The infinity is not a key factor here. I am more concerned about how the viewports interact with each other in multi-monitor setup. Current situation allows for a very generic scenarios - you can have multiple viewports of different sizes, they can arbitrarily overlap with each other and unification of their areas does not have to necessarily create continuous geometrical object. While it is not implemented, I even planned that viewports could be resized or rotated (so you could for example zoom out to have general overview over the desktop). For more details about the described paradigm, see [1] and [2].
You could argue that such genericity is an overkill for most of the practical scenarios, and I would probably agree with you. However, if we are going to restrict the design, it should be done in a way that is consistent with the approach described above. For me, the naive addition of artificial mouse boundaries around viewports seem to be like an antipattern for the described design approach. While I am not sure, maybe there is some consistent tradeoff that would not kill the potentially useful features and still allowed for introduction of mouse boundaries. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zooming_user_interface [2] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dxsUKX6xXyE (especially the part after 2:14) Petr > From: HelenOS-devel [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf > Of Jiri Svoboda > Sent: Friday, April 19, 2013 11:30 AM > To: HelenOS development mailing list > Subject: Re: [HelenOS-devel] Framebuffer problems > > An infinite desktop is nice, but it does not make much sense, in general, to > allow the mouse pointer to move off screen. Either the viewport should follow > the mouse or the mouse should be restricted to the current viewport. > > -Jiri _______________________________________________ HelenOS-devel mailing list [email protected] http://lists.modry.cz/cgi-bin/listinfo/helenos-devel
