it completely done by the task bar application by making it use composite extension to name the window pixmap and draw the thumbnail. Anything else would be a bit of a hack. The problem is that Render extension acceleration isn't good enough and the compositing manager might add window decorations and such things that you might want to be visible in the thumbnail but the task bar application is of course not aware of those things. I suggest that we add a plugin and a simple interface that allows any application to request that a set of client windows should be composited on top of a different client window. E.g. a task bar application that like to show thumbnails in task bar item tooltips would before mapping the tooltop window set a property like _COMPIZ_COMPOSITE_CLIENT on the tooltip window to the client window that should be thumbnailed and the position and size that should be used. A compiz plugin will simply read this property and make sure that the requested client window is composited at the requested position. This is similar to what the switcher plugin is doing and probably very similar to what you had the thumbnail plugin do initially. Task bar applications will need to be modified to support this of course but I reckon that for decent desktop environment integration that's required and not necessarily something we should try to avoid. Anyhow, I think the thumbnail plugin that you've written provides some very useful functionality and if nothing else it's very good for exploring how we can best provide this kind of functionality. I'm interested in including functionality like this in the main compiz repository once we have a good solution for it. Let me know what you think about the my suggestions and keep up the good work. -David _______________________________________________ compiz mailing list compiz@lists.freedesktop.org http://lists.freedesktop.org/mailman/listinfo/compiz