On 18/10/2009, at 02:45 , Richard Frith-Macdonald wrote:
On 17 Oct 2009, at 12:04, Philippe Roussel wrote:
On Sat, Oct 17, 2009 at 07:02:12AM +0100, Richard Frith-Macdonald
wrote:
It sounds reasonable to allow interface style to control that sort
of
thing, and the behavior you suggest makes sense for a windows app.
Just for the record, I like the vertical menus :o)
Anyway ... see what you think of the change to allow unhide by
showing
<snip>
miniaturised windows (eg in a task bar).
It works for me (under Metacity), thanks Richard ! I think this is a
big step for better integration. I would prefer something to appear
in
the task bar instead (so demanding...) of the appicon but it's a
start.
<snip>
One option might be to scrap the backend miniaturisation/
deminiaturisation API entirely, and have the frontend strictly
implement that using the window/miniwindow counterpart pairing. So
to miniaturise a window, we order in the counterpart miniwindow
(implicitly ordering the main window out), and to deminiaturise the
window, we order it in (implicitly ordering the miniwindow out), and
let the backend decide what it's going to do about the way it
displays that on-screen.
In the case where we don't have real counterpart miniwindows because
the window manager is actually just putting labels on a taskbar, i
guess the backend could provide some sort of dummy placeholder.
Anyway .. that's just an idea ... don't know how much it would
really help simplify things.
Actually, I think it would simplify things a great deal if we dropped
the miniwindow entirely.
I believe the fundamental problem here is one of design and the flaw
is trying to get -gui to handle miniwindows. For any compatibility
desktop we want to consider (GNOME, KDE, MS-WIN...) the answer is
conceptually straight-forward:
a window sets its state to whatever, including MAXIMIZED, ICONIFIED/
MINIMISED
the desktop environment does the display
So what -gui should be doing is just that, setting the window state
appropriately and letting the backend translate that into the desktop
environment.
The architecture is supposed to go like this:
The application handles it's windows and draw in them/etc. This is -
gui & -back.
The window manager decorates the windows and provides the mechanisms
for users to interact with them. (Move them around, re-layer, pin,
show/hide, whatever)
The application manager (pager) handles launching applications,
showing what is running and switching between them. This is the
taskbar / kicker / fiend / dock thing. This is the thing which would
be displaying miniwindows for those desktop environments where its
appropriate.
It seems to me that we're trying to get -gui/back to sometimes be a
window manager and sometimes be an application manager and getting
(understandably) very confused.
Regards,
Sheldon
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